Friday, November 16, 2012
War good Gd
It's hard to go toward war and hide your mobilization unless you disguise it as defending yourself....
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
It really is about Alinsky and the community
Barack Obama wrote this article for Illinois Issues in 1988, while he was a community organizer in Chicago. It later became part of a book, After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois, published by Illinois Issues in 1990. We are republishing it this month to show, in his own words, some of the Democratic presidential candidate’s earliest influences in Illinois.
Problems and promise in the inner city
by Barack Obama
Over the past five years, I’ve often had a difficult time explaining my profession to folks. Typical is a remark a public school administrative aide made to me one bleak January morning, while I waited to deliver some flyers to a group of confused and angry parents who had discovered the presence of asbestos in their school.
“Listen, Obama,” she began. “You’re a bright young man, Obama. You went to college, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer.”
“Why’s that?”
“’Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don’t nobody appreciate you.” She shook her head in puzzlement as she wandered back to attend to her duties.
I’ve thought back on that conversation more than once during the time I’ve organized with the Developing Communities Project, based in Chicago’s far south side. Unfortunately, the answers that come to mind haven’t been as simple as her question. Probably the shortest one is this: It needs to be done, and not enough folks are doing it.
The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches. During the early years of the Civil Rights movement, many of these issues became submerged in the face of the clear oppression of segregation. The debate was no longer whether to protest, but how militant must that protest be to win full citizenship for blacks.
Twenty years later, the tensions between strategies have reemerged, in part due to the recognition that for all the accomplishments of the 1960s, the majority of blacks continue to suffer from second-class citizenship. Related to this are the failures — real, perceived and fabricated — of the Great Society programs initiated by Lyndon Johnson. Facing these realities, at least three major strands of earlier movements are apparent.
First, and most publicized, has been the surge of political empowerment around the country. Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson are but two striking examples of how the energy and passion of the Civil Rights movement have been channeled into bids for more traditional political power. Second, there has been a resurgence in attempts to foster economic development in the black community, whether through local entrepreneurial efforts, increased hiring of black contractors and corporate managers, or Buy Black campaigns. Third, and perhaps least publicized, has been grass-roots community organizing, which builds on indigenous leadership and direct action.
Proponents of electoral politics and economic development strategies can point to substantial accomplishments in the past 10 years. An increase in the number of black public officials offers at least the hope that government will be more responsive to inner-city constituents. Economic development programs can provide structural improvements and jobs to blighted communities.
In my view, however, neither approach offers lasting hope of real change for the inner city unless undergirded by a systematic approach to community organization. This is because the issues of the inner city are more complex and deeply rooted than ever before. Blatant discrimination has been replaced by institutional racism; problems like teen pregnancy, gang involvement and drug abuse cannot be solved by money alone. At the same time, as Professor William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago has pointed out, the inner city’s economy and its government support have declined, and middle-class blacks are leaving the neighborhoods they once helped to sustain.
Neither electoral politics nor a strategy of economic self-help and internal development can by themselves respond to these new challenges. The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs to inner-city neighborhoods or cut a 50 percent drop-out rate in the schools, although they did achieve an important symbolic effect. In fact, much-needed black achievement in prominent city positions has put us in the awkward position of administering underfunded systems neither equipped nor eager to address the needs of the urban poor and being forced to compromise their interests to more powerful demands from other sectors.
Self-help strategies show similar limitations. Although both laudable and necessary, they too often ignore the fact that without a stable community, a well-educated population, an adequate infrastructure and an informed and employed market, neither new nor well-established companies will be willing to base themselves in the inner city and still compete in the international marketplace. Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.
In theory, community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies for neighborhood empowerment. Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership — and not one or two charismatic leaders — can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions.
This means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent groups and any other institutions in a given community to pay dues, hire organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies and education campaigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole range of issues — jobs, education, crime, etc.
Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to community needs. Equally important, it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively — the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative.
By using this approach, the Developing Communities Project and other organizations in Chicago’s inner city have achieved some impressive results. Schools have been made more accountable — job training programs have been established; housing has been renovated and built; city services have been provided; parks have been refurbished; and crime and drug problems have been curtailed. Additionally, plain folk have been able to access the levers of power, and a sophisticated pool of local civic leadership has been developed.
But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well. One problem is the not entirely undeserved skepticism organizers face in many communities. To a large degree, Chicago was the birthplace of community organizing, and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts. Many of the best-intentioned members of the community have bitter memories of such failures and are reluctant to muster up renewed faith in the process.
A related problem involves the aforementioned exodus from the inner city of financial resources, institutions, role models and jobs. Even in areas that have not been completely devastated, most households now stay afloat with two incomes. Traditionally, community organizing has drawn support from women, who due to tradition and social discrimination had the time and the inclination to participate in what remains an essentially voluntary activity.
