To a friend of 45 years in Florida, copied to list: Somewhere I read - maybe I sent it to you - it was an excellent talk in SF by Mike Davis whom I am more or less paraphrasing - that after the 29 crash, despite the crisis in people's lives, there was no automatic guarantee that massive layoffs and hunger would become a political issue. Whatever their ideological shortcomings, It took several years of a committed, tightly disciplined, virtually kamikaze movement of Young Communist League cadre, withstanding truncheons, tear gas and jailings, to organize and spearhead protest demonstrations and strikes sufficient to alert the media to the fact that there were people out there suffering severely from the effects of a full-blown Depression. Until then, as is the case now, I'm told that the media ignored it. That in turn brought in FDR and the New Deal - but even that didn't take off until almost the last year of FDR's first term.
Where that might come from this time, with the working class lacking any effective organs of unity and the socialist alternative so recently discredited, and a level of what Nader describes as almost Bangladesh passivity, is the question that begs for a positive answer. At some point it seems as if the total delegitimation of the present way of doing things, with wealth continuing to pile up at the high end at the expense of all the others in an openly, heedlessly corrupt system where capital accumulation no longer serves the majority and which leaves more and more people jobless, homeless and the safety net broken, the 16 to 25 year olds among us may somehow give vent to their wrath, in sheer righteous desperation, and the bounds of apathy may explode. In LA a few years ago there were massive protests, schools emptied onto the streets across the barrios, Latinos of first, second and third generation protesting the (later ruled unconstitutional) Prop 187. There's enormous anger and distress growing, people losing everything they've worked for, workplace security, housing, education, health care, social safety net, future prospects, all slipping away. And on the subject of California, in the midst of the fiscal debacle here, while Arnie the Terminator and the legislature under the Democrats have been gutting social services to a Mississippi level in a state which still has unparalleled technological and productive capabilities and vast wealth, and what was once the finest education system in the US - Krekorian the Democratic assemblyman from Burbank sneaked through without hearings in the dead of night tax cuts for his film and aircraft and sundry other megacorporate friends of what is estimated as almost $900 billion over seven years, with only 8 Democrats voting against it. And while California has maybe the most powerful assemblage in the Congress of any state in at least the last 100 years, the Democratic Congress and the Obama administration are letting the state go down the sluiceways, fiddling while California burns. With massive deficits, imports collapsing, China and others balking at the US continuing to print money like no tomorrow and threatening to cash in their Treasuries, the industrial heart of the US economy hollowed out and converted to a centralized, inflexible, increasingly oligarchical state-buttressed finance and low-paid service economy, how can there be a perception among the suites that there's wiggle room, sufficient productive activity for so much as even a partial, stop-gap Keynesian style solution? Then most importantly there's the deteriorating environment, which only the most ideologically blinded can still deny and the depths of which no one yet knows, and for which there don't seem to be any viable solutions in a profit-driven, competitive world economy, where anything like effective cutting back, diversion of resources and long-term planning and cooperation across national boundaries appears hopelessly improbable. So, for a positive bit - this time, if it should come to that, we might not settle for the old patchwork liberal corporate solutions, nor even the authoritarian alternative that the corporate state might get behind. Although I know that you, as a confirmed cynic, repeatedly choose to think that nothing is learned and nothing gained over time from our experiences, except the worst. We can hope and trust and above all work for the best, and we'll find out, should we live so long. [email protected] wrote: > So, 100% agreement. The people I know are not a good statistical > sample, but the most common thread is total disgust, yet passive > acceptance. Comments like..."I'll never again work in a campaign, > give money, trust a candidate"...are pervasive. Nader, like Henry > Wallace, will be forgotten by almost everyone, but is a prophet in his > time. > > > > In a message dated 8/10/2009 4:05:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, > [email protected] writes: > > Nader Was Right: Liberals are Going Nowhere With Obama > > http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090810_nader_was_right_liberals_are_going_nowhere_with_obama/ > > <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090810_nader_was_right_liberals_are_going_nowhere_with_obama/> > Posted on Aug 10, 2009 > By Chris Hedges > ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
