Forum Replies Created
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bnw,
Of course endowments are private donations. Donations derived via CAPITALISM. 13.2% interest earned via CAPITALISM.
Indeed change is inevitable. Human nature is not. Capitalism has lasted as long and permeated the world because of it.
How long do you think capitalism has been around? Please be specific. And please describe what you think it actually is. Because in America, it wasn’t dominant until after the Civil War. More than 80% of American workers were self-employed, and not capitalists up until the late 1870s. We had thriving universities, with endowments, and “private donations” before it took control. Capitalism has never, ever been required for people to make those donations. People gave to the arts, to universities, to medical research, etc. etc. centuries upon centuries before its advent.
It is also the case that even under the capitalist system, the public sector has been responsible for the vast majority of all innovations we use on a day to day basis. Not capitalism. The Internet, touch screen technology, satellite tech, GPS, the computer — to name a few — all came from public sector research and development. The vast majority of new medical breakthroughs also come from the public sector, primarily NIH. We could easily do without the private sector and still fund all of our universities, research triangles and so on. The public sector could do everything done currently by the private sector, and better, and for far less costs to citizens. The private sector also routinely impedes progress, chiefly because it won’t move on innovations if they don’t produce immediate profits — and most great innovations don’t.
Read David Graeber’s excellent Of Flying cars and the declining rate of profit for a good break down of the above.
WV,
Again, good thoughts on your part. You’re still damn humble about this stuff, and I think that’s a help when it comes to communication with people in general, and the poor especially. One of the things they hate the most about “liberals,” for instance, is the sense they get from them that they’re all too dumb to “get it,” and the sense that they’ve been written off, especially if they’re poor and white. And, basically, they have been by the everyone from the right to the center-left. The Dems turned their backs on the poor after the 1960s, and the Republicans stopped caring after Lincoln.
That “dependence on capitalists” is a biggie for me. It’s one of the main reasons I despise capitalism so much, because it does create ginormous dependencies, and it came into existence, originally, by crushing small, independent farmers, artisans, craftpersons, etc. etc. A lot of people assume, for instance, that waves of immigrants left Europe and other countries to find a better life in America, because of something we were supposedly doing so much better than anyone else. That we were this amazingly free beacon of hope for all. In reality, we were forcing capitalism on the world, along with Britain, especially, to such a earth-shattering degree, those old world artisans, farmers, craftspersons and the like HAD to leave their homes. Capitalism had destroyed their way of life, which was, relatively speaking, “independent” of the competitive laws of motion foisted on the world with the rise of capitalism. They were forced to leave for the New World largely due to what the New World had done to them — again, with Britain once being the main pimp for capitalism before us.
In short, we need an economic system that has social justice and democracy baked in, and no longer forces dependencies on everyone. One that makes people independent to the degree possible. Ironically, if it’s a cooperative, instead of a competitive economic system, individuals are a thousand times more likely to forge that independence.
Waterfield,
Nader didn’t cost Gore the election. That would have been mathematically, physically and, due to the way we structure elections, impossible from an electoral point of view. Presidents win via a cumulative count in the Electoral college. No one state can possibly be “decisive” because of this. You need a lot of states to get to 270. Gore won 20. Bush won 30 and received 271 electoral votes to Gore’s 266. Take any of those 30 states for Gore, leave Florida in Bush’s column, and Gore wins.
It’s akin to saying that a missed field goal, in the last second of the last game of the season, cost some NFL team a chance to get to the playoffs. Wrong. If they had won another game prior to that last one, it wouldn’t have mattered, and if they had scored more points prior to that last-second field-goal attempt, it wouldn’t have mattered, etc. etc.
It’s become an article of faith among too many Democrats, but it’s really nothing more than a copout and a refusal to take responsibility for Gore’s terrible campaign, the lack of turnout among Dems, and the fact that more than 300,000 Democrats in Florida voted for Bush. Nader cost Gore roughly 27,000 likely votes there. If just 564 Democrats had stayed with their own candidate, instead of voting for Bush, Gore wins. And if the ballots hadn’t been so confusing to people in Palm Beach — even Buchanan said he believed at least 95% of his votes should have gone to Gore — Gore wins. And if Gore takes his own state of Tennessee, he wins, etc. etc.
If, if, if. Too many Democrats want to cherry pick just one possible counterfactual among a sea of them, while ignoring 99% of the rest. They need to do some real soul searching, or just let all of that go.
Nader had nothing to do with Bush’s victory. He couldn’t possibly.
We already have this freedom. It’s called owning your own business. You’re in charge. For good or bad.
