SURVEY: 47% of American Socialists Believe “taking violent action against the rich may be JUSTIFIED”

Source

http://www.theorganicprepper.com

by Daisy Luther

October 10, 2019

In a nation that has prided itself on the “American Dream” – the dream that anyone can become wealthy if they work hard enough and make the right decisions – it’s probably a shock to learn that a lot of folks no longer believe in capitalism.

But the shock goes even deeper than that. A report from the Cato Institute that examined Americans’ opinions on wealth and the wealthy says that 47% of American socialists believe that  “taking violent action against the rich may be justified.”

About the report

The Cato Institute is a think tank that performs independent, non-partisan research into a wide range of issues related to personal liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. You can learn more about the Cato Institute here.

The new report is entitled What Americans Think About Poverty, Wealth, and Work.

The survey…investigates attitudes toward the rich and the poor and examines what Americans believe about work, welfare, and social mobility. (source)

Many of the results seem to be right down party lines and in this political climate, are frighteningly predictable.

Let’s take a look at the findings.

Socialism vs. Capitalism

Opinions have taken a shift since 2016.

In 2016, Democrats were about as favorable toward capitalism (58%) as socialism (56%). But after President Donald Trump took office, Democrats became more favorable toward socialism. Today, 64% of Democrats have favorable opinions of socialism and 45% are favorable to capitalism. Republicans continue to have overwhelmingly favorable views of capitalism (77%) while only 13% have favorable views of socialism. (source)

Why did this shift occur?

According to half of the Democrats surveyed, President Trump caused them to dislike capitalism and lean more toward socialism.

At the same time, 44% of Democrats say that Trump has not influenced their views on capitalism vs. socialism. 72% of independents and 64% of Republicans reported that President Trump has not influenced their views on the economic model.

Overall, 59% of Americans favor capitalism and 39% favor Socialism.

Thoughts on Wealth

Opinions on wealth were varied. Here were some of the findings:

84% of Americans believe “there is nothing wrong with a person trying to make as much money as they honestly can.”

• 61% want to raise taxes on anyone who makes more than $200,000.
• 53% want to raise taxes to a whopping 70% on those who make more than $10 million.
• 65% of Americans over age 60 oppose the increased tax on people making more than $10 million, while 62% of those under 30 support the increase.

A worryingly slim majority of Americans do not believe that wealth should be redistributed from the rich to the poor.

• 62% oppose the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. (Where do they intend for that 70% millionaire tax to go?)
• Down party lines, here’s who believes in wealth distribution: 58% of Democrats, 36% of Independents, and 15% of Republicans think that money should be taken from the rich and given to the poor.

More than half of Americans (55%) believe that the distribution of wealth in this country is “unfair.” This is divided by age and political philosophy.

• 79% of Democrats find the distribution unjust.
• 55% of Independents find the distribution unjust.
• 67% of Republicans find the distribution just.
• 70% of people under 30 think the current distribution of wealth is unjust
• 61% of people over 65 think the current distribution is just.

The distribution of wealth (or lack thereof) will probably be a key factor in the next election. It was only a couple of years ago when a group went public about their desire to “expropriate” the assets of the wealthy and redistribute them to the poor.

Young people vs. old people

Let’s talk about younger people’s opinions versus older people’s opinions. Cato reports:

People under 30 are about 20–30 points more likely than Americans 65 and over to:

• believe the rich got rich by “taking advantage of other people” (52% vs. 27%)
• believe billionaires are a threat to democracy (51% vs. 26%)
• feel “angry” when they read or hear about rich people (44% vs. 11%)
• believe it’s “immoral” for society to allow people to become billionaires (39% vs. 13%)
• believe that citizens taking violent action against the rich may be justified (35% vs. 10%)
• support redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor (53% vs. 20%)
• support raising top marginal tax rates (62% vs. 43%)

Young Americans are about equally favorable toward socialism (50%) and capitalism (49%). In stark contrast, Americans 65 and over solidly prefer capitalism (76%) to socialism (34%). (source)

It is not out of line to blame our education system for pushing socialism and leftist professors who promote violence for these attitudes.  In fact, the Democratic Socialists of America urge socialists to become teachers to accomplish just this.

However, it might be consoling to note that when a similar survey was undertaken in 1978, more than half (54%) of Americans under 30 believed that wealth should be redistributed from the rich to the poor. The young people who were 18-29 then are 59-70 now, and you can see how their opinions have changed. That should provide some hope that the attitudes of current young people will change as they become more mature and have more life experience.

People have wildly varying views on how rich folks became wealthy.

One of the biggest points of disparity was opinions on how rich people attained their money. Liberals and conservatives are completely at odds regarding this.