Today the majority of women in the black community work full time, many are the sole parent, and all have to split themselves between work, raising children, running a household and maintaining some semblance of a personal life — all of which makes voluntary activities lower on the priority list.
Additionally, the slow exodus of the black middle class into the suburbs means that people shop in one neighborhood, work in another, send their child to a school across town and go to church someplace other than the place where they live. Such geographical dispersion creates real problems in building a sense of investment and common purpose in any particular neighborhood.
Finally, community organizations and organizers are hampered by their own dogmas about the style and substance of organizing. Most still practice what Professor John McKnight of Northwestern University calls a “consumer advocacy” approach, with a focus on wrestling services and resources from the outside powers that be. Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.
Our thinking about media and public relations is equally stunted when compared to the high-powered direct mail and video approaches successfully used by conservative organizations like the Moral Majority. Most importantly, low salaries, the lack of quality training and ill-defined possibilities for advancement discourage the most talented young blacks from viewing organizing as a legitimate career option. As long as our best and brightest youth see more opportunity in climbing the corporate ladder than in building the communities from which they came, organizing will remain decidedly handicapped.
None of these problems is insurmountable. In Chicago, the Developing Communities Project and other community organizations have pooled resources to form cooperative think tanks like the Gamaliel Foundation. These provide both a formal setting where experienced organizers can rework old models to fit new realities and a healthy environment for the recruitment and training of new organizers. At the same time the leadership vacuum and disillusionment following the death of Harold Washington have made both the media and people in the neighborhoods more responsive to the new approaches community organizing can provide.
Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership and — most importantly — values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago. A fierce independence among black pastors and a preference for more traditional approaches to social involvement (supporting candidates for office, providing shelters for the homeless) have prevented the black church from bringing its full weight to bear on the political, social and economic arenas of the city.
Over the past few years, however, more and more young and forward-thinking pastors have begun to look at community organizations such as the Developing Communities Project in the far south side and GREAT in the Grand Boulevard area as a powerful tool for living the social gospel, one which can educate and empower entire congregations and not just serve as a platform for a few prophetic leaders. Should a mere 50 prominent black churches, out of the thousands that exist in cities like Chicago, decide to collaborate with a trained organizing staff, enormous positive changes could be wrought in the education, housing, employment and spirit of inner-city black communities, changes that would send powerful ripples throughout the city.
In the meantime, organizers will continue to build on local successes, learn from their numerous failures and recruit and train their small but growing core of leadership — mothers on welfare, postal workers, CTA drivers and school teachers, all of whom have a vision and memories of what communities can be. In fact, the answer to the original question — why organize? — resides in these people. In helping a group of housewives sit across the negotiating table with the mayor of America’s third largest city and hold their own, or a retired steelworker stand before a TV camera and give voice to the dreams he has for his grandchild’s future, one discovers the most significant and satisfying contribution organizing can make.
In return, organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people. Through the songs of the church and the talk on the stoops, through the hundreds of individual stories of coming up from the South and finding any job that would pay, of raising families on threadbare budgets, of losing some children to drugs and watching others earn degrees and land jobs their parents could never aspire to — it is through these stories and songs of dashed hopes and powers of endurance, of ugliness and strife, subtlety and laughter, that organizers can shape a sense of community not only for others, but for themselves.
Illinois Issues, September 2008
Problems and promise in the inner city
by Barack Obama
Over the past five years, I’ve often had a difficult time explaining my profession to folks. Typical is a remark a public school administrative aide made to me one bleak January morning, while I waited to deliver some flyers to a group of confused and angry parents who had discovered the presence of asbestos in their school.
“Listen, Obama,” she began. “You’re a bright young man, Obama. You went to college, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer.”
“Why’s that?”
“’Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don’t nobody appreciate you.” She shook her head in puzzlement as she wandered back to attend to her duties.
I’ve thought back on that conversation more than once during the time I’ve organized with the Developing Communities Project, based in Chicago’s far south side. Unfortunately, the answers that come to mind haven’t been as simple as her question. Probably the shortest one is this: It needs to be done, and not enough folks are doing it.
The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches. During the early years of the Civil Rights movement, many of these issues became submerged in the face of the clear oppression of segregation. The debate was no longer whether to protest, but how militant must that protest be to win full citizenship for blacks.
Twenty years later, the tensions between strategies have reemerged, in part due to the recognition that for all the accomplishments of the 1960s, the majority of blacks continue to suffer from second-class citizenship. Related to this are the failures — real, perceived and fabricated — of the Great Society programs initiated by Lyndon Johnson. Facing these realities, at least three major strands of earlier movements are apparent.
