SPOT ON SIR. Mr. Carville was a huge part of the machinery that has taken us to where we are currently. American's, by a huge majority, want a change. And not just another dose of Neo-Liberalism. It's time for a major shift in leadership. A revitalization of the Democratic party with bold young leadership. I too have been scolded by people when I have been critical of the party. But I have noticed more and more people are beginning to see and understand we need a drastic change in the party. I am 79 years old and used to be a lobbyist for a major union and currently a 60 year dues paying member. I have watched the Democrats do this dance since Reagan and Clinton and frankly am sick of this shit. Mr. Carville needs to stay in Louisiana with his right wing wife Mary Matalin.
Good piece....just a reminder of Carville's wise words last February:
'...there’s nothing Democrats can legitimately do to stop it, even if we wanted to.
With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead.'
It all begs the question...why is this guy still being listened to as some important strategist?
The mental image, spot on, pummeling the vending machine for withholding the reeces cup while simultaneously choking it (vending machine) with more quarters too rich! They're (dems) not incentivised to change the system. THey are incentivised to rail against it while trying to convince us that railing against the system is the same as doing anything about the system they benefit from. Omg finally said something about subsidizing the extraction apparatus so by sussiding we can continue to survive while being blamed for utilizing that subsidy and thriving remains further and further out of reach. I don't have a family just me and the cat who I might add is by this point the smartest cat in the hood. The cat would make a better candidate.
Where in this etch-a-sketch is the Right Use of Will?
Where/what is WILL at all?
Adjustments, adaptations, evolutions do not start themselves. These actions require sensory and psychic anchoring inside the one reality all biota live within. Humans are so megalomaniacally separatist from every needed reality they live off of, they could not now define, let alone see themselves inside of - a water cycle, a nutrition cycle, a waste and toxin cycle, a life or death cycle.
Corbin, you are all over this gaslighting, this Newspeak rerun created by the Grand Inquisitors of extinction. I am so fortunate. I live and work in the Wild, daily. Weather and climate and birds and ants and clouds and chlorophyll and water and dirt counsel me. 85 percent of 'murkans live 95 percent of their daily lives on concrete, plastic, metal, and the precious wood raped from the dwindling forests of our planet. They breathe toxins, eat toxins, clothe themselves in toxins, wash themselves in toxins. We are a poisoned, sick society, enmeshed in the mind virus of wetiko, the embodiment of 'speciesism,' where only humans can exist, all else is just abstraction.
It takes WILL to change any situation. Synchronicity - entropy -chaos - awareness - reaction - causal driver - action - response - effect(s) - consequence(s). Where in this knee-jerk process is willful agency?
Awareness of situation, description, inventory, analysis, perception of context, relationships of contexts to the existing condition(s) of the whole of reality are needed to even strip away the illusions/addictions/enslavements that define this cosplay of deceits we flounder in by the minute.
Will comes from sensory awareness of the potential for death and the realization that death is unwanted by a healthy brain/mind. Will creates the impetus to avoid death, to avoid the dominance of the Shadow Self, to attack the wetiko cancer inside the mind/soul and Seek Out kindred spirits, what we might call the need for unity.
WILL, Corbin. It rarely comes from leadership, because leadership is the end result of the delusion of helplessness. I do not agree with you about Booker, but Carville is just TFG lite, Schumer with new readers, the Ivy League without all those vines stuck on bricks. Before we can build anything of value, we must de-construct and then re-use/recycle the Fortress of Big Brother. Our beloved Earth has no more raw meat to give.
It is imperative that We the Citizenry de-construct ourselves FIRST, do 90 percent more with 90 percent less. Alas, we are in such wretched condition personally and societally that the losses will ultimately outnumber the gains.
The wetiko Leadership now unhinged before us is pure chaos, no reason, no thought, no perception, no apperception, no intuition, no harmony, only stochastic destruction. Until this absolute Threat hits the guts of most citizens, and creates REAL pain and the threat of Death, the Carville's of the nation/world will parse and pander and spar with windmills as the Titanic sinks.
