Category / socialism

by jameslloyddavis

Socialism, American Style – The Book

If you’ve been reading here, you know that I have been writing a series of essays, titled Socialism, American Style, essays that are more of a voyage of discovery for me,,, an attempt to find a uniquely American approach to the concept of socialism. Although I’ve put the essays temporarily on hold, I have continued to work on the concept.   last week, while doing some research and writing down my thoughts, I had an idea, something a little different, which may or may not be one of those big ideas you just happen to stumble upon like someone groping their way through the dark… a flash of light, maybe, a serendipitous thought that starts with a question…

In the United States, certain trends in the political realm have resulted in what can only be called a conservative bias in both political parties, marked by corporatism and autocratic tendencies, the result of influences that are subtle, even invisible to the electorate, but which lead to an untenable condition of economic and social inequality that feels as though we are going backwards, not forward into any recognizable semblance of a better world.

For instance, a firm cultural bias toward specialists, so-called “experts” has become increasingly evident in government. Technocrats, we call them, or we did at one time. Today? Their role is less visible, but their influence?  More profound.

Both parties love them and employ them regularly in roles that often usurp those which our Constitution reserves to our elected representatives. They save legislators time and effort by providing their “expertise” in writing legislation, so our Senators and Representatives don’t have to do the work of research and needn’t try to understand the complexities involved. Unfortunately, these technocrats also bring their predilection for satisfying their industry’s own special interests and their corresponding professional biases to the task as well.   The common welfare of the American people will always and thus be of little… if any… consideration for cause in the drafting of legislation or the writing of policies affecting the corresponding commercial interests of their unelected authors.

“What’s good for Goldman Sachs is good for America.”

Accordingly, we have people from the insurance industry composing legislation like the Affordable Care Act… lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry composing the language and provisions for Medicare Part D… or “experts” from the alumni of Goldman Sachs and other financial organization recruited by the Executive branch to write the policies by which the same institutions will be regulated.

fox hen house.aspx

“Morning, ladies. My name is A. Faufox McChicken and I’m announcing my candidacy for Congress.”

Fox in the henhouse metaphors, if you will, are entirely relevant here.

So… if both political parties are thus corrupted, determined to serve the interests of commerce and corporations over the common welfare of the average American… and we, the people, are limited by tradition to only two relevant political parties… both of which are dominated by wealthy families, corporate donors, lobbyists and special interests, what is the answer to our dilemma?

Third parties have seldom been successful in modern times and efforts to reform both parties from within only seem to further advance the creep of autocracy in the inevitable reactionary blow-back. And the public is further frustrated in attempts at reform by very subtle campaigns of genetically modified “populist” movements influenced from abroad and from within… and, again, by profoundly powerful special interest groups with buckets of cash and opportunistic, amoral leadership. Witness the Tea Party.

So… here is the question I posed to myself last week:
If not a Third Party… what’s the answer?

Now? I think I have it… the answer. A new idea. A way forward where there seems… at least to me… to be none. A totally different approach and maybe even a unique solution. Now all I have to do is find a way to adequately communicate its construct. So… for now? I’m suspending the essays and working on what will probably be a project the size of a book that will attempt to offer a solution to our very present and frustrating political impasse.

Conventional-Steel-Fabrication-450x194Watch this space.

by jameslloyddavis

The Green New Deal in a readable format and a video…

For the purpose of clarity and for my own use in comprehending the content, I copied and pasted the text of the legislation for the Green New Deal (House Resolution 109) into an MSWord .doc file and reformatted the language in less daunting form so it can be read more easily (hopefully).  It contains the same language, but in a smoother context, one that I find renders it less intimidating so I could actually make sense of it.

I thought I would pass it on to you, so hopefully you’ll take the time to read it.  Granted, it’s not much in the headlines these days, given the feud and fuss over the de-fanged and blacked-out Mueller Report, which, it turns out, is quite an indictment of Trump as it is… but rest assured, the people who rolled out the Green New Deal are not about to give up and neither should you.  The problems it points out are not going to vanish and the solutions it presents are bold, viable, and absolutely necessary for the future of us all.

