In Conversation: Chauncey DeVega & Eddie Glaude Jr.

In Conversation: The Age of Trump vs The Black Freedom Struggle 


 Eddie Glaude Jr. is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University. His publications include Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul and In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America. In 2006, he worked with Cornel West to develop a public online course called the “Covenant Curriculum: A Study of Black Democratic Action.”

 Professor Glaude has also written for The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and Time, and he has appeared on the Tavis Smiley Show, Hannity & Colmes, MSNBC, CNN, and C-SPAN. 

Professor Glaude explains the lessons of the Black Freedom Struggle for surviving in a time of disaster that is Donald Trump's presidency, how not to surrender to despair in this moment, developing a more sophisticated way to discuss race and social inequality, and how Black Pragmatism and black folks' "Blues Sensibility" are tools for living and maintaining our moral virtue.

The Neocons Have Their Caesar by Tom Engelhardt

 




What dreamers they were! They imagined a kind of global power that would leave even Rome at its Augustan height in the shade. They imagined a world made for one, a planet that could be swallowed by a single great power. No, not just great, but beyond anything ever seen before — one that would build (as its National Security Strategy put it in 2002) a military “beyond challenge.” Let’s be clear on that: no future power, or even bloc of powers, would ever be allowed to challenge it again.

Poet's Nook: "your mirror" by Najm al-Din Daya Razi

Each soul is created to serve as your mirror.

All things in the two worlds

are only your mirrors.

The heart is the mirror of your most royal

beauty -

and both of these worlds

are the case of that mirror.

~ Najm al-Din Daya Razi

from Love's Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition

Our Enemies Are Human. That’s Why We Want To Kill Them by Tage Rai, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Jesse Graham

On Saturday, James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, injuring 30 people and killing Heather Heyer. Earlier that day, white supremacists nearly beat Dre Harris to death. Throughout the afternoon, violence erupted between white supremacists and counter-protesters.

What drove white supremacists to converge on the town of Charlottesvilleready to fight and, in a few cases, kill? Did they see the victims as less than fully human and feel no moral obligations to them? Or could an excess of morality—morality that could only be satisfied by punishing a fellow human being—instead have driven their violence?

Beware the Soft Hand of Capital by Clara Mejia-Gamboa & Daniel Sullivan

These days, it seems customary to begin any political commentary with the laundry list of indicators of global decline: exploding wealth inequality, looming environmental collapse, and the resurgence of overt racial terror in far-right governments. We are familiar enough with the mechanics of capitalism’s iron fist to know that we live in a world of precarity, so much so that sometimes we welcome capitalism’s soft hand in mitigating crises of its own making.

Reasons To Believe

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Have you ever wondered why people believe things like religion, spirituality, conspiracy theories and political ideology without evidence? Why it's so hard to change their minds, even after presenting the facts? Reasons To Believe is a thought-provoking documentary by filmmaker Ben Fama Jr., that explores the psychology and science of belief and why we believe, sometimes falsely, in things that may not match up with reality. Facilitated by leaders in the fields of science, philosophy, neuroscience, moral reasoning, psychology, perception, memory formation, and indoctrination, these experts answer a variety of thought provoking questions and provide tangible structure to the definition and creation of belief in the human brain. Fama asks the question: Why do we believe?

The Sorrows of Empire

 

Pulitzer Prize –winning reporter Chris Hedges talks about his new book, America: The Farewell Tour. In it he goes deep into how the opioid crisis; the retreat into gambling to cope with economic distress; the pornification of culture; the rise of magical thinking; the celebration of sadism, hate, and plagues of suicides are the physical manifestations of a society that is being ravaged by corporate pillage and a failed democracy. Where do we, as a people and a planet, go next?  

UN Report: Meat Consumption Leads Earth To ‘Cease To Support Human Life By 2050

SOURCE: Naked Food Magazine

The human population has reached 7.6 billion and could number 9 billion or 10 billion by midcentury. All those people will need to eat. A report published by the journal Nature argues that a sustainable food system that doesn’t ravage the environment is going to require dramatic reforms, including a radical change in dietary habits.

To be specific: Meat is out, and fruits and veggies are in.