• Strong liberals say the top drivers of wealth are family connections (48%), inheritance (40%), and getting lucky (31%)
• Strong conservatives say the top drivers of wealth are hard work (62%), ambition (47%), self-discipline (45%), and risk-taking (36%)
• Strong Liberals say the top causes of poverty are discrimination (51%), an unfair economic system (48%), and a lack of educational opportunities (48%)
• Strong Conservatives say the top causes of poverty are poor life choices (60%), a lack of work ethic (52%), breakdown of families (47%), and drugs and alcohol (47%) (source)

With these differences in perspective, it is easy to see how difficult it would be for liberals and conservatives to come to a consensus regarding policy to “fix” the poverty in America.

What attitudes most influenced people’s points of view?

According to this report, there are two major factors that influence people’s points of view regarding capitalism vs. socialism: resentment and compassion. The report says:

Statistical tests find that resentment of high achievers has about twice the impact as compassion for the needy in predicting hostility toward capitalism and support for raising taxes on the rich. However, compassion is a better predictor of support for increasing welfare benefits. Both resentment and compassion predict support for socialism. (source)

At the same time, 69% believe that billionaires became wealthy by creating value for others, and 65% believe that the nation is better off when people become wealthy because they, in turn, will invest in businesses that create jobs.

Most Americans (82%) believe that people should be “allowed” to become billionaires. However, this really breaks down in the Democratic party, where 54% of them believe that billionaires are a “threat to democracy.” Unsurprisingly, 65% of socialists believe that “allowing” billionaires is immoral.

And this is where things get kind of scary.

There are more people than you might think who believe that “citizens taking violent action against the rich” is acceptable. Here are the people who believe that it is acceptable in some situations to be violent toward the wealthy.

• 17% of Americans in general
• 47% of socialists
• 36% of liberals
• 35% of those under 30

One must wonder what they mean by “violence.”

Do they mean that violence should be used to expropriate the wealth or violence should be used just for the sake of harming the wealthy for the audacity of being financially well-to-do? Do they want to use guillotines like the people in the French Revolution to enforce their goals of wealth distribution?

Conclusion

At this point, there’s a hard push toward socialism in this country.

Most folks who believe in socialism don’t see the correlation between those policies and the collapse of Venezuela for example. They don’t understand that every time in history that food production was collectivized, people died of starvation. On the other hand, a lot of the vocal people who are against socialism have views that appear to be condescending and judgmental, neither of which is going to win over hearts and minds.

As someone who has been dirt poor despite my very hard work, I find the opinions that cite laziness and drug use to be downright offensive. As someone who managed to dig myself out of poverty, I find the concept of having the results of my hard work “redistributed” to be equally offensive.

Also note: this article is based on the Cato Institute’s statistics – this isn’t an opinion piece.

What do you think of the results of this survey? Do you believe there will be violence against the wealthy? Do you think the push for socialism will continue until we no longer recognize the United States as the land of opportunity?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the findings. Do they seem accurate to you? Do you have any personal experiences that support or contradict the survey? Please share those stories in the comments.

And try to keep it civil – this only has to be volatile if we allow it to be.

Please visit The Cato Institute to read more details of this survey on the state of our union, and share your thoughts in the comments.

About Daisy

Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, gun-toting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. Daisy is the best-selling author of 4 books and runs a small digital publishing company.  She lives in the mountains of Virginia with her family. You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.

 

Throwing stones in a glass house: Trump criticizes the world, but his words are best applied to the US

We all know that Agent Orange is an idiot, a windbag, and a hypocrite : “Iran will become “a cautionary tale of what happens when a ruling class abandons its people and embarks on a quest for personal power and riches,” Trump warned, seemingly blind to how applicable his words were to his own country.”

Source

http://www.rt.com

Published time: 24 Sep, 2019

© Reuters / Lucas Jackson

US President Donald Trump had harsh words for socialism, Venezuela, Iran and China in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly – but many of his criticisms were best applied to his own country.

Warning of the “divide between those whose thirst for control deludes them into thinking they are destined to rule over others, and those people and nations who want only to rule themselves” – and implying the US falls into the latter category – Trump proceeded to boast about how the US is the most powerful nation in the world, and said, “hopefully we will never have to use this power.”

ALSO ON RT.COMWashington’s Iran policy is backstreet thuggery masquerading as statecraft

One can only wonder what countries like Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq – plus the countries the US has “merely” sanctioned instead of bombing – would have to say about this magnanimous American restraint. Repeatedly lambasting Iran for its “menacing behavior” later in his speech, Trump seemed to have forgotten that he’d opened his own remarks by menacing the entire General Assembly with the world’s “most powerful military,” now “rebuilt” with $2.5 trillion in taxpayer dollars.

