Maintaining high unemployment weakens labor and strengthens both management and capital. It not only weakens workers without jobs, i.e. they settle for much less pay to find work, but it weakens those with jobs who cannot bargain effectively because they would be highly vulnerable in the job market. Capital, unlike labor, is highly mobile. If [...]

This song does a good job capturing the hope I have… and the concern. I’m just riding that big old duality wave right back to the beach. The Story in Your Eyes by the Moody Blues

Listen to the tide slowly turning Wash all our heartaches away We’re part of the fire that is burning From the [...]

Perhaps some clarification is needed. I agree with your take on many issues. When you say things like “what’s left is to foment resistance, and provide reasons for it”, I couldn’t agree more. I was especially interested in your characterization of what I wrote as “realistic/pessimistic”. For the record, I see myself as something of [...]

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” –Mao The problem with violence is that its aims are not clear. Do we seek to conquer the government itself? Do we believe we can outgun the military and the police? Is ultimate conquest the goal? It seems unrealistic. Or, perhaps, would a few key [...]

Thanks very much, greenmassgroup. I just watched the entire video. I like Jill Stein; I live in Mass and I’m familiar with her from past campaigns. While she did draw the distinction between income and wealth, which is a critically important distinction, she really did not address my point which is that we have to [...]

Let me start by saying I haven’t spent much time researching either candidate. Frankly, any party separated from a broad-based movement is a bit of a pretend. I did, however, read some of Mr. Anderson’s positions. The good news is that I agree with all of them; the bad news, and, if true, it really [...]

First, I no longer know who ‘the Left’ includes, but many self-identify as such, and support Democrats loudly and fail to accept that the party leadership is corrupt, self-serving elitist, and most Dem Congress-critters hate unions in practice, love funding wars and the lies that sold them, hate transparency, hate financial regulations, love NDAA and other [...]

If there’s one emerging concept that OWS has brilliantly made part of the dialogue already, imo, it’s that the old left/right political labels are no longer operable, and that it’s a top/bottom economic and social disparity that’s important. And that’s where you build coalitions, as well as on preemptive wars that don’t keep us safer, abrogation [...]

Yes, we have “to modify the behavior of whichever “evil son of a bitch” happens to be in the White House.” We can’t do that by voting for them.

And you won’t do it by punishing them either. You seem to forget that progressive left is a minority in this country.

That’s right. The electoral process in [...]

…it is essential to modify the behavior of whichever “evil son of a bitch” happens to be in the White House.

Well, that’s true. The problem is that you can no longer effect change by voting for the same parties and the same candidates. Start with this: real wages for American workers have not increased since [...]

Oops. Here’s a link to the quoted analysis.

Excellent quote! I liked this analysis of a speech Brandeis gave:

Citizens in a successful democracy must be free, and they could not be free so long as they were “dependent industrially upon the arbitrary will of another.” Thus, “some curb must be placed on overweening industrial power,” in particular on the threats posed by the [...]

More and more of us can now see the failures of capitalism, the endless militarism, the Wall St. corruption, the greed of corporatism, the crushing of the middle class, the toxic environment, the hopelessness of the young, the demise of empire and the poisoning of the American dream. Some see smaller government as a panacea. [...]

Here’s a link to the transcript of Carter’s speech . As for the issue of economic sanctions, consider what Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did in Iraq:

However, with the embargo in Iraq, we have a United Nations whose decisions in the Security Council have led to the deaths of possibly more than one million people in [...]

all citizens and all entities are designed and regulated for the benefit of all. Really, comrade? Care to recapitulate?

Heh. I originally had the phrase “all institutions and all entities” and meant to modify it to “all systems and all entities”. All I can say is sometimes the fingers have a mind of their own. Good [...]

To quote an online friend: “ahhhh… Bingo!” Check out my exchange with our good friend wendydavis here and here. Ultimately, following the maxim of “be the change you want to see”, I don’t believe enough of us are “being” yet to effect radical change. We have been poisoned by a poisoned culture. Overcoming the invasive conditioning we’ve [...]

Having said this, allow me to emphasize the need for public oversight of worker-controlled corporations. Consider the endless stream of undemocratic abuses currently plaguing us. We have a massive military-industrial complex. We have corporatized mass media. We have greed driven bankers. We have oil companies that won’t recognize climate change because doing so would hurt [...]

We often think in terms of whether Joe Average is doing OK or he isn’t. Are there jobs? Are workers being paid fairly? Is the social safety net intact? Is the middle class growing? We conflate these symptoms with the underlying root cause of the disease. Wolff gets right to the heart of the matter [...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7gyusc7QBc I replied in the previous thread but… here it is again. In one sense, I share the Culture Jammers optimism; in another, not so much. It seems increasingly clear to me that we have crossed the Rubicon. Power and wealth have become so perversely centralized that nature’s sustaining systems can no longer endure. They have [...]