1 - Eschew all MSM/social media/financial propaganda for 60 days. Re-learn how to reason with both logic and the senses. 2 - observe with dispassion every cause/effect/consequence process in your 'critical' life - nutrition, shelter, mental health, inspiration, security, etc., and inventory the pluses and minuses. 3 - Reckon with yourself about your values, and value system, and sort the wheat germ from the chafe. 4 - Pare down your inventory to the bare essentials. 5 - Re-discover Every contextual relationship you have with those essentials, and value each one on a scale of most-to-least necessary. 6 - Pick one as critical and overhaul it for one week, then pick the second one on the second week and parse it, and then work number one into number two, and so on, for 8 weeks. 7 - During this time, eat extremely carefully and nutritionally, walk at least 10k steps in some area with trees, shrubs, etc., pare down all drug use to the bare minimum, drink very pure water 2 qts/day minimum. 8 - Count your blessings and name them, one by one, daily. 9 - Look around you and discover how many friendly and healthy beings are there to love and be loved by you. 10 - Will yourself to cleanse and overhaul your relationship with all life, including your own, and KNOW that you are ONE MICRON distance from Death at any moment in time, so you had better Live and Love and Value each second. That is a start, the hard part comes later, when you have to move into the messy world of humanity and find value there.
Instead of wasting my time at a table with Trumpers who won't shut up and other smug relatives who listen quietly as they simply "want to get back to normal," I'll be spending the "holiday" in Bloomington, IN with my daughter. We're cooking up some sides and a dessert for an AA sponsored Thanksgiving for local homeless people. I'll be back in the fight next week. Happy Turkey Day, peeps.
"Carville and Booker are offering the appearance of change. Cosplay populism." No doubt about it. They (as well as Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, etc.) offer various solutions of liberal or social-democratic capitalism, and the New Deal was one of these solutions (grudgingly accepted by the "haves" class) to preserve the capitalist system, which is fundamentally unsustainable on a single planet with naturally limited resources and has already reached its limits. The "have nots" must and ultimately will demand something different from "fair" or benign capitalism for their sheer survival.
The answer to the author's rhetorical question "Will “We The People” be at the table?" is unquestionable 'NO' unless “We The People” become collective owners of the major means of production, which requires fundamental transformation of the current economic system or the capitalist mode of production. And, given the looming ecological crisis, “We The People” are gradually, but surely, walking to our own extinction, which has already started with the Global South. Rising global heat is now killing one person a minute around the world, which is more than 500,000 a year. We should not entertain any illusion that somebody is going to pay their "fair share". And even if they are forced to, they will have to extract this 'share' from somewhere, which will exacerbate the crisis.
The author's motto "Build, baby, build", even if for the common good, will require "Drill, baby, drill" in some form or another and will, ultimately, kill the baby. Therefore, any "traditional" New Deal of any color is, essentially, a suicide at the global scale. What is needed is not to build more, but to build different things – hospitals and schools instead of prisons and military bases, public transportation instead of aircraft carriers and submarines, no luxury consumption items even if they create employment, etc. We cannot expand as a nation and as a species, which means the existing mode of production (the capitalism) driven by competition and the profit motive must change. It can (theoretically, but very unlikely) change peacefully, by consensus or violently, but this is inevitable, and what comes next might remind apocalyptic movies unless our collective mind and science driven reason prevail.
Hi, Corbin. You've really nailed it (again)! When are you going to run for a significant office? And when will you organize to get all the various progressive groups to unite around your overarching message? So far, it looks like Michael Katz' efforts are all about creating some kind of fancy infrastructure, without any outreach to bring other groups into the effort.
You might remember him as a part of the “Tennessee Three.” He demanded action after a school shooting, was expelled for speaking out, and then re-elected with 94% of the vote. He’s also organized to beat two billion-dollar oil companies to protect Memphis’ water and consistently protected his community from corporate greed.
The incumbent in the district, Congressman Steve Cohen is the opposite — someone who may have started with good intentions but, after nearly 20 years in Washington, simply isn’t meeting the moment for the people he represents.
So Justin is challenging him. And we’re proud to back him.
Cohen isn’t taking it well. In a recent interview, he said — and this is a direct quote:
“He could’ve waited two years, he could’ve waited four years. He could’ve talked to me, he interned for me in high school, and he never talked to me about running for office. It was kinda like uh… uh…Pearl Harbor."
If that sounds insane to you, it’s because it genuinely is. Comparing a young leader running for office to a surprise attack that killed over 2,000 Americans … We've heard some wild stuff from pissed off incumbents, but that’s a new one!