“One of the greatest threats facing peaceful nations today,” said the Commander-in-Chief of a military whose forces occupied 70 percent of the world’s countries in 2016, “is the repressive regime in Iran.” Iran’s citizens deserve a government that doesn’t “steal their money to fund and massacre abroad and at home,” declared the leader of a country where more than half of federal discretionary spending goes to fund the government’s military adventures.

Socialism, Trump said, wheeling out his favorite ideological punching bag, is not about a better standard of living for the poor – it’s about “power for the ruling class.” He reiterated his vow that America would never be a socialist country, even as a growing number of Americans are at least curious about how socialism might favorably compare to the current system in the US, where income equality is at an all-time high and the richest three men have more money than half the country combined. Socialism, Trump lamented, was the only thing stopping Venezuela from receiving the “vast quantities of humanitarian aid” the US had in store for it – if only it would “restore democracy” and embrace an unelected, US-backed leader from Venezuela’s own ruling class.

ALSO ON RT.COM‘Immense power’: Trump blasts social media companies over censorship in UNGA speech as US lawmakers push for more control

Iran will become “a cautionary tale of what happens when a ruling class abandons its people and embarks on a quest for personal power and riches,” Trump warned, seemingly blind to how applicable his words were to his own country. The American ruling class’s abandonment of its people has been a running theme in the last two election cycles – it’s arguably what put Trump in power, and some of his Democratic opponents are betting on it to secure their own victories in 2020.

“The US does not seek conflict with any other nation,”  Trump declared, after bashing the countries the US uses all its financial and military clout to undermine. The message was heard loud and clear: uphold your country’s sovereignty, unless it conflicts with our interests.

 

Why the ‘one percent’ in the US is worried

The wealthy elite increasingly recognises that the socioeconomic status quo in the US is unsustainable.

Source: Why the ‘one percent’ in the US is worried | Poverty | Al Jazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com

by David A Love

May 5, 2019

The US also has the highest rate of income inequality in the West [File: AP/Mark Lennihan]

 

Inequality in the United States has reached such levels lately that even members of the “one percent” have started worrying. 

Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates hedge fund who is ranked 57th wealthiest person in the world by Forbes magazine, quipped in a recent interview that capitalism is denying “equal opportunity for the American dream”. He said that he was “a byproduct of capitalism when it also gave equal opportunity”, adding “I was very lucky to live the American dream by having the proper care and the proper public school education … A number of things have changed.”

Former Starbucks CEO and prospective presidential candidate Howard Schultz, who prefers to be called a “person of means” rather than a billionaire (ranked 617th by Forbes), recently observed that “the vast majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck” and declared that the next US president must urgently address inequality.

CEO of JP Morgan Chase Jamie Dimon (ranked 1,717th) also noted earlier this year that: “A big chunk of [Americans] have been left behind […] Forty percent of Americans make less than $15 an hour. Forty percent can’t afford a $400 bill, whether it’s medical or fixing their car. Fifteen percent of Americans make minimum wages, 70,000 die from opioids.”

Indeed, the growing impoverishment and despair that are plaguing our country are hard to miss. The US also has the highest rate of income inequality among Western nations, with the top one percent claiming 40 percent of US wealth in 2016, in contrast to a 25 to 30 percent share in the 1980s. According to the rather conservative estimates of the US Census Bureau, around 14 percent of the population or 45 million live in poverty. According to the UN, 8.5 million of them face extreme poverty and 5.3 million suffer in “Third World conditions of absolute poverty”.

But in reality, many more Americans struggle to secure a dignified life for themselves and their families. A damning report published by the UN in 2018 found that: “High child and youth poverty rates perpetuate the intergenerational transmission of poverty very effectively, and ensure that the American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion. The equality of opportunity, which is so prized in theory, is in practice a myth, especially for minorities and women, but also for many middle-class White workers.”

Perhaps parts of the American “one percent” are finally ready to admit that socioeconomic inequality has reached unprecedented levels and that the current status quo is unsustainable because just like South African billionaire Johann Rupert, the prospect of the poor masses rebelling is keeping them “awake at night“. They are now saying that capitalism “needs work” and are proposing various “fixes” – mainly “trickle-down philanthropy”. Some have gone as far as suggesting that social provision should be enhanced and that the wealthy should be taxed.

Yet all of them are quick to outright reject “socialist policies”. In a recent interview for NBC, Melinda Gates, cochair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and wife of the second richest man in the world, echoed the thoughts of many of the super-rich, saying that: “What I know to be true is I would far rather live in a capitalistic society than a socialist society.”