The report comes on the heels of a warning from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that global leaders need to take unprecedented action in the next decade to keep the planet’s average temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

How Humans Disrupted a Cycle Essential to All Life

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How one animal dug up carbon and put it back into the atmosphere at an astounding pace. How do we reverse this systematically? Are the solutions mostly technological? What about our consumer habits/choices? What about our heavy consumption of meat? And the overwhelming influence of oil & gas companies & lobbies in government's environmental policies -- how can we counteract this?

One thing is for sure, we are DONE if we don't wise up & resist this ongoing destruction of our home.

The IRS & Poor People's Money

Journalist Jesse Eisinger reports on a massive (downward) shift at the IRS - stripped of resources and power by a longterm Republican project, the agency watches corporations and the rich float above tax enforcement, while setting its sights on the working poor and the few benefits they have left.

Jesse co-authored the report How the IRS Was Gutted with Paul Kiel for ProPublica. 

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” as a Parable of Our Time by Clint Smith

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.

Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.

~~~Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Thirty-One Actual National Emergencies by Paul Street

A Wannabe Strongman’s Brown Menace Straw Man 

 Everyone with five functioning gray cells knows that the aspiring fascist strongman Donald Trump’s Declaration of a National Emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border is absurd. There is no “national security crisis” of illegal immigration on the southern United States border. Illegal crossings are not at “emergency” levels; they are at a fifty-year low..... 

  READ MORE

Worshipping the Electronic Image by Chris Hedges

Donald Trump, like much of the American public, is entranced by electronic images. He interprets reality through the distortions of digital media. His decisions, opinions, political positions, prejudices and sense of self are reflected back to him on screens. He views himself and the world around him as a vast television show with himself as the star. His primary concerns as president are his ratings, his popularity and his image. He is a creature—maybe the poster child—of the modern, post-literate culture, a culture that critics such as Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Boorstin, James W. Carey and Neil Postman warned us about.

Alondra Nelson: The Need For a New Bioethics

   


From the discovery of the double helix structure in 1953, to the Human Genome Project of the 1990s and early 2000s, to the Precision Medicine Initiative announced by President Barack Obama in 2015, the DNA revolution has touched almost every corner of society. While a deeper understanding of genetics offers great potential for positive social change and targeted medical treatments, it also presents complex new ethical challenges that must be confronted with care and a thorough understanding of the history of racism in science. 

In this interview, Dr. Alondra Nelson, dean of social science and professor of sociology and gender studies at Columbia University in New York, argues that this unique moment requires a new bioethics that takes into account ‘the full social life of DNA’.

What Happens to Cognitive Diversity When Everyone is More WEIRD? by Kensy Cooperrider

For centuries, Inuit hunters navigated the Arctic by consulting wind, snow and sky. Now they use GPS. Speakers of the aboriginal language Gurindji, in northern Australia, used to command 28 variants of each cardinal direction. Children there now use the four basic terms, and they don’t use them very well. In the arid heights of the Andes, the Aymara developed an unusual way of understanding time, imagining the past as in front of them, and the future at their backs. But for the youngest generation of Aymara speakers – increasingly influenced by Spanish – the future lies ahead.
These are not just isolated changes. On all continents, even in the world’s remotest regions, indigenous people are swapping their distinctive ways of parsing the world for Western, globalised ones. As a result, human cognitive diversity is dwindling – and, sadly, those of us who study the mind had only just begun to appreciate it.

In 2010, a paper titled ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ gave the field of cognitive science a seismic shock. Its authors, led by the psychologist Joe Henrich at the University of British Columbia, made two fundamental points. The first was that researchers in the behavioural sciences had almost exclusively focused on a small sliver of humanity: people from Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic societies. The second was that this sliver is not representative of the larger whole, but that people in London, Buenos Aires and Seattle were, in an acronym, WEIRD.

But there is a third fundamental point, and it was the psychologist Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania who made it. In his commentary on the 2010 article, Rozin noted that this same WEIRD slice of humanity was ‘a harbinger of the future of the world’. He had seen this trend in his own research. Where he found cross-cultural differences, they were more pronounced in older generations. The world’s young people, in other words, are converging. The signs are unmistakable: the age of global WEIRDing is upon us.

