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?
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for these words! Being an artist/crafter with a family history of hands-on training in multiple skills, I can tell you there are many Americans and residents who are aching to get to work showing others how to do for themselves. There must be numbers of technically skilled people who can show us enough to take the panic out of our daily contact with the mighty internet and computers in general. We were all sold a bill of goods about how special we are, so special that we didn't have to worry our little heads about how things are made, what the real Earth costs are, or who suffers in another land to bring us what we want with free shipping. So we are complicit too and have responsibilities to make change. The beauty of now is, we don't have to chafe under a rerun of the mess that is falling apart around us. We can't afford to. Again you said it - we need a clarion call to move to new ways that provide for all and build resources rather than waste them. You don't have to get off the grid to learn.
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.
I just got a text from Mark Kelly, another appeal for my pennies on the dollar donation to, from what I understand, ensure he and Jon Osof can battle the demon hordes arrayed against them. Im so tired of this shit. These democrats that benefit from NOT battling the system then turn to us with the least amount of power or resources to ensure they can continue to do NOTHING. I've got nothing against Kelly or Osoff but they're just more of this cosplay activism that gets us nowhere. Im constantly getting the appeal and guess how many times ive been responded to when I asked why I should trust these folks, that's right, NEVER from Osoff to Bernie to AOC to whomever, its all the same. No thanks I've had enough turkey please pass the dressing.
Got to primary the oligarch worshippers and corporate-owned quislings every chance we get, and support those primary challengers as much as our meager checkbooks allow.
I absolutely agree. We need leaders with bold ideas. The word Back should be stricken from our vocabulary. I do however wonder what you mean about the bond market? I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the bond market so I have no idea what needs to be done about it.
Good one, Corbin! Made me LOL, and, "Government as builder, not government as purchaser. Public capacity that competes with private extraction" is the resonant piece from the FDR era. Public works. Now, how we extract those from the hierarchy of insider contractors and so forth is a big concern. Which takes us to, PRIMARY INCUMBENTS. Throw the bums out. Yes: they all must wend their way thru a corrupt, morally bankrupt system. But, I'm hoping, the more "independents" we can elect, the more systemic change we may enact. Because it's hard so see how we have any chance of victory in a true civil war against the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen. Convince me I'm wrong. (Because I have visions of homemade Ukranian & Palestinian drones and weapons which have deterred, tho not beaten, their vile enemies.).
"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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for these words! Being an artist/crafter with a family history of hands-on training in multiple skills, I can tell you there are many Americans and residents who are aching to get to work showing others how to do for themselves. There must be numbers of technically skilled people who can show us enough to take the panic out of our daily contact with the mighty internet and computers in general. We were all sold a bill of goods about how special we are, so special that we didn't have to worry our little heads about how things are made, what the real Earth costs are, or who suffers in another land to bring us what we want with free shipping. So we are complicit too and have responsibilities to make change. The beauty of now is, we don't have to chafe under a rerun of the mess that is falling apart around us. We can't afford to. Again you said it - we need a clarion call to move to new ways that provide for all and build resources rather than waste them. You don't have to get off the grid to learn.
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.
I just got a text from Mark Kelly, another appeal for my pennies on the dollar donation to, from what I understand, ensure he and Jon Osof can battle the demon hordes arrayed against them. Im so tired of this shit. These democrats that benefit from NOT battling the system then turn to us with the least amount of power or resources to ensure they can continue to do NOTHING. I've got nothing against Kelly or Osoff but they're just more of this cosplay activism that gets us nowhere. Im constantly getting the appeal and guess how many times ive been responded to when I asked why I should trust these folks, that's right, NEVER from Osoff to Bernie to AOC to whomever, its all the same. No thanks I've had enough turkey please pass the dressing.
Keep hammering away, Corbin. Another of my go to substack writers is walking a similar path.
https://twvme.substack.com/p/campaign-finance-what-you-can-do?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=4211715&post_id=179510074&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=eov1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Got to primary the oligarch worshippers and corporate-owned quislings every chance we get, and support those primary challengers as much as our meager checkbooks allow.
I absolutely agree. We need leaders with bold ideas. The word Back should be stricken from our vocabulary. I do however wonder what you mean about the bond market? I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the bond market so I have no idea what needs to be done about it.
Good one, Corbin! Made me LOL, and, "Government as builder, not government as purchaser. Public capacity that competes with private extraction" is the resonant piece from the FDR era. Public works. Now, how we extract those from the hierarchy of insider contractors and so forth is a big concern. Which takes us to, PRIMARY INCUMBENTS. Throw the bums out. Yes: they all must wend their way thru a corrupt, morally bankrupt system. But, I'm hoping, the more "independents" we can elect, the more systemic change we may enact. Because it's hard so see how we have any chance of victory in a true civil war against the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen. Convince me I'm wrong. (Because I have visions of homemade Ukranian & Palestinian drones and weapons which have deterred, tho not beaten, their vile enemies.).
"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.
Psst - you forgot Citizens United -
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!
Way to bring it home calling out the empty talking points and making clear what real vision looks like.
Let’s go!!