But Gates is wrong. The current system in place in the US is not capitalism, but rather “socialism for the rich” which favours the “one percent” by granting it ever-increasing subsidies, exorbitant tax breaks, deregulation and executive bonuses. The rest of the population lives in an unfair system of inequality and segregation, struggling to make ends meet under severe austerity and erosion of labour rights. It is a system of “survival of the fittest”, which privileges some over the others based on race and gender.

Economic growth now only “uplifts” the rich, who are able to control the distribution of wealth by influencing the government and making sure it serves their interests and maintain their power. Through the US system of legalised corruption, the wealthy funnel billions of dollars in donations to election campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, the stop-gap fixes that people like Gates, Dimon, Schultz and Dalio are proposing are unlikely to work because they are designed to maintain the current system in place so they can continue to accumulate wealth unrestrained. The only viable solution that would prevent a major socioeconomic disaster in the US and subsequent social upheaval would be to overhaul the system.

Solutions to economic inequality and the excesses of American capitalism are necessary to save capitalism from itself, or better yet, to save people from capitalism.

There is an increasing number of dramatic proposals for economic justice that look promising. These include Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which envisions a national mobilisation to eliminate carbon emissions and transform the US economy, boosting economic growth and job creation, while seeking economic and racial justice for vulnerable communities. Ocasio-Cortez has also called for a 70 percent marginal tax rate on earnings above $10m.

Congresswoman Elizabeth Warren has a plan to wipe out $1.5 trillion in student loan debt by levying a surtax on the ultra-rich, while Congressman Bernie Sanders has put forward a proposal for universal healthcare. The idea of reparations for slavery, which could help alleviate some of the racial inequality in the country, is also gaining ground.

Although conservatives attack proposals promoting economic justice and equity as dangerous because they could lead to a totalitarian socialist system, such policies have long been a part of the US system. After all, the Green New Deal is named after the New Deal, which was introduced during the Great Depression to protect the poor, strengthen labour rights and impose strict regulation on the financial system.

At the same time, Americans are increasingly in favour of a major overhaul of the system, due to the problematic and corruptive nature of the current one. Existing and proposed government programmes of economic redistribution and equity are popular. Socialism is also gaining popularity, even surpassing capitalism among Democrats, particularly millennials. Such policies, which translate into more democratic ownership and control over the government and greater public accountability, most certainly frighten the wealthy for their effectiveness and political popularity.

If members of the “one percent” truly care about the widening wealth gap, they should not resist the implementation of these policies. An overhaul of the system might make them less wealthy, but ultimately will not be to their detriment. A profit can still be made if workers are paid dignified salaries, provided proper healthcare, and granted social and labour rights.

Indeed the choice of the “one percent” is reduced to either living in a more equal and just society or facing the wrath of angry impoverished masses.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. 

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David A Love

David A Love is a Philadelphia-based freelance journalist and commentator.

@ davidalove

What is Socialism?

What is Socialism?

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by TERESA L. EBERT – MAS’UD ZAVARZADEH

APRIL 11, 2019

Marx in 1882 – Public Domain

As the presidential election of 2020 approaches and socialism is used to characterize the ideas and platforms of some of the candidates, a relatively large number of explanations of the concept have appeared in the press.

Most of these explanations are really non-explanatory.  Whether written as a list or in a more discursive form, they are little more than descriptions of some social democratic order, usually in a Northern European country such as Sweden. Their “explanations,” in other words, are not explanatory, they do not go beyond portraying how, for example, health care, education, public transport and similar institutions work in these countries, mostly as state organizations. Political theorists who have contributed to discussions of socialism have avoided its philosophical grounds and instead given an account of its history and, depending on their own political views, its successes or failure.

Most of these non-explanatory articles draw on familiar tropes in the American political imaginary about socialism, describing it, for example, as a form of redistributionism through state institutions to undo inequalities. Or, they define socialism as public ownership of the means of wealth. However, the state, as the agency of equality, and collective ownership of the means of production are only instruments of socialism. They do not explain its underlying philosophy. To understand socialism, one has to go beyond descriptions of its agencies and engage its philosophical principles.

The most concise explanation of the philosophical premises of socialism is by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme.

The text is a critique of the evolutionary tendencies among some socialists and the reformism that underlies the manifesto for a party conference in Gotha.

Here Marx writes that socialism is an historical state of in-between-ness: the transitional period from capitalism to communism. It is therefore a hybrid condition in which a residual capitalism is mixed with an emerging communism.

Marx’s main point is that although socialism, as the first stage of communism, is an advance over capitalism because it abolishes classes, the socialist right to equality remains an abstract right, and as such, it produces inequality.

Under socialism, people contribute to society through their labor and, in return, receive from society an equivalent amount of labor in the form of the “means of consumption.” People’s earnings are equivalent to their labor; no one has income from owning the means of producing wealth or capital, and labor is no longer exploited for profit.