This marks a major change of course for our species. For tens of thousands of years, as we fanned out across the globe, we adapted to radically different niches, and created new types of societies; in the process, we developed new practices, frameworks, technologies and conceptual systems. But then, some time in the past few centuries, we reached an inflection point. A peculiar cognitive toolkit that had been consolidated in the industrialising West began to gain global traction. Other tools were abandoned. Diversity started to ebb.

The WEIRD toolkit comprises our most basic frameworks for understanding the world. It touches on every aspect of experience: how we relate to space and time, to nature, to each other; how we filter our experiences and allocate our attention. Many of these mental frameworks are so ingrained we don’t notice them. They are like the glasses we’ve forgotten we’re wearing.

Consider our obsession with numbers. In global, industrialised cultures we take it for granted that we can – and should – quantify every aspect of experience. We count steps and calories, track interest rates and follower counts. Meanwhile, people in some small-scale societies don’t bother to track how old they are. Some couldn’t because their languages don’t have numbers beyond four or five. But WEIRD quantiphilia is quickly catching on. Hunter-gatherers in the Amazon are now eagerly learning Portuguese number words. In Papua New Guinea, once home to a rich variety of ‘body count’ systems – numbered landmarks on body, usually ranging to about 30 – children are learning English numbers instead.

Another peculiar part of the WEIRD toolkit is our fixation on time. We budget it, struggle to save it, agonise over losing it. We count days, hours and seconds. We are always oriented to exactly where we are on the long arrow of history. In the United States, for example, when doctors screen patients for cognitive impairment, one of the first questions they ask is the year, month and date.

To many in non-Western, non-industrialised groups, this fixation might seem odd. One early 20th-century ethnographer, Alfred Irving Hallowell, observed that the Ojibwe of native North America would be unruffled by not knowing whether it was a Thursday or Saturday. What would distress them, he remarked in 1957, is not knowing whether they were facing south or east. Not so for WEIRD people: our fixation on time appears to be balanced by a breathtaking obliviousness to space. A 2010 study found that Stanford students could not reliably point to North.

Now, such obliviousness to space is going global. Satellite-based navigation systems are displacing traditional techniques worldwide. It’s happening in the Arctic, as we have seen, but also in the Pacific. In Micronesia, seafaring was once accomplished with jawdropping precision by using a conceptual system so different from Western ones that scientists struggled to understand it. Today, this masterwork lives largely in museum exhibits.

Everyday ways of talking about space are undergoing a sea change, too. Very often, people in small-scale communities prefer to describe space using cardinal directions or local landmarks – often slopes, rivers or salient winds. Some of these systems, like the Gurindji compass terms, are highly elaborated. In contrast, WEIRD folks prefer to carve up the world in terms of their own bodily axes – their lefts and rights, fronts and backs. This ego-based frame of reference now appears to be taking hold broadly, spreading along with the influence of global languages such as Spanish.

Humanity is getting more ego-centred in other ways, too. It has long been observed that Western adults – and Americans in particular – privilege the individual over the group. We give our children unique names; we put them in bedrooms of their own; we emphasise their autonomy and needs. People in many other societies, most famously in East Asia, have historically privileged the collective instead. But Western-style individualism is gaining a foothold, even in the East. Japanese people have started giving their children unique names, too. A recent analysis of 78 countries found that, over the past half-century, markers of individualism have increased in the majority of them.

These are just some of the frameworks that are being displaced as global WEIRDing accelerates. Elsewhere, taxonomies, metaphors and mnemonics are evaporating. Many were never really documented in the first place. Researchers still don’t fully understand the conceptual system motivating khipus – the intricate string recording devices once made by the Inkas – but there’s no one left to explain it.

Human cognitive diversity joins a number of other forms of diversity that are disappearing. Diversity of mammals and plants, of languages and cuisines. But the loss of cognitive diversity raises issues all its own. Cognition is invisible and intangible, making it harder to track and harder to record. You can’t pin mindsets to a specimen board, or store them in a seed vault. It’s not easy to pose ways of knowing in a diorama. Thinking leaves footprints, of course – in language, in artifacts, in knotted string – but the act itself is ephemeral.