The saddest part? His response isn’t that far off from the current state of the Democratic Party. There is a deeply ingrained culture where incumbents in Congress feel entitled to their seats — not to their constituents’ needs.
And telling Justin to “wait his turn” for another two, another four years? Classic. Members of Congress say that and then keep running again and again.
To them, a young person saying my community can’t wait anymore is an attack. But families in Memphis going years without real results? That’s apparently “normal.”
We’re here to remind people like Steve Cohen:
Your seat doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to your constituents. And if you want to avoid a primary (which is apparently your own personal Pearl Harbor), maybe start by just trying to be a better Congressman and being in touch with your community!
Remember the "reason" that Rep.Connelly was made ranking member of whatever committee rather than AOC? "It was his turn"! The man who had been there for many many years & was suffering from cancer - but it was his turn.
Honestly, that is the kind of reasoning far too many incumbents are suffering from. And the Democratic Party encourages that reasoning.
Great question. To me, pragmatism means doing what is necessary to solve the problem. In 1932, FDR's massive intervention was considered radical, but it was the only pragmatic solution to the Great Depression. Today, we face a similar crisis of capacity and trust. Subsidies and tax credits are like bringing a garden hose to a forest fire. That's not pragmatic. It's insufficient. Building public capacity in housing, healthcare, and energy is the only pragmatic way to lower costs and save democracy.
Yes, it was a very pragmatic and rather liberal by necessity solution to save the system. And it worked. Other, more radical, but less liberal solutions were proposed, but rejected because of a danger of popular revolt. At the present time, such liberal solutions are not necessary to preserve the system that have exhausted itself and is unsustainable in a not so long run. That's why we have the current President.
While it’s true that government famously can’t fix itself – hence the widespread resignation “Easier said than done” – there’s a book that explains that regaining our republic is “Easier than we assume, it’s been done many times, here are step-by-step directions.”
It’s titled: THE MECHANICS OF CHANGING THE WORLD — POLITICAL ARCHITECTURE TO ROLL BACK STATE AND CORPORATE POWER.
An Aussie named John Macgregor wrote it. He distills 1300+ sources and 8 years of work into 400 pages. He takes us all the way back to prehistoric hunter gatherers’ egalitarian self-governance. Then we discover the first documented democracy – the 65 years of Athens’ Golden Age. After a mere 2400-year interlude of empires, we witness the second flowering of democracy in Philadelphia, at a closed-door meeting during May and June of 1787, which produced a constitution (and a Bill of Rights!) adopted a year later.
Despite the flaws in that document, we ended slavery, reduced oppression of first nations, and extricated ourselves from wars that the majority didn’t want. Women got the vote, Jim Crow was made illegal, hungry children were fed.
It was impossible, however, for the Founding Parents to foresee the 4 modern obstacles to a well-functioning constitutional republic. Macgregor explains how we can regain genuine representative government that currently suffers these maladies:
• Corporate money runs DC and state capitals
• Centralized media doesn’t tolerate dissent
• Americans have no clue about the transformative effect of Citizens Assemblies (which already work well for many nations, such as the Swiss), and we never learned why the parliamentary system is more balanced than our current presidential system
• Voters in democracies around the world are discouraged because our feeble attempts to influence our electeds (demonstrations, letters to the editor, and voting) hardly change anything
Here are 4 ways to get more info, from short to the whole enchilada:
1. Mike Muntisov provides an excellent overview of Changing the World here:
Like so many of us, John Macgregor isn't in this for the money; he set the price of the book (available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon) as low as possible, thus earning the magnificent return of 28¢ per hard copy that's sold (probably about the same for the digital version).
To sum up, we CAN regain our constitutional democracy. If you can find time now, be an early bird in this still-unknown paradigm change. Or, if you’re spread too thin, wait until we have a modern Boston Tea Party that galvanizes the nation and jump on the band wagon then.
Lest we forget, I remind everyone of this "little" article from the first week of Harris' campaign. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/29/us/politics/donors-harris-tax-ultrawealthy.html. The "donor" class is a problem. And, as the Atlantic calls it, the "Epstein" class of Larry Summers et al has gotten obscenely wealthy by providing the "intellectual" cover for the donor class. "Any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites." – Larry Summers. No, Larry, this honest Democrat is an MMTer and knows that we can all have nice things. All we need are the votes.