However, in the exchange of labor for labor, socialism reproduces the logic of commodity exchange in the capitalist market, which is the main source of inequality.

The socialist “equal right” is, therefore, an empty right because people are not equal: one person is different from another in physical or mental abilities and is able to offer more labor during the same time and thus receive more in return for her or his labor. Socialism implicitly acknowledges the right to “natural privileges” that lead to economic inequality.

Bernie Sanders, who is identified with (democratic) socialism, seems to accept such “natural” inequalities. He wants a just society in which (in)equalities are proportional to people’s own work.

But justice and equality are part of the seemingly timeless rights such as liberty, individuality, free market and property that now ground capitalist democracies. While they are represented as universal, they are actually ideological. These “rights” essentially stabilize capitalism by normalizing its class antagonisms as individual differences. In contrast, a society without class conflicts is beyond this narrow sense of justice and equality. As Marx writes, “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development conditioned thereby.”

In a post-socialist society therefore, human “rights” are superseded by human “needs,” and the socialist principle—”from each according to their ability, to each according to their work”— is left behind. Different people have different needs. Fulfilling their “needs” frees them from “necessity” beyond which, Marx argues, begins “that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom.”

Freedom from necessity (not “freedom of speech),” emancipates people from the social relations of exchange and wage labor: humans return to themselves “as social beings” and their existence and essence become one.

Bernie Sanders mostly talks of socialism as the freedom of working people. Socialism, however, is the first phase of building a society based on freedom from work itself—a society that will “inscribe on its banner”:  “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”

Teresa L. Ebert’s books include The Task of Cultural Critique. She is professor emerita of cultural theory at the University at Albany, SUNY.

Mas’ud Zavarzadeh has written Seeing Films Politically and several other books. He is a retired professor of critical theory at Syracuse University. They are co-writers of  Class in Culture and their new book, “Subtractive Interpretation,” is forthcoming from Routledge.

More articles by:TERESA L. EBERT – MAS’UD ZAVARZADEH

Teresa L. Ebert is a professor of Cultural Theory at the State University of New York at Albany. She is the author of The Task of Cultural Critiqueand other books. Mas’ud Zavarzadeh is a retired professor of Critical Theory at Syracuse University. He is the author of several books includingSeeing Films Politically. Ebert and Zavarzadeh are co-authors of Class in Culture and the forthcoming The Poverty of (Post)Humanities.

Social Democracy Revealed to America

Source link

journal-neo.org

Author: Deena Stryker

22.03.2019

After spending most of my adult life in various Eastern and Western European countries, I returned to the US just before the turn of the twenty-first century. I had spent several periods here in previous decades, always wondering why Americans were the only highly developed people who were told nothing about the democratic socialism that reigned across the Atlantic — and in most other parts of the world. I continued to wait, but the word socialism continued to be absent from the media.

It wasn’t until Bernie Sanders defied custom to declare himself a democratic socialist in the 2016 election, that most Americans first heard the notion praised: Sanders was prevented from being the Democratic candidate by more or less blatant Party maneuvers in favor of Hillary Clinton, ensuring the arrival in the White House of a man now accused of white supremacy and mob behavior.

While information about socialism and even social-democracy has continued to be withheld since Trump’s inauguration more than two years ago, within days of the president’s failure to condemn white supremacy after 50 Muslim worshippers were gunned down in New Zealand by a man who admitted being inspired by him, the widely watched ‘Morning Joe’ invited a highly credentialed figure to reveal the realities of democratic socialism to its audience. None other than Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who directs Columbia’s Earth Institute for Sustainable Development, was brought in to reveal the truth to its upscale audience.

He told them in no uncertain terms that the top-ranking countries on the World Happiness Report, produced by the U.N Sustainable Development Solutions Network, are once again the Nordic countries. (The report ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens consider themselves, based on economic wealth, life expectancy, social support and freedom to make life choices.) Americans have often heard of the Nordic countries with respect to overall well-being, but their daily reality has never been spelled out — anymore than the fact that all of Europe, and many other parts of the world, long ago adopted social-democracies basic principals: single payer medical care from cradle to grave, plentiful vacations, and many other supports that enable populations to keep stress at a minimum.

While most Americans get two weeks off a year, with a few stingy ‘sick days’ thrown in, and are only now being exposed to the idea of ‘Medicare for All’, which dares not expel for-profit insurers from the health-care market, Sachs revealed that social benefits they can only dream of have been taken for granted basically since the end of World War II in Europe. (When I lived in Italy in the late fifties, most workers could look forward to a ‘thirteen month’, an extra thirty days of vacation on top of the mandated month.)

It was the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt a few months before V-Day, that determined America’s trajectory, and interestingly, the invitation to Jeffrey Sachs came barely a week after the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, declared himself to be a social democrat and a follower of FDR.