The loss of cognitive diversity raises an ethical dilemma, too. The forces that are eroding cognitive diversity – the forces of global WEIRDing – are often the same forces that are raising literacy levels worldwide, promoting access to education and opportunity in indigenous communities, and connecting people across the globe. Few would deny that these are positive developments for humanity. So we are left to ask, not only whether we can slow the loss of human cognitive diversity, but also whether we should even try.

Cognitive scientists such as myself are not used to grappling with these kinds of questions. Nor are we used to thinking about big trends in the human journey. But global WEIRDing is a trend we can’t ignore, one with scientific, humanistic and ethical implications. For much of human history, one of our most distinctive traits as a species has been our sheer diversity. But then our course began to change – and it’s time that cognitive scientists joined the conversation about where we’re going.

SOURCE: AEON

***************************************************************

Kensy Cooperrider. is a cognitive scientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago

Musings

Throw Off the Yoke of Indoctrination! by Dandelion Salad

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We say we want change. So every few years, we elect new officials, and they continue to churn out more of the same policies, legislation, and rhetoric. The rich continue to get richer. The poor slide deeper into poverty. Corporations and the wealthy see pet projects and sweet deals passed through Congress. The People receive yet another bitter slap in the face.

Continue

Will Trump Resign Before the 2020 Election? by David Rosen

 

As Donald Trump gave his 2019 “State of the (Dis)Union” speech, an unasked question haunted the event – will he be forced to resign before the 2020 election?  Much media attention is focused on “Russia Gate” and the Mueller investigation as well as the dozen or so investigations getting underway by the new Democrat-controlled Congress.  However, Trump’s real threat may come from the investigations of his – and his family’s – business practices being separately undertaken by the governments of New York, New Jersey, Washington, DC, and Maryland.

Trump’s leading biographer, David Cay Johnston, pulls no punches in his assessment of Trump’s questionable business practices. “He comes from a family of criminals,” Johnston explains. “His grandfather made his fortune running whorehouses in Seattle and in the Yukon Territory. His father, Fred, had a business partner named Willie Tomasello, who was an associate of the Gambino crime family. Trump’s father was also investigated by the U.S. Senate for ripping off the government for what would be the equivalent of $36 million in today’s money.”  Following the family line, Johnston notes, “Donald got his showmanship from his dad, as well as his comfort with organized criminals.”

Continue...

Poisoning The World From the U.S.A - The Devil we Know

 

After watching this disturbing film, toss your Teflon pots & pans into the trash! I've always suspected that Big Business (for the most part) suppresses information detrimental to their bottom line (examine what tobacco companies did for decades to suppress & deny evidence of their carcinogenic products). 

 Some of the common items this poison is part of : dental floss, microwave popcorn bags , irons, hair straighteners, curling wands , baking gear, carpets and sofas, waterproof mascara, ironing board covers, some light bulbs, toasted sandwich makers, waffle makers, rice cookers and many plug in slow cookers and woks, waterproof clothes, namely raincoats, outdoor deck waterproofing sealants....jeeeeezzzzz.......

 We are all sitting ducks in corporate America's penetrating eye of avarice & deceit. The damage done is incalculable. 

Southern Discomfort

Southern Discomfort is a documentary film that examines white southerners' love affair with the Confederacy.I found it quite interesting in light of the moment we are in right now with the political, cultural & legal battles ripping this country apart.

Edward Said - Framed: The Politics of Stereotypes in News

  Palestinian academic Edward Said’s (1935-2003) book ‘Orientalism’ showed how the West had the power to represent the colonial ‘other’ - while at once leaving them voiceless. 

Break the trance folks!!

'This Bitter Earth:' The Rape of Recy Taylor

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                                                       REVIEW by Kelish B Graves

  See the whole thing HERE

 

This powerful, heart-wrenching documentary was released in 2017, but I only found out about it while doing some research on something else yesterday. One of the joys of searching the Internet is discovering gems like this by chance. I saw a review of this film by Kelish B Graves while scrolling through numerous pages & actually scrolled past her review, but something told me to scroll back to take a closer look. I felt blessed for doing so as Kelish's review impacted me powerfully & made me look up/watch this documentary. Quite honestly, Recy Taylor's story broke me down. Her voice, so full of melancholic anguish, brought a slice of what being black in America has always meant: to be under constant threat of injury, diminishment & removal.

Check out Kelish B Graves' review in the link above & please make it a point to check this important documentary out...