You’re right that they don’t know what to do. The problem is no one gets the source of democracy’s failure because no one will look into our schools. People like Booker and Carville are as innocently ignorant about the corruption in our education system as everyone else reading this now and thinking that’s crazy. It can’t be.
It’s been explained at WhiteChalkCrime.com and EndTeacherAbuse.org since 2002. People have ignored us. We’re just powerless teachers everyone thinks. Wait until you find out what we know!
Don’t be so hard on our ignorant leaders when ALL haven’t connected the dots to how democracy imploded. Instead learn about it. Read the memoir of my teaching days, A Graver Danger, and everything will make sense.
I'll happily join the chorus of complimenters and compliments. As cogent and well written piece on our current political and underlying economic status as I’ve recently read.
The question left unanswered, but hopefully not for long, is what, how and when are the solutions going to be suggested. And there’s the problem because history moves forward and what appears today as the status quo may be something quite different in the New Year. The elephant in the room is the quiet economic changes that suggest a bipolar world , both militarily and economically, are in the offing.
Regardless of today’s headlines to the contrary, the Ukraine issue has not yet been addressed fully nor solved and a war there has a far more significant chance of continuing and evolving into something bigger. And if it does, as the neocons here and in Europe hope, then the political landscape shifts. As does the economic landscape which is being shaped by a looming sovereign debt crisis and a growing Chinese presence throughout the third world economies.
I look forward to your perspective on all these issue.
SPOT ON SIR. Mr. Carville was a huge part of the machinery that has taken us to where we are currently. American's, by a huge majority, want a change. And not just another dose of Neo-Liberalism. It's time for a major shift in leadership. A revitalization of the Democratic party with bold young leadership. I too have been scolded by people when I have been critical of the party. But I have noticed more and more people are beginning to see and understand we need a drastic change in the party. I am 79 years old and used to be a lobbyist for a major union and currently a 60 year dues paying member. I have watched the Democrats do this dance since Reagan and Clinton and frankly am sick of this shit. Mr. Carville needs to stay in Louisiana with his right wing wife Mary Matalin.
Preach it, my brother! Your essays, not the drivel from Carville, Klein et al, should fill the airwaves and grace the op ed pages of our country!
Good piece....just a reminder of Carville's wise words last February:
'...there’s nothing Democrats can legitimately do to stop it, even if we wanted to.
With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead.'
It all begs the question...why is this guy still being listened to as some important strategist?
The mental image, spot on, pummeling the vending machine for withholding the reeces cup while simultaneously choking it (vending machine) with more quarters too rich! They're (dems) not incentivised to change the system. THey are incentivised to rail against it while trying to convince us that railing against the system is the same as doing anything about the system they benefit from. Omg finally said something about subsidizing the extraction apparatus so by sussiding we can continue to survive while being blamed for utilizing that subsidy and thriving remains further and further out of reach. I don't have a family just me and the cat who I might add is by this point the smartest cat in the hood. The cat would make a better candidate.
Faith, hope, anger, rage, belief, memes, memes, memes, cosplay, cosplay, cosplay.
Where in this etch-a-sketch is the Right Use of Will?
Where/what is WILL at all?
Adjustments, adaptations, evolutions do not start themselves. These actions require sensory and psychic anchoring inside the one reality all biota live within. Humans are so megalomaniacally separatist from every needed reality they live off of, they could not now define, let alone see themselves inside of - a water cycle, a nutrition cycle, a waste and toxin cycle, a life or death cycle.
Corbin, you are all over this gaslighting, this Newspeak rerun created by the Grand Inquisitors of extinction. I am so fortunate. I live and work in the Wild, daily. Weather and climate and birds and ants and clouds and chlorophyll and water and dirt counsel me. 85 percent of 'murkans live 95 percent of their daily lives on concrete, plastic, metal, and the precious wood raped from the dwindling forests of our planet. They breathe toxins, eat toxins, clothe themselves in toxins, wash themselves in toxins. We are a poisoned, sick society, enmeshed in the mind virus of wetiko, the embodiment of 'speciesism,' where only humans can exist, all else is just abstraction.
It takes WILL to change any situation. Synchronicity - entropy -chaos - awareness - reaction - causal driver - action - response - effect(s) - consequence(s). Where in this knee-jerk process is willful agency?