Since 1917, except when the four-term American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt referred to his Russian ally as ‘Uncle Joe’, equity has been the bone of contention between the US and Russia, and the Presidential Election campaign that follows ‘Russiagate’ revolves around this separation from the rest of the world. What happened was that Roosevelt’s untimely death delivered US foreign policy into the hands of the right-wingers who had forced on Roosevelt as his running mate for his exceptional fourth term Harry Truman (in the midst of a two-front war), a hat-maker from Missouri, instead of the Progressive former Republican Henry Wallace that he wanted. That switch sealed the fate of American socialism for 75 years.

In his State of the Union of January 6, 1941, almost a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor that finally brought the US into World War II against Germany, Japan and Italy, Roosevelt sought to establish a fair basis for the sacrifices the population would be called upon to make. It became known as the Four Freedoms speech (freedom of speech freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear), however, in the 80 years since, only the first two freedoms, which are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, have been guaranteed. Want and fear have continued to characterize the American population, enabling aggressive wars that consume the money needed for single payer health care.

Declaring that:

“a free nation has the right to expect full cooperation from all groups,” Roosevelt told business leaders they must lead the war effort. “However, since men do not live by bread alone, do not fight by armaments alone. ….they must have the stamina and courage which come from an unshakable belief in the way of life they are defending. The mighty action we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all things worth fighting for. These are:

Equality of opportunity

Jobs for those who can work.

Security for those who need it.

The ending of special privileges for the few.

The preservation of civil liberties for all.

The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.”

To make sure his point was understood, Roosevelt added: “These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.”

And he delivered, making more citizens eligible for retirement and unemployment benefits, widening the opportunities for adequate medical care and improving opportunities for work. Taking the bull by the horns, he admitted that his program implied higher taxes, adding: “Taxes in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.”

And he didn’t stop there: translating freedom from fear into what he called ‘world terms’, he recognized that it requires a world-wide reduction of armaments “to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor anywhere in the world.” Four years before Eleanor Roosevelt founded the United Nations, her husband declared that: “The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.” Eighty years after this ground-breaking speech, having fought a dozen aggressive wars and used color revolutions and drones to ensure that the world’s people serve the few, the United States continues to disown not only socialism, but Russian President Putin’s and Chinese President Xi’s call for ‘a multi-polar world’.

Deena Stryker is an international expert, author and journalist that has been at the forefront of international politics for over thirty years. She can be reached at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

Torches and Pitchforks

Source link

http://www.zerohedge.com

by Tim Knight fro…

Sat, 03/30/2019

From the website Slope of Hope: 

The front page of our local paper struck a chord:

The subject of wealth inequality has been on my mind ever since I started writing Slope fourteen years ago. I’ve written countless posts on it, and even dedicated a SocialTrade page to it, but a quick summary of my disposition could be boiled down to a few personal points:

• Although I didn’t know it at the time, my childhood was in an era of relative wealth equality in the United States, pretty much the most even playing field in its history;
• Average folks like my Dad made $35,000 per year; the “rich” people in town made $50,000;
• The houses of the average and the rich were pretty much the same, although the rich had Buicks instead of Fords and could afford maids who came to clean the house each day; but that was about it.

My own adulthood, of course, is like a different universe. Normal people live in $7 million houses. Rich people live in $25 million houses and have other residences scattered around the planet. The difference between rich and poor in my youth was a short hop; in my current life, it’s a chasm.

My view is that the increasing disparity between rich and poor has, for decades, largely been non-disruptive to society as a whole, principally because the lower classes have been placated enough, by way of the proverbial bread and circuses, not to cause any waves. Sure, there have been little movements here and there, such as Occupy Wall Street, but they have attracted fringe groups and fizzled out in weeks, if not days.

The aforementioned SocialTrade page is packed with charts like the one below, which shows just how hosed the lower classes are, but again, the rich are pretty much getting away with it with no consequence.

There are rumblings going on, however, which suggest to me that the next time something like 2008 comes along, the outcome is going to be very different. And if there’s one word I want to be emphatic about with this thought, it is this one: context.

What I mean by that is we are living in an era of (ostensibly) great prosperity and extremely low unemployment. These days, whenever I see an able-bodied man on the side of the road with a cardboard sign, I’m not exactly flooded with sympathy, because virtually every retail store and food outlet I go to has signs BEGGING for people to apply for jobs. I have honestly never seen so many companies desperate for human labor.

And so when you see someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez get so much attention (including, recently, her face on the cover of Time magazine) in the context of an environment when there should be so little “want” in the United States, you have to figure something is going on below the surface.