Musings

OM

 


 The AUM symbol (also spelled “Om”) consists of three curves, one semicircle, and a dot; these are symbols of each person’s self and his potential:

• The large curve (the lower left corner of the image) symbolizes the waking state.  Perhaps it is best to think of this curve as symbolic of the ego, our outward persona, the person we think we should be, that identity that we consciously associate with the self.
• Moving clockwise, the upper curve (upper left corner) symbolizes the unconscious state, that part of the self that is hidden to one’s consciousness, but is equally part of the self.
• The middle curve, which extends from the center to the right side, symbolizes the dream state. This dream state, positioned vertically between the conscious and unconscious elements of the self, serves as a means to connect the two, a means for the conscious and unconscious to interact.  This is certainly what we do when we dream: the unconscious becomes conscious, affording a more complete view of the self.
• The semicircle or crescent (upper right corner) symbolizes illusion, specifically in this case, the illusion that the self exists as a separate entity at all.  Notice that the crescent separates the dot from the other three curves.  It is this illusion that separates the individual from becoming one with his infinite self, beyond boundaries.
• The dot signifies the infinite, absolute self, hidden from the individual by illusion; this is what the Eastern faiths of Hinduism and Buddhism consider God.  Dispelling the illusion and becoming one with this infinite self is the ultimate experience of life and the experience of the divine.

In Joseph Campbell’s book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces“, a book I read many years ago in my quest to understand what this Life was all about,  Campbell breaks down each of AUM’s three phonemes, a, u and m:

• The A representing the realm of waking experience: “cognitive of the hard gross facts of an outer universe, illuminated by the sun, and common to all”.
• The U representing the realm of dream experience: “cognitive of the fluid, subtle forms of a private interior world, self-luminous and of one substance with the dreamer”.
• The M representing the realm of very deep sleep: “dreamless, profoundly beautiful” (the person unified with the unconscious and the greater self).

For Campbell, the most profound element of AUM is not the sound, however, but the silence that surrounds it: “The silence surrounding the syllable is the unknown: it is called simply ‘the fourth’.  The syllable itself is God as creator-preserver-destroyer, but the silence is God Eternal, absolutely uninvolved in all the openings-and-closings of the round.”

 Sweet meditations!

White Power on a Dead Planet: Against the Myths of Purity and Progress.

Writer Ben Ehrenreich explains how Enlightenment-era ideas of progress and Western civilization collapsed time and space around the bumbling, destructive European ideology of early capitalism, and why those ideas still mis-guide the bumbling, destructive European ideology of late capitalism on a dying planet.

Ben wrote the article "After the Storm" for The Baffler. 

Bertram Warned Us

 


 Check out these timeless quotes from the scholarly 1980 classic, "Friendly Fascism The New Face of Power in America" by Bertram Gross. All of these quotes can apply to the dystopia we find ourselves in today......

pxiii 

economist Robert Lekachman "Ronald Reagan must be the nicest president who ever destroyed a union, tried to cut school lunch milk rations from six to four ounces, and compelled families in need of public help to first dispose of household goods in excess of $1,000...1f there is an authoritarian regime in the American future, Ronald Reagan is tailored to the image of a friendly fascist."

pxxiii 

Samuel Johnson "Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant and consistent."

p32 

Daniel R. Fusfeld "As long as an economic system provides an acceptable degree of security, growing material wealth and opportunity for further increase for the next generation, the average American does not ask who is running things or what goals are being pursued."

p43 

James O'Conner "Both welfare spending and warfare spending have a two-fold nature: the welfare system not only politically contains the surplus population but also expands demand and domestic markets. And the warfare system not only keeps foreign rivals at bay and inhibits the development of world revolution (thus keeping labor power, raw materials and markets in the capitalist orbit) but also helps to stave off economic stagnation at home."

p54 

American Heritage Dictionary "Establishment: An exclusive group of powerful people who rule a ) government or society by means of private agreements or decisions."

p62 

Adam Smith "Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many."

p63 

C. Wright Mills No one can be truly powerful unless he has access to the command of major institutions, for it is over these institutional means of power that the truly powerful are, in the first instance, truly powerful . . .

p63 

Richard Barber Their [a few immense corporations] incredible absolute size and commanding market positions make them the most exceptional man-made creatures of the twentieth century.... In terms of the size of their constituency, volume of receipts and expenditures, effective power, and prestige, they are more akin to nation-states than business enterprises of the classic variety.