Awareness of situation, description, inventory, analysis, perception of context, relationships of contexts to the existing condition(s) of the whole of reality are needed to even strip away the illusions/addictions/enslavements that define this cosplay of deceits we flounder in by the minute.
Will comes from sensory awareness of the potential for death and the realization that death is unwanted by a healthy brain/mind. Will creates the impetus to avoid death, to avoid the dominance of the Shadow Self, to attack the wetiko cancer inside the mind/soul and Seek Out kindred spirits, what we might call the need for unity.
WILL, Corbin. It rarely comes from leadership, because leadership is the end result of the delusion of helplessness. I do not agree with you about Booker, but Carville is just TFG lite, Schumer with new readers, the Ivy League without all those vines stuck on bricks. Before we can build anything of value, we must de-construct and then re-use/recycle the Fortress of Big Brother. Our beloved Earth has no more raw meat to give.
It is imperative that We the Citizenry de-construct ourselves FIRST, do 90 percent more with 90 percent less. Alas, we are in such wretched condition personally and societally that the losses will ultimately outnumber the gains.
The wetiko Leadership now unhinged before us is pure chaos, no reason, no thought, no perception, no apperception, no intuition, no harmony, only stochastic destruction. Until this absolute Threat hits the guts of most citizens, and creates REAL pain and the threat of Death, the Carville's of the nation/world will parse and pander and spar with windmills as the Titanic sinks.
That was fantastic but respectfully speaking, what do you suggest?
1 - Eschew all MSM/social media/financial propaganda for 60 days. Re-learn how to reason with both logic and the senses. 2 - observe with dispassion every cause/effect/consequence process in your 'critical' life - nutrition, shelter, mental health, inspiration, security, etc., and inventory the pluses and minuses. 3 - Reckon with yourself about your values, and value system, and sort the wheat germ from the chafe. 4 - Pare down your inventory to the bare essentials. 5 - Re-discover Every contextual relationship you have with those essentials, and value each one on a scale of most-to-least necessary. 6 - Pick one as critical and overhaul it for one week, then pick the second one on the second week and parse it, and then work number one into number two, and so on, for 8 weeks. 7 - During this time, eat extremely carefully and nutritionally, walk at least 10k steps in some area with trees, shrubs, etc., pare down all drug use to the bare minimum, drink very pure water 2 qts/day minimum. 8 - Count your blessings and name them, one by one, daily. 9 - Look around you and discover how many friendly and healthy beings are there to love and be loved by you. 10 - Will yourself to cleanse and overhaul your relationship with all life, including your own, and KNOW that you are ONE MICRON distance from Death at any moment in time, so you had better Live and Love and Value each second. That is a start, the hard part comes later, when you have to move into the messy world of humanity and find value there.
Excellent. Thank you.
Happy Thanksgiving and whatever that means when you live next door to indigenous folks.
Have to admit your essay made me smile and I will read your others! Thank you! 💙🙏🏼🇺🇸🙏🏼💙
Instead of wasting my time at a table with Trumpers who won't shut up and other smug relatives who listen quietly as they simply "want to get back to normal," I'll be spending the "holiday" in Bloomington, IN with my daughter. We're cooking up some sides and a dessert for an AA sponsored Thanksgiving for local homeless people. I'll be back in the fight next week. Happy Turkey Day, peeps.
"Carville and Booker are offering the appearance of change. Cosplay populism." No doubt about it. They (as well as Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, etc.) offer various solutions of liberal or social-democratic capitalism, and the New Deal was one of these solutions (grudgingly accepted by the "haves" class) to preserve the capitalist system, which is fundamentally unsustainable on a single planet with naturally limited resources and has already reached its limits. The "have nots" must and ultimately will demand something different from "fair" or benign capitalism for their sheer survival.
The answer to the author's rhetorical question "Will “We The People” be at the table?" is unquestionable 'NO' unless “We The People” become collective owners of the major means of production, which requires fundamental transformation of the current economic system or the capitalist mode of production. And, given the looming ecological crisis, “We The People” are gradually, but surely, walking to our own extinction, which has already started with the Global South. Rising global heat is now killing one person a minute around the world, which is more than 500,000 a year. We should not entertain any illusion that somebody is going to pay their "fair share". And even if they are forced to, they will have to extract this 'share' from somewhere, which will exacerbate the crisis.