Think about the political atmosphere right now which is railing against the rich. Such things as………

• Elizabeth Warren’s widely-received proposal to have an annual tax on wealth (not income, mind you, but family assets);
• The national rage-fest against the rich and powerful caught up in the college admissions scandal;
• The strong interest in such socialist programs as Universal Basic Income and the Green New Deal

Now imagine………just imagine……….a world in financial turmoil again. Try to think about the public mindset – – already clearly primed to “soak the rich” even in the context of our current prosperity – – in which:

• Hundreds of thousands of jobs are being cut;
• The press runs more and more stories about how many hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes the rich have saved from the 2017 tax cut;
• Public interest in exposing “privilege” and “access” (a supersized version of the admissions scandal) increases;
• The whisper-thin financial cushion of the lower 40% swiftly pushes people to welfare, handouts, and EBT cards

Can you imagine the backlash against the rich THEN? I suspect it would be absolutely enormous.

The danger, I believe, is that the political soil will be fertile and loamy for the already-planted seeds of socialism to thrive. That’s exactly what the Russian Revolution and Chinese Revolution were about. The wealth of the upper classes was utterly confiscated by the state, and rich people weren’t just subjected to unkind stories in the press – – they were imprisoned, tortured, or killed. Simply stated, the underclasses took decades of rage and resentment and went batshit crazy with it.

So here, and now, in the gentle suburb of Palo Alto, if there can be a headline story about how rich people are already afraid of having the handcuffs slapped on their wrists, just think of what they’ll be worried about when it feels the entire nation has turned against them. It seems to me the pieces are going to be in place for something very ugly to emerge, coupled with a tremendous political swing to the left.

For all of us, it won’t have been worth it.

Your Plans For Revolution Don’t Work. Nothing We’ve Tried Works.

All the old ideas for uprooting the status quo have failed.

Source: Your Plans For Revolution Don’t Work. Nothing We’ve Tried Works.

With permission from

medium.com/@caityjohnstone

Caitlin Johnstone

Mar 27, 2019

All the old ideas for uprooting the status quo have failed. I point this out not to depress people, but to persuade them to stop twisting on locked doorknobs. The old ideas don’t work, so we need new ones.

The political process has failed. Capitalism has failed. Socialism has failed. Libertarianism has failed. Marx has failed. Populism has failed. Anarchism has failed. I say this not because of any glaring flaws in any of those ideas (in theory any of them could potentially work in an alternate universe), but because we are hurtling towards extinction in the fairly near future, and none of them have saved us.

“But Caitlin!” you may object. “My particular favorite ideology would have saved us long ago if only everyone had gotten on board with it!”

Okay. But they didn’t. And now we’re on the brink of armageddon. That means it has failed. It doesn’t work.

We are well on our way to extinction via climate collapse or nuclear holocaust, and even if we miss those by some miracle we are headed toward an artificial intelligence-led tech dystopia in which our consciousness is permanently enslaved by a propaganda network that is far too advanced for there to be any hope of escaping into truth.

We are witnessing a mass extinction the likes of which we haven’t seen since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, with some 200 species going extinct forever every single day. The very ecosystemic context in which we evolved is vanishing underneath us. More than half the world’s wildlife has vanished in forty years, and the worldwide insect population has plummeted by as much as 90 percent. Fertile soil is vanishing, and so are forests. The oceans are choking to death, 90 percent of global fish stocks are either fully fished or overfished, the seas are full of microplastics, and phytoplankton, an indispensable foundation of earth’s food chain, have been killed off by 40 percent since 1950. Science keeps pouring in showing that global warming is occurring faster than previously predicted, and there are self-reinforcing warming effects called “feedback loops” which, once set off, can continue warming the atmosphere further and further regardless of human behavior, causing more feedback loops.

Our ecosystem is very fragile and rapidly fading, and the difference between the ability to survive without it and our current scientific capability is the difference between flying and jumping. Which won’t matter if one of the many small, unpredictable moving parts in the steadily escalating new cold war with Russia results in a nuclear weapon being deployed as a result of misunderstanding or miscommunication and sparking off the annihilation of every organism on earth, as nearly happened during the last cold war on more than one occasion.

This is where the status quo has gotten us. All attempts to overthrow it have failed. The time is up, and the results are in.

The political process doesn’t work.

I say this not because the political process can’t work, due to some technical failure in the way it has been applied. I say this because it doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that we’re on the cusp of the apocalypse with no signs of steering clear of it. Attempts to uproot the status quo via political engagement and voting does not work.

“But Caitlin!” you may object. “The only reason the political process doesn’t work is because it has been hijacked by corrupt powers with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo! If we can extract those corrupt powers, we can make the political process work!”

Okay. But you didn’t. You were unable to extract the corrupt powers, and now we’re on the brink of extinction. Your strategy has failed.