p167 

James Madison "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

p184 

Amaury De Riencourt "Caesarism can come to America constitutionally without having to break down any existing institution."

p195 

William W. Turner "Leadership in the right has fallen to new organizations with lower profiles and better access to power . . . What is characteristic of this right is its closeness to government power and the ability this closeness gives to hide its political extremism under the cloak of respectability."

p209 

Daniel Fusfield There is a subtle three-way trade-off between escalating unemployment together with other unresolved social problems, rising taxes, and inflation. In practice, the corporate state has bought all three.

p210 

Slogan of the Medici family "Money to get power, power to protect money."

p219 

The major responsibility of corporate executives, so long as they are not constrained by enforced law, is to maximize their long-term accumulation of capital and power no matter what the cost may be to ... people or physical resources.

p229 

Murray B. Levin "No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the facade of democratic institutions. "

p229 

Thomas R. Dye and Harmon Ziegler "It is the irony of democracy that the responsibility for the survival of liberal democratic values depends on elites, not masses."

p239 

Gary Wills "If a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery."

p239

 President Richard M. Nixon "The average American is just like the child in the family."

p251 

Ferdinand Lundberg "If the new military elite is anything like the old one, it would, in any great crisis, tend to side with the Old Order and defend the status quo, if necessary, by force. In the words of the standard police bulletin known to all radio listeners, "These men are armed -and they may be dangerous."

p251 

Edward Luttwak "A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder."

p255 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Emile "There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom, for in that way one captures volition itself."

p256 

Herbert Schiller "The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action. "

p259 

Adolf Hitler "Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise. "

p260 

Aldous Huxley "Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science."

p261 

Fred Friendly head of CBS news ... pointed out that CBS was in business to make money and that informing the public was secondary to keeping on good terms with advertisers.

p263 

Larry P. Gross "While the Constitution is what the judges say it is, a public issue is something that Walter Cronkite or John Chancellor recognizes as such. The media by themselves do not make the decisions, but on behalf of themselves and larger interests they certify what is or is not on the nation's agenda."

p267 

Edmund Carpenter "The White House is now essentially a TV performance. "

p267 

Fred W. Friendly head of CBS news said of the American presidency "No mighty king, no ambitious emperor, no pope, or prophet ever dreamt of such an awesome pulpit, so potent a magic wand. "

p303

 Ronald Reagan when governor of California "If it takes a bloodbath ... let's get it over with."

p329 

Baron De Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws "The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy."

p331 

Karl Popper ""It can't happen here" is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere."

p349 

William H. Hastie "Democracy is a process, not a static condition. It is becoming rather than being. It can easily be lost, but is never fully won. Its essence is eternal struggle."

p351 

"Sure, we'll have fascism, but it will come disguised as Americanism." This famous statement has been attributed in many forms to Senator Huey P. Long, the Louisiana populist with an affinity for the demagogues of classic European fascism. If he were alive today, I am positive he would add the words "and democracy."

p356 

Mary Parker Follett "We are not wholly patriotic when we are working with all our heart for America merely; we are truly patriotic only when we are working also that America may take her place worthily and helpfully in the world of nations . . . Interdependence is the keynote of the relations of nations as it is the keynote of the relations of individuals within nations."

p359 

James Fenimore Cooper "The vulgar charge that the tendency of democracies is to leveling, meaning to drag all down to the level of the lowest, is singularly untrue; its real tendency being to elevate the depressed to a condition not unworthy of their manhood."

p359 

Louis D. Brandeis "We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth in a few hands, but we can't have both."

p382

 Mahatma Ghandhi "For me patriotism is the same as humanity. I am patriotic because I am human and humane. It is not exclusive. I will not hurt England or Germany to serve India . . . My patriotism is inclusive and admits of no enmity or ill-will."

p383 

George Washington, Farewell Address "Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism."

p384 