Yes, the business owner is in charge of other humans. He or she owns them, at least for eight hours a day. And it used to be for a much longer period of time before enough anticapitalist activism forced changes in our labor laws. But they still get to legally steal workers’ production and profit from it. They stil get to decide FOR those workers what their pay will be, what they must do to keep their jobs, and if the workers don’t obey the dictates of that business owner, they lose their jobs.
Master/slave. Theft and coercion. A profoundly autocratic, antidemocratic and immoral system down to its very core.
The business owner may be “free” in a sense under capitalism, but the worker isn’t. He or she obeys or they get fired. He or she doesn’t have any control over what they do at work, how much they make, or the context of their employment. They are obviously NOT “free.” And because of the massive inequality in wages under capitalism, only the lucky few have the time/privilege to pursue their personal dreams to their fullest, and only the lucky few get to maximize their own potential.
Btw, there are roughly 7 million businesses in America with employees. Think about that in terms of percentages. A tiny fraction of society owns the means of production and other human beings at work.
Why anyone BUT the rich would accept such a despicable system is nothing short of insane.
Really? You ignored the G&T student predicament. So lets see what else. What if someone is ugly vs. gorgeous? Fat vs. fit? Extroverted vs. introverted? Still preaching equality or do you at all acknowledge human behavior and its undeniable effect?
I didn’t ignore anything. I said that you described the existing problems with society, thinking you had come up with some unique problem that would only apply to alternative systems. Again, the alternative wouldn’t have that problem, because the purpose of education in a socialist, left-anarchist society is completely different from a capitalist society. There is no need to create good little capitalist worker bees. There is no need to preach obedience to authority and mold young minds into mass children for a mass consumerist culture. There is no need to make sure kids surrender their own personal autonomy to the ruling class, to business owners, etc. Those things won’t exist.
As for individual differences? Why would any of that matter? We’re not looking for sameness in human beings, unlike the capitalist system, which depends upon sameness, teaches it, herds people into being compliant, complacent drones. It’s capitalism that couldn’t survive if everyone were actually free to do their own thing. It’s capitalism that couldn’t survive if people were taught to think for themselves, provide for themselves, self-govern, self-actuate.
So, again, who cares if people are radically diverse? In this alternative society, we celebrate, promote and do our best to provoke that.
I think you are seriously confused about the definition of “equality” in this context. It doesn’t mean individual to individual sameness. It means equal rights and all humans being equally valued. Our time being equally valued and valuable. It means equal say in one’s workplace, an equal voice in one’s community, and equal access to all the fruits of society, without hindrance. It means all citizens are co-owners of the means of production, with an equal share. It means everyone is entitled to personal autonomy and dignity, as citizens. No bosses. No masters. No slaves.
It doesn’t mean everyone acts alike or is expected to. It means quite the opposite. Because in this society, with everyone having all the tools they could possible need to achieve their potential, the diversity of individual human experience will be greater than in any previous system known to humankind. Rather than just a tiny fraction of society having the chance to pursue individuals dreams, everyone will have that chance.
Again, you seem to be critiquing this from the standpoint of how things work now, by the rules of capitalism and our existing system. That’s using the rules of Risk to say this or that Chess move can’t work.
In short, you have to think outside the box.
I’ve never been a Kenny Loggins fan. But I watched a lot of Gilligan’s Island. That seems like what you want to do but out of those 7 stranded castaways 3 are the Howels and Gilligan.
Actually, no. The point would be to make sure no one is stranded. No one. No one left behind. Everyone gets the chance to achieve their fullest potential, primarily because there would no longer be any monetary barriers between them and their dreams. For the first time in history, everyone, simply by being a citizen, would have unhindered access to the full range of educational, cultural, health and fitness and environmental options available, with no entrance fees. Instead of these things being set aside for the Howells alone, or those who manage the wealth of the Howells, everyone could take advantage of all the fruits of society. No exclusion. No one stranded.
As long as they are not the square peg to be forced into the round hole. That square peg looks around the packed gifted and talented classroom and decides the work is so ridiculously easy as to be meaningless. Feigning sleep to daydream of a life lived fully elsewhere brings some solace for now.
You’re describing our current situation, not the alternative. The alternative wouldn’t be tasked with churning out good little capitalist cogs for the machine. Instead, the duty of our teachers in the alternative society would be to provoke and hone critical thinking skills, creativity, independence of mind and body. Study the Paris Commune. This was a really big deal to its theorists and practitioners. They sought to raise a new generation of independent minds, capable of self-provisioning, self-governance, no longer under the beck and call of capitalist bosses. No longer forced into the economic machine against their will, because they had no other option, not being members of the financial elite.