Capitalism doesn’t work.

I say this not because capitalism can’t work in theory, I say this because it doesn’t work in practice. How do I know it doesn’t work in practice? Because the planet is dying and we’ve all got doomsday weapons pointing at our heads that may go off at any moment. The results are in. Capitalism doesn’t work.

“But Caitlin!” you may object. “What we’ve tried hasn’t been real capitalism! The free market hasn’t been given a chance to solve all our problems, because of the artificial interference and regulations of Big Government. If we can get rid of Big Government, we can solve all our problems!”

Okay. But that never happened. And now here we are at the end of the world, watching our planet ripped to shreds by status quo power structures. Capitalism failed. It doesn’t work.

Socialism doesn’t work.

I say this not because socialism can’t work in theory, I say it because it doesn’t work in real life, as evidenced by the fact that our world is on fire, our time is up, and we are all about to die. Socialism failed to save us. It doesn’t work.

“But Caitlin!” you may object. “Socialism hasn’t worked because it’s never had a chance to work! If the capitalist imperialists would just stop sabotaging socialist experiments, it would thrive and replace the status quo! We’d all be saved!”

Okay. But we’re not. The worldwide populace has not answered the call of socialism in sufficient numbers to overthrow the interests which oppose it, and now we’re at the end of days. The plan was to unite the working class against the elite oppressors around the world and implement socialism, and it failed. It is a strategy which does not work.

Libertarianism doesn’t work.

We could do this all day, with any number of ideologies. Perhaps libertarianism could work under the right circumstances, but attempts to rally the public around it have utterly failed, and now we’re staring down the barrel of extinction. You can object and make excuses, or you can acknowledge that the strategies for implementing your preferred status quo-challenging ideology don’t work, and find new ones.

It’s easy to isolate yourself within a particular ideological echo chamber and create the illusion for yourself that your pet ideology is making progress. Oh look, Russiagate was disproven. Oh look, Jeremy Corbyn did well in those last elections. Oh look, the Democratic Socialists of America gained a few thousand members. But if you step out of that echo chamber and look at the big picture, you see a futile tug-of-war between feuding ideologies with no gains made anywhere near the scale that would be necessary to avert the massive threats on our horizon.

My point here is that we may have found an ideological standpoint that really resonates with us, and that ideology itself may be intrinsically worthy and vastly superior to the status quo. But the strategies for implementing that strategy have failed spectacularly. If you can’t implement your strategy, you’re just diddling cutesy ideas while the world burns. It’s just a nice identity for you to hold onto and make your feely bits feel nice.

“I’m a Marxist!”

“I’m an anarchist!”

No you’re not. You’re an ideological LARPer dressing up in an identity and pretending to change the world, while the world itself tumbles into the abyss.

Again, I say this not to create a sense of hopelessness, but to get people to stop wasting time and energy pushing on locked doors. Stop trying strategies that people have been trying for decades with essentially zero ground gained, and try something else instead. Stop hanging out in your little echo chambers and thinking that anything’s changing just because you are surrounded by people who agree with you. Sure, hold onto your beliefs about what kind of system would most benefit the world if you like, but be acutely aware that those beliefs in our current situation are completely meaningless.

The reality is that as long as powerful people control the dominant public narratives, no ground will be gained in steering our species away from the status quo trajectory that’s killing us, because you won’t be able to awaken mainstream consciousness to what’s going on. The only thing that has any hope of prying the oligarchic hands off the steering wheel is the mainstream public seeing what they’re doing and using the power of their numbers to force drastic change in a wildly different direction. If we can’t make that happen, we’re all just banging on locked doors while the curtain closes on humanity.

We all need to do better. I include myself in this. We need to try new things. Many, many new things. We need new ideas. What kind of new ideas? I don’t know, that’s why I’m telling you. I’m just one woman, and I put as many ideas out there as I can, but it’s not enough. Clearly it’s not enough, because here we are.

In my opinion the obvious way to open up a path for dissident ideas to replace the status quo is to kill the public trust in the stories they were told in school and continue to be told by the mass media about the kind of world and country they live in, but so far that hasn’t happened. My own ideas for advancing that agenda which I’ve been seeding into the world have been inadequate, and so have everyone else’s. So we need more new ideas. Lots and lots of new ideas.

What we’ve tried up until now hasn’t worked, so if there’s anything that might work it’s going to come from a wildly unanticipated direction, from way outside the failed mental processes which have accompanied us to this point. We need to open ourselves to that kind of idea.

That’s basically all I’ve got to offer today. A helpless but sincere plea for humanity to try something new, spat out onto the internet in the Hail Mary hope that it might plant some seeds and loosen the soil for something unprecedented to open up in human consciousness. Sometimes that’s all that we can do.

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