The author's motto "Build, baby, build", even if for the common good, will require "Drill, baby, drill" in some form or another and will, ultimately, kill the baby. Therefore, any "traditional" New Deal of any color is, essentially, a suicide at the global scale. What is needed is not to build more, but to build different things – hospitals and schools instead of prisons and military bases, public transportation instead of aircraft carriers and submarines, no luxury consumption items even if they create employment, etc. We cannot expand as a nation and as a species, which means the existing mode of production (the capitalism) driven by competition and the profit motive must change. It can (theoretically, but very unlikely) change peacefully, by consensus or violently, but this is inevitable, and what comes next might remind apocalyptic movies unless our collective mind and science driven reason prevail.
Hi, Corbin. You've really nailed it (again)! When are you going to run for a significant office? And when will you organize to get all the various progressive groups to unite around your overarching message? So far, it looks like Michael Katz' efforts are all about creating some kind of fancy infrastructure, without any outreach to bring other groups into the effort.
And yes, no T-day w/right wing family.
Column from LEADERS WE DESERVE:
You might remember him as a part of the “Tennessee Three.” He demanded action after a school shooting, was expelled for speaking out, and then re-elected with 94% of the vote. He’s also organized to beat two billion-dollar oil companies to protect Memphis’ water and consistently protected his community from corporate greed.
The incumbent in the district, Congressman Steve Cohen is the opposite — someone who may have started with good intentions but, after nearly 20 years in Washington, simply isn’t meeting the moment for the people he represents.
So Justin is challenging him. And we’re proud to back him.
Cohen isn’t taking it well. In a recent interview, he said — and this is a direct quote:
“He could’ve waited two years, he could’ve waited four years. He could’ve talked to me, he interned for me in high school, and he never talked to me about running for office. It was kinda like uh… uh…Pearl Harbor."
If that sounds insane to you, it’s because it genuinely is. Comparing a young leader running for office to a surprise attack that killed over 2,000 Americans … We've heard some wild stuff from pissed off incumbents, but that’s a new one!
The saddest part? His response isn’t that far off from the current state of the Democratic Party. There is a deeply ingrained culture where incumbents in Congress feel entitled to their seats — not to their constituents’ needs.
And telling Justin to “wait his turn” for another two, another four years? Classic. Members of Congress say that and then keep running again and again.
To them, a young person saying my community can’t wait anymore is an attack. But families in Memphis going years without real results? That’s apparently “normal.”
We’re here to remind people like Steve Cohen:
Your seat doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to your constituents. And if you want to avoid a primary (which is apparently your own personal Pearl Harbor), maybe start by just trying to be a better Congressman and being in touch with your community!
Remember the "reason" that Rep.Connelly was made ranking member of whatever committee rather than AOC? "It was his turn"! The man who had been there for many many years & was suffering from cancer - but it was his turn.
Honestly, that is the kind of reasoning far too many incumbents are suffering from. And the Democratic Party encourages that reasoning.
If not pragmatism, then what, Corbin? Revolution? How is that going to work?
dB
Great question. To me, pragmatism means doing what is necessary to solve the problem. In 1932, FDR's massive intervention was considered radical, but it was the only pragmatic solution to the Great Depression. Today, we face a similar crisis of capacity and trust. Subsidies and tax credits are like bringing a garden hose to a forest fire. That's not pragmatic. It's insufficient. Building public capacity in housing, healthcare, and energy is the only pragmatic way to lower costs and save democracy.
Yes, it was a very pragmatic and rather liberal by necessity solution to save the system. And it worked. Other, more radical, but less liberal solutions were proposed, but rejected because of a danger of popular revolt. At the present time, such liberal solutions are not necessary to preserve the system that have exhausted itself and is unsustainable in a not so long run. That's why we have the current President.
Pragmatism IS revolution if done correctly or it just as Corbin illustrates the beating disguised as a massage.
Put another way - There is nothing pragmatic about incremental solutions to catastrophic problems.
Not "baby stepping" out of this.
While it’s true that government famously can’t fix itself – hence the widespread resignation “Easier said than done” – there’s a book that explains that regaining our republic is “Easier than we assume, it’s been done many times, here are step-by-step directions.”
It’s titled: THE MECHANICS OF CHANGING THE WORLD — POLITICAL ARCHITECTURE TO ROLL BACK STATE AND CORPORATE POWER.