In his Militarism, USA, a sober critique based on years of experience in the U.S. Marine Corps, Colonel James A. Donovan: identifies the dangerous patriot: "the one who drifts into chauvinism and exhibits blind enthusiasm for military actions. He is a defender of militarism and its ideals of war and glory. Chauvinism is a proud and bellicose form of patriotism . . . which identifies numerous enemies who can only be dealt with through military power and which equates the national honor with military victory."

p384 

In The Reason for Democracy, published after his death in 1976, Kalman Silvert of New York University provided another pungent description of false patriots: "People who wrap themselves in the flag and proclaim the sanctity of the nation are usually racists, contemptuous of the poor and dedicated to keeping the community of 'ins' small and pure of blood, spirit and mind."

Capitalism vs Socialism: A False Choice by David Korten

Economic power is—and always has been—the foundation of political power. Those who control the peoples’ means of living rule.

In a democracy, however, each person must have a voice in the control and management of the means of their living. That requires more than a vote expressing a preference for which establishment-vetted candidate will be in power for the next few years.

My previous column, “Confronting the Great American Myth,” distinguished true democracy from government by the wealthy, a plutocracy. Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. Constitution was written by representatives of the new nation’s wealthy class to keep people like themselves in power.
On Jan. 4, the newly elected Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced HR1, the For the People Act of 2019. Its aim is to make voting easier, reduce the influence of big money, and curtail gerrymandering. Even before it was introduced, the champions of having rich people rule were falsely characterizing it as an attack on the freedom of speech of ordinary Americans.

The provisions of HR1 represent an important step in a transition from the plutocracy we have to the democracy most Americans want. Unfortunately, political gridlock assures that HR1 has no chance of becoming law until at least after the 2020 election. Yet the popular yearning for democracy reflected in that bill makes this a propitious moment for a serious conversation about what a true democracy might look like and why it would be a good idea.

We stand at an epic choice point for our nation and for humanity. The plutocracy now in place has put us on a path to self-extinction—a future with no winners, rich or poor. We must now seek a path that restores the health of Earth’s regenerative systems while securing equity, material sufficiency, peace, and spiritual abundance for all—exactly the opposite of the plutocrats’ drive to secure the power, privilege, and material excess for themselves. This makes democracy far more than just a good idea; it is now an imperative.

The power of plutocracy depends on keeping the people divided against each other along gender, racial, religious, or other fault lines. The goal is to divert our attention from themselves so that they can maintain their power and continue to amass wealth.

Champions of plutocracy would also have us believe that we must choose between two options: capitalism (private ownership and management) or socialism (government ownership and management). They prefer we not notice that in their most familiar forms, both capitalism and socialism feature an undemocratic concentration of control over the means of living in the hands of the few. Democracy is essential for either to work effectively for the benefit of all.

Plutocrats generally favor capitalism, because in the extreme form we now experience, it supports virtually unlimited concentrations of wealth and power. Its practitioners are also drawn by capitalism’s ideological claim that unregulated markets will assure that the presumed benefits of a growing economy will be shared by everyone, and so the rich need not bear any personal responsibility beyond maximizing their personal financial gain.

The critical economic and political question for humanity is not whether our means of living will be controlled by corporations or government, but whether control will be concentrated for the benefit of the few or dispersed, with benefits shared by everyone.

Support for the needed economic transition can come from many places. Just as people are not necessarily racist because they are White or misogynistic because they are male, people do not necessarily become plutocrats just because they are rich. Many wealthy people work actively for economic and political democracy and support radical wealth redistribution, including through support of progressive taxation and significant taxing of inherited wealth.

The political and economic democracy we seek cannot be easily characterized as either capitalist or socialist. It is a system of substantially self-reliant local economies composed of locally owned enterprises and community-secured safety nets with responsibilities shared by families, charities, and governments. Such a system facilitates self-organizing to create healthy, happy, and productive communities.

In our complex and interconnected world, this system will require national and global institutions responsive to the people’s will and well-being to support cooperation and sharing among communities, but the real power will be dispersed locally. There would be ample room for competition among local communities to be the most beautiful, healthy, democratic, creative, and generous. There is no place for colonizing the resources of others or for predatory corporations.