No gods, no masters. We’d teach our children this, and give them the tools to thrive in an open, democratic and cooperative society. No more dependence on capitalism, corporations, the state. No more class hierarchies. They’d have access to the widest possible array of avenues to explore, all of them without prices attached. And because every community would have the resources they needed to present that array, in full, no child would have to choose between fewer and fewer options, because rich people wanted their taxes cut and public goods and services slashed to pay for them.
No class system. No chance for the rich to demand tax cuts, paid for by slashing programs for the poor and the middle. Instead, everyone gets full access to the entire gamut of learning, with no one left out.
This is also pretty much the same exact thing that led to right-wing evangelicals becoming politically active back in the early 1970s. For them, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the ruling against Bob Jones University, on the issue of segregation. Samantha Bee explains: …
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I assume the Religious-evangelicals are still a powerful core faction
of the Rep Party. They may not be quite as visible as they used to be
but I assume they still carry a significant amount of weight on the Right.
Lots of votes out there, among the fundamentalist-christian crowd.w
v
“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?” ― Mark Twain“The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.” — Robert Anton Wilson
Great quotes, WV. I’ve never gotten a coherent response from Christians who believe the bible literally, when I talk about their god as genocidal madman. The trap is that literal belief. The only way to really get around the fact that the Christian and Jewish god is the most evil father god in all of organized religion is to NOT take the texts literally. Take them poetically, as allegory, myth, legend, etc. etc. . . . and you can avoid that conclusion. But if a person actually sees the bible as the inerrant word of their god, there is no other conclusion. He’s profoundly evil on a colossal scale.
Anyway . . . . if you want to be seriously depressed by the ugliness of right-wing fundamentalists, watch this women ranting in a Target, which is the latest boycott from conservatives — again, due to the transgendered and bathrooms issue.
….was listening to NPR on the car radio and i heard that Bruce Springsteen and Itzak Perlman and a bunch of glittering celebrities were boycotting North Carolina.
Cause of the Identity politix thing. Trans people cant use bathrooms of their choice.
They have to use the other bathroom.THAT brings about a boycott.
Meanwhile… NC can pass laws the crush the poor every legislative session, and that gets
no reaction from the rich celebs.And so it goes.
wv grouch
I agree that it would be much better if celebs advocated on behalf of the poor, dealt seriously with class issues, inequality, poverty, hunger, our melting planet, etc. etc. . . . instead of waiting for this kind of bill to come along. Hell, they should really boycott every “right to work” state. Perhaps that would force change. But the bill in question does more than just force the transgendered into going against their gender identity. It’s actually quite sweeping in its discriminatory practices:
The new law did more than repeal the Charlotte ordinance. It made the state’s law on antidiscrimination — which covers race, religion, national origin, color, age, biological sex and handicaps — the final word. Meaning cities and local governments can’t expand “employment” or “public accommodations” protections to others, such as on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Minimum wage also falls under the state’s antidiscrimination law, so this law means local governments aren’t able to set their own minimum wages beyond the state standard.
This is also pretty much the same exact thing that led to right-wing evangelicals becoming politically active back in the early 1970s. For them, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the ruling against Bob Jones University, on the issue of segregation. Samantha Bee explains:
So the squirrel analogy was utterly lost on you. Oh well.
No, I got it. It just doesn’t work.
Collecting enough goods for the winter is not the same thing as selling them for profit. Putting aside enough for a rainy day, a bad harvest, a rough year, etc. etc. . . . is not remotely the same thing as selling these things for a profit. You can do the one and not the other.
And, again, no production facilities in this alternative ever need to make any money on their production in the first place, much less a profit. The system isn’t set up to make money and it’s not at all legal. The legal, social, societal structure in place doesn’t allow for it, and soon enough, it will be but a distant memory that things were done a different way in the past.
Again, revenues aren’t tied to funding in any way, shape or form. A totally separate stream of funding is held in common, in those public banks, in the form of digits, so if a “plant” needs upgrades or alterations, it puts in the request — or the community does it before that. Community councils vote on the upgrades, alterations, etc., make sure these adhere to the constitution and to environmental and civil rights parameters, and we go from there. There is absolutely no need, whatsoever, for them to show “earnings” beyond costs in order to “reinvest” in anything. That’s all decided democratically. There is never a matter of “business success” or failure involved. It’s all about the needs of the people, of every single citizen, not how well the commonly-held outlets and production facilities do on their own.
They’re just tools and means to an end, never ends in themselves, as they are under capitalism.