An Aussie named John Macgregor wrote it. He distills 1300+ sources and 8 years of work into 400 pages. He takes us all the way back to prehistoric hunter gatherers’ egalitarian self-governance. Then we discover the first documented democracy – the 65 years of Athens’ Golden Age. After a mere 2400-year interlude of empires, we witness the second flowering of democracy in Philadelphia, at a closed-door meeting during May and June of 1787, which produced a constitution (and a Bill of Rights!) adopted a year later.
Despite the flaws in that document, we ended slavery, reduced oppression of first nations, and extricated ourselves from wars that the majority didn’t want. Women got the vote, Jim Crow was made illegal, hungry children were fed.
It was impossible, however, for the Founding Parents to foresee the 4 modern obstacles to a well-functioning constitutional republic. Macgregor explains how we can regain genuine representative government that currently suffers these maladies:
• Corporate money runs DC and state capitals
• Centralized media doesn’t tolerate dissent
• Americans have no clue about the transformative effect of Citizens Assemblies (which already work well for many nations, such as the Swiss), and we never learned why the parliamentary system is more balanced than our current presidential system
• Voters in democracies around the world are discouraged because our feeble attempts to influence our electeds (demonstrations, letters to the editor, and voting) hardly change anything
Here are 4 ways to get more info, from short to the whole enchilada:
1. Mike Muntisov provides an excellent overview of Changing the World here:
https://courtofthegrandchildren.com/democracy-3-0/
2. Or read Macgregor’s more detailed Introduction – and subscribe to his Substack – here:
https://johnmacgregor.substack.com/p/introduction-to-the-mechanics-of
3. Macgregor kindly sent a URL for the whole book so I could share the digital version, I think there’s a time lag for him to unlock the link.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_Q_nr0y9P1X0XZ8rb8td05DTDc-oT6zr/view
Like so many of us, John Macgregor isn't in this for the money; he set the price of the book (available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon) as low as possible, thus earning the magnificent return of 28¢ per hard copy that's sold (probably about the same for the digital version).
To sum up, we CAN regain our constitutional democracy. If you can find time now, be an early bird in this still-unknown paradigm change. Or, if you’re spread too thin, wait until we have a modern Boston Tea Party that galvanizes the nation and jump on the band wagon then.
Lest we forget, I remind everyone of this "little" article from the first week of Harris' campaign. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/29/us/politics/donors-harris-tax-ultrawealthy.html. The "donor" class is a problem. And, as the Atlantic calls it, the "Epstein" class of Larry Summers et al has gotten obscenely wealthy by providing the "intellectual" cover for the donor class. "Any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites." – Larry Summers. No, Larry, this honest Democrat is an MMTer and knows that we can all have nice things. All we need are the votes.
You’re right that they don’t know what to do. The problem is no one gets the source of democracy’s failure because no one will look into our schools. People like Booker and Carville are as innocently ignorant about the corruption in our education system as everyone else reading this now and thinking that’s crazy. It can’t be.
It’s been explained at WhiteChalkCrime.com and EndTeacherAbuse.org since 2002. People have ignored us. We’re just powerless teachers everyone thinks. Wait until you find out what we know!
Don’t be so hard on our ignorant leaders when ALL haven’t connected the dots to how democracy imploded. Instead learn about it. Read the memoir of my teaching days, A Graver Danger, and everything will make sense.
Read his previous articles. It's all there(the what to do and the how to do it)
I'll happily join the chorus of complimenters and compliments. As cogent and well written piece on our current political and underlying economic status as I’ve recently read.
The question left unanswered, but hopefully not for long, is what, how and when are the solutions going to be suggested. And there’s the problem because history moves forward and what appears today as the status quo may be something quite different in the New Year. The elephant in the room is the quiet economic changes that suggest a bipolar world , both militarily and economically, are in the offing.
Regardless of today’s headlines to the contrary, the Ukraine issue has not yet been addressed fully nor solved and a war there has a far more significant chance of continuing and evolving into something bigger. And if it does, as the neocons here and in Europe hope, then the political landscape shifts. As does the economic landscape which is being shaped by a looming sovereign debt crisis and a growing Chinese presence throughout the third world economies.
I look forward to your perspective on all these issue.
Keep up the good work.