These communities will most likely feature cooperative and family ownership of businesses. They will also recognize the rights of nature and their shared responsibility to care for the commons and to share its gifts.

The rules of plutocracy evolved over thousands of years. We have far less time to come up with suitable rules for democratic alternatives. That search must quickly become a centerpiece of public discussion.

There’s a Vanishing Resource We’re Not Talking About by Jessica Stites

Within 100 years, many of our cities will become uninhabitable, submerged under oceans or deadly hot. Food will be more difficult to grow. Storms will become more violent. The gentle planet we’ve known will be no more.

That’s hard to wrap one’s brain around. Some turn to faith, others despair.

I turned to anthropology, and found that the prevailing thinking on humans’ knack for survival has changed since my intro class. Scientists are no longer as impressed with individual human cleverness. Many animals, from macaws to chimpanzees to otters, are adept at innovative problem-solving.

Instead, a growing school of evolutionary biology believes that our ability to adapt to climates, from the Arctic to the Sahara, is because of our cultural diversity and ability to pass on detailed knowledge for generations. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich observes:

Surviving in this immense diversity of habitats depended not on specific genetic adaptations, but on large bodies of culturally transmitted know-how, abilities and skills that no single individual could figure out in his or her lifetime (e.g., blowguns, animal tracking). Many an explorer has perished in supposedly 'harsh' environments in which local adolescents would have easily survived.

We are a young, genetically homogenous species. Where others rely on genetic diversity for survival, we rely on a staggering diversity of cultures.

Or we used to. “Capitalist economies that stress on nonstop economic growth … are paving the way to the homogenization of cultures and landscapes,” warned 13 biologists and researchers in the journal Conservation & Society in 2009. Land grabs, efforts to “modernize” indigenous ways of life, consumerism and urbanization, among other forces, are driving a cultural die-off. One rough proxy is language: Of Earth’s roughly 7,000 languages, one becomes extinct every other week. 

That loss threatens not only “the capacity of human systems to adapt to change,” the Conservation & Society writers warn, but ecosystems as a whole. Numerous studies have linked linguistic diversity and biodiversity. Lose local languages, and you lose local species.

That is likely because the vanishing languages and cultures belong to indigenous peoples. “Land is revered and respected … in virtually every indigenous cosmovision,” says ecosystem and sustainability researcher Víctor M. Toledo. 

“What ends up happening when we lose linguistic diversity is we lose a bunch of small groups with traditional economics,” explains Professor Larry J. Gorenflo of Penn State University, who has studied the link between linguistic and biological diversity. “Indigenous languages tend to be replaced by those associated with a modern industrial economy accompanied by other changes such as the introduction of chain saws. In terms of biodiversity conservation, all bets are off.”

Indigenous peoples have served as the Earth’s staunchest environmental stewards in the face of 500 years of violent colonialist encroachment. According to Global Witness, more than 50 indigenous defenders of the land were murdered in 2017 alone. The 22 percent of the world’s land indigenous people occupy holds 80 percent of its species, as well as swaths of forest that represent a last bulwark against climate change. 

To me, this suggests that rather than trust in individual cleverness to mitigate climate change, we might draw on our remaining cultural diversity and turn to indigenous peoples for leadership.

I’m not alone. The U.N. and even the World Bank have recommended centering indigenous peoples in climate planning. A 2016 report by the Obama administration’s USDA suggested that the U.S. look to its 562 tribal nations: “It is detrimental for the federal government to exclude tribes in climate-change initiatives because long histories of adaptation in response to colonialism, genocide, forced relocation and climatic events have provided tribes with extensive experience with resistance, resilience and adaptation.”

What’s more, indigenous people can offer “an ethical framework for adaptation plans.” The report quotes Terry Williams, of the Tulalip Tribes Natural Resources Department: “We were taught that we’re the caretakers of the land. I tell our people that, if nothing else, we can set the example.”

Or, as new U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), of the Laguna Pueblo, puts it: “Our cultural practices take into deep regard the harmony that must exist between people and the land—if we are to sustain ourselves and create such a path for future generations.”

JESSICA STITES

Jessica Stites is In These Times' Deputy Editor. Before joining ITT, she worked at Ms. magazine and George Lakoff's Rockridge Institute. Her writing has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ms., Bitch, Jezebel, The Advocate and AlterNet.