I’ve included links to both the original text and my own format below:

If you like to read legislative text in the raw, (some people are like that) go here:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text

But if you are legislatively challenged and want to read the MSWord outline I created for easier reading, go here:
Click here to read the Green New Deal in plain English format

Feel free to copy it and pass it on to anyone who might benefit.  The more people who are aware of what it actually says, the less chance there is that Koch and Exxon funded think-tanks can fool us by trying to put out disinformation.

I’ll be writing more about it in the future, but I thought that this profoundly interesting and even engaging introduction to the content of the program might be worth a look:

by jameslloyddavis

Nancy Pelosi vs Franklin Delano Roosevelt… will the real Democratic Party please stand up !!

In a 60 Minute interview that aired on Sunday last, CNBC reports that Nancy Pelosi said, “I do reject socialism.  If people have that view, that’s their view.  That is not the view of the Democratic Party.”  All due respect to Nancy Pelosi, de facto leader of the party in minority that ascended once again to control at least the House, sailing into control on the winds that filled their sails… winds of change that emanated from progressive Democrats and other activists within her party determined to reverse the trends of economic inequality, corporate control of politics, and right wing hegemony, including candidates who were willing to openly identify themselves as democratic socialists… but, perhaps she’s not listening, or even knows the electorate as well as she believes.

It’s obvious, however, that the Democratic Party, the same Party that gave America its longest running, wildly popular President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, is no longer the party of the New Deal, nor the kind of party that could so embrace the common good of all its members, giving Americans a legislative agenda that offered us Social Security, the WPA, the FDIC, the National Labor Relations Board, the Glass–Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Tennessee Valley Authority and countless other bold social programs designed to lift our nation up from the economic collapse in 1929 that was caused by the unparalleled greed of irresponsible bankers, financiers, and monopolistic industrialists.  These programs were vilified by conservatives in their day as a dangerously anti-American socialist agenda which, even in the current conservative climate, are today accepted as inevitable, necessary, beneficial programs that are every bit as American as Mom, the flag, and butter crusted, cinnamon infused, and sugar topped, sweet apple pie.

Nonetheless, and for years now, particularly during the past four decades… since conservatives in both parties canonized Ronald Reagan and began to sing his profane little tune of corporate welfare and the mythology of trickle down economics, Democrats have moved increasingly to the right with their economic policies, suffering a major tectonic shift, claiming territory once held entirely by Republicans, during the Clinton administration.

To be sure, these neo-liberal Democrats retained those “radical” ideas that were inviolable in the minds of most Democrats, like equal “opportunity”, abortion rights, women’s rights, and other fashionable causes célèbres that identified them with a liberal brand, but only in so far as they did not compete with a conservative economic agenda that favored the heavy corporate donors who were so enamored of Clintonian Democracy.  These neo-liberal disciples of the apostle Billary now control the DNC and operate the strings of the corporate media like puppet masters in a Punch and Judy drama in which they assume the role of “Not Trump” as opposed to, say, the Party of Economic and Social Reform. So… where does that leave the progressives in the Party?

What does that bode for the future, when the leadership of the Democratic Party has no desire to aid or entertain the “green dream” of so many of its younger membership, now clearly the more active, not really interested in neo-liberal politicians who pat them on the head and tell them to get in line and accept the same sort of incrementalism and corporatist theories that have made paupers of the majority of working Americans.  Big labor pays Nancy’s freight while corporations spend millions in an effort to make unions illegal.  And our college-educated minority?  They are, too many of them, in debt and in servitude to their student loans for life… like most Americans who try to get ahead… saddled with crippling debt and no clear path to the elusive, if not mythic, American Dream.  Our aged are in danger of being priced out of medical care, in spite of Medicare… and they will be for the unforeseeable, and for some, very short future… for as long as pharmaceutical companies act like mafiosi with medications that should be as inexpensive as clean water, which is less expensive and much less clean than it was forty years ago… and in some areas?  Toxic.  Does any of this sound familiar?

But why talk about distressed populations?  They were abandoned long ago for lack of political clout, worthy now of little more than lip service.  Nancy Pelosi says in effect, if not with the words, “Let them eat cake.”  Does she imagine herself so correct that she no longer listens?  It’s time for the Party of FDR to go back to its roots.  Let’s hope that it’s not too late.  If the Democratic Party of today seems impotent now in relation to Trump?  Where will they stand next year when they demand more loyalty of the electorate than they’ve ever given us in return.

by jameslloyddavis

Under the sun… nothing new, nothing new, only bigger. The coming storm and the Green New Deal…

“I, for one, do not believe that the era of democracy in human affairs can or will be snuffed out in our lifetime. I, for one, do not believe that the world will revert to a modern form of ancient slavery, or to controls vested in modern feudalism, or modern emperors, or modern dictators, or modern oligarchs in these days. The very people under iron heels will themselves rebel.”

These words spoken on November 11, 1940, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a speech commemorating Armistice Day, the annual celebration of the end of first World War were prophetic. Spoken a full year and some weeks before it was even understood that there would be another World War. In a time of peaceful sublimity for America, if not for the world, the words were composed at the height of New Deal successes following the Great Depression.
Then, more so than today, the American people still understood the tyranny inherent in the marriage of unbridled wealth and political power, the great house of cards that collapsed in 1929, when the exclusive, privileged world of the financiers, bankers and other wealthy financial predators collapsed under the weight of its own greed, taking most of the country and much of the western world along with it into devastating economic collapse.
The New Deal, a huge, multi-faceted government program that served the common welfare of all Americans, an ambitious program that was vilified in its inception as a socialist dream was an unqualified success, finally brought order into the economic chaos, rebuilding the nation, restructuring our priorities.
But today and once again, our economy is at the perpetual edge of collapse as another and more powerful breed of financial predators than those who caused the 1929 collapse threatens not only our financial system, but the very air we breathe, the water we drink, as they seek to establish a more crippling autocracy than the common welfare of our nation could ever sustain and must not continue to tolerate.  We do so at our own peril.
This is the reason and the necessity for the Green New Deal. And like the old New Deal, this Green New Deal has been labeled a socialist dream. but it may well be the last chance for a peaceful political movement to take us back to a proper and sensible path before inevitable environmental and economic collapse necessitates the kind of violence that will always occur when the rich become too rich at the cost of our common welfare as a nation… the most influential nation in the world… such that collapse here at home will have profound echoing effects worldwide.
The Green New Deal.  If you don’t know what it is… now is the time to find out. Ask me. I’ll tell you how. But don’t wait too long, lulled by the silence and the peaceful sublimities that so often precede the most violent of devastating storms.

by jameslloyddavis

What is this Green New Deal exactly? And why are Republicans….

…..and neo-liberal Democrats so dead set against it they are ready to dismiss it quite out of hand?

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) were joined by Democratic lawmakers from both the House and Senate on February 7, 2019, to introduce Green New Deal legislation. (Photo- Stefani Reynolds)

Chances are you’ve heard people both praise and vilify House Resolution 109, otherwise known as the Green New Deal, but it’s just as likely that you haven’t really been given a sense of what it is and what it contains.  A bold, expansive document, it is a comprehensive listing of priorities for the Congress and Senate to consider as it tackles issues that many Americans perceive as necessary for the survival of our basic institutions and the future well-being of all Americans… with the emphasis on the word “ALL…”   The document specifically outlines a series of problems that affect every American and provides solutions that benefit our collective interests, addressing not only the devastating and observable effects of man-made global warming, but advancing the perspective that the radical changes we must use to correct them should incorporate methods that benefit every American, such that no single group or segment of our population is forced to bear a disproportionate share of the necessary cost.  Indeed, if all the proposals are implemented, the plan could very well rebuild our infrastructure, strengthen our nation, and provide a more egalitarian economy simultaneously.

I’ll be writing about the Green New Deal in several posts over the coming weeks, but for now, I would like to give you a link to the House Resolution, so you can read it yourself.  Click on the link below for a .pdf file:

HR109 – The Green New Deal

The Resolution is presented in the usual legal format.  I’ve produced a file that presents the same text in a more readable outline form and will post it here soon.

Watch this space !! 

If you do?  You could become an expert on the Green New Deal… able to leap tall misperceptions with a single declarative sentence… able to deflect the speeding bullet-points of right-wing detractors… and you could become the envy of all your progressive friends, while standing for truth, justice, and the American way.

If I could be given a super power, that’s what I’d ask for.

by jameslloyddavis

On Socialism in America…

I wrote this about two years ago and posted it on Facebook, but I think it’s time to dust it off and toss it out there once again along with a couple of others, posts that I will resurrect over the next couple of weeks because there should be a conversation about this contentious subject before the shouting match buries it yet again…

This is long, but bear with me, please. It’s a big subject and cannot be treated with sound bites or slogans, but speaks to the very core of our problems. This is something to which I’ve given a lot of thought, more so lately than ever before…. There is once more a debate, but the subject is often too vague and the voices on each side of it are, even among the unified participants within each side, confused and often angry. This is not a new debate in this country… right vs left, conservative vs liberal, but the debate too often rages around the effects rather than the cause of our differences. Enter Bernie Sanders and the surprisingly popular, if not populist appeal of his socialist ideas…
Perhaps the debate is not about some vague idea of “Conservatism” vs “Liberalism” after all, but speaks instead to something more basic… the economic system under which we live. Perhaps the present, seemingly insoluble crisis is about the failure of an economic system that is, no matter how elegantly you describe it or bend it to heel in academic terms, based upon the base and unsympathetic nature of its driving force, greed… or avarice, if you prefer. 
Perhaps, once again, as it has in the past when there is a vast, even incomprehensible inequity between the rich and the poor, the debate comes down to capitalism vs socialism.
“But hasn’t that been tried and didn’t it fail?”
“It’s been tried, Virginia, but never properly achieved. Yes, there are many nations in the world who live under systems of social democracy, but the Soviet experiment that you’re thinking of was not socialism at all, but state controlled capitalism. Social democracies, however, such as we see in the Scandinavian countries are thriving and they are only weak imitations of socialism.”
“But isn’t socialism undemocratic,, even stifling, a kind of dictatorship?”
“Absolutely not. In fact, socialism is an expansion of democracy to the point that every aspect of our lives, including in the workplace where most of us spend most of our waking moments is democratically controlled.”
“Sounds too good to be true. And if it’s so great, why aren’t more people talking about it”
“Simple answer? Socialism is inimical to capitalists and capitalists own almost everything. After World War Two, our government suppressed socialism, even to the point that espousing the idea was criminalized. People lost their jobs, in universities especially, to the point that, even now, the subject is virtually taboo on campuses in America.. Even the word, socialism, was stigmatized… a product of the Cold War.”
Socialism is possible and probable within the lifetime of any generation that loses the fear of cultural, racial, religious, and gender diversity.  With our current generation, we are very nearly there. When people truly believe in both equality and justice, when equality is inclusive of all people, when the one criteria to fit the definition of “human” is only and merely their humanity alone, we can have a fair and equitable social and political system, one that is as purely democratic as humanly possible under a socialist system.
Is it possible today?
You tell me…
Do you make justice and equality possible?
Or is there some group that you despise?
Can you answer that honestly?
Probably not.We who call ourselves progressive often cannot converse, much less abide in the same room as those who identify themselves as conservative. Can you look me in the eye and say that you feel equal to someone wearing a red ball cap that bears the statement “Make America Great Again”? Or do you feel that such people are flawed, sensing that your own beliefs and ideals are somehow superior? If you want to live in a world where justice and equality are the backbone of civilization, do you mean to make it possible by including or eliminating those with whom you disagree? And just how do you plan to eliminate them from your just and equitable world?  Do you see the hypocrisy? Do you sense the self-deceit, the conflict and the inevitable injustice within the perspective of “Us” and “Them”?
Justice and equality will thrive when we begin to put aside our prejudices.
Impossible?
“Nothing is impossible, Virginia.”
“How can you possibly make it happen? Where do you even begin?”
“It starts with you.”