First, and most publicized, has been the surge of political empowerment around the country. Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson are but two striking examples of how the energy and passion of the Civil Rights movement have been channeled into bids for more traditional political power. Second, there has been a resurgence in attempts to foster economic development in the black community, whether through local entrepreneurial efforts, increased hiring of black contractors and corporate managers, or Buy Black campaigns. Third, and perhaps least publicized, has been grass-roots community organizing, which builds on indigenous leadership and direct action.
Proponents of electoral politics and economic development strategies can point to substantial accomplishments in the past 10 years. An increase in the number of black public officials offers at least the hope that government will be more responsive to inner-city constituents. Economic development programs can provide structural improvements and jobs to blighted communities.
In my view, however, neither approach offers lasting hope of real change for the inner city unless undergirded by a systematic approach to community organization. This is because the issues of the inner city are more complex and deeply rooted than ever before. Blatant discrimination has been replaced by institutional racism; problems like teen pregnancy, gang involvement and drug abuse cannot be solved by money alone. At the same time, as Professor William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago has pointed out, the inner city’s economy and its government support have declined, and middle-class blacks are leaving the neighborhoods they once helped to sustain.
Neither electoral politics nor a strategy of economic self-help and internal development can by themselves respond to these new challenges. The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs to inner-city neighborhoods or cut a 50 percent drop-out rate in the schools, although they did achieve an important symbolic effect. In fact, much-needed black achievement in prominent city positions has put us in the awkward position of administering underfunded systems neither equipped nor eager to address the needs of the urban poor and being forced to compromise their interests to more powerful demands from other sectors.
Self-help strategies show similar limitations. Although both laudable and necessary, they too often ignore the fact that without a stable community, a well-educated population, an adequate infrastructure and an informed and employed market, neither new nor well-established companies will be willing to base themselves in the inner city and still compete in the international marketplace. Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.
In theory, community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies for neighborhood empowerment. Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership — and not one or two charismatic leaders — can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions.
This means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent groups and any other institutions in a given community to pay dues, hire organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies and education campaigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole range of issues — jobs, education, crime, etc.
Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to community needs. Equally important, it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively — the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative.
By using this approach, the Developing Communities Project and other organizations in Chicago’s inner city have achieved some impressive results. Schools have been made more accountable — job training programs have been established; housing has been renovated and built; city services have been provided; parks have been refurbished; and crime and drug problems have been curtailed. Additionally, plain folk have been able to access the levers of power, and a sophisticated pool of local civic leadership has been developed.
But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well. One problem is the not entirely undeserved skepticism organizers face in many communities. To a large degree, Chicago was the birthplace of community organizing, and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts. Many of the best-intentioned members of the community have bitter memories of such failures and are reluctant to muster up renewed faith in the process.
A related problem involves the aforementioned exodus from the inner city of financial resources, institutions, role models and jobs. Even in areas that have not been completely devastated, most households now stay afloat with two incomes. Traditionally, community organizing has drawn support from women, who due to tradition and social discrimination had the time and the inclination to participate in what remains an essentially voluntary activity.
Today the majority of women in the black community work full time, many are the sole parent, and all have to split themselves between work, raising children, running a household and maintaining some semblance of a personal life — all of which makes voluntary activities lower on the priority list.
Additionally, the slow exodus of the black middle class into the suburbs means that people shop in one neighborhood, work in another, send their child to a school across town and go to church someplace other than the place where they live. Such geographical dispersion creates real problems in building a sense of investment and common purpose in any particular neighborhood.
Finally, community organizations and organizers are hampered by their own dogmas about the style and substance of organizing. Most still practice what Professor John McKnight of Northwestern University calls a “consumer advocacy” approach, with a focus on wrestling services and resources from the outside powers that be. Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.
Our thinking about media and public relations is equally stunted when compared to the high-powered direct mail and video approaches successfully used by conservative organizations like the Moral Majority. Most importantly, low salaries, the lack of quality training and ill-defined possibilities for advancement discourage the most talented young blacks from viewing organizing as a legitimate career option. As long as our best and brightest youth see more opportunity in climbing the corporate ladder than in building the communities from which they came, organizing will remain decidedly handicapped.
None of these problems is insurmountable. In Chicago, the Developing Communities Project and other community organizations have pooled resources to form cooperative think tanks like the Gamaliel Foundation. These provide both a formal setting where experienced organizers can rework old models to fit new realities and a healthy environment for the recruitment and training of new organizers. At the same time the leadership vacuum and disillusionment following the death of Harold Washington have made both the media and people in the neighborhoods more responsive to the new approaches community organizing can provide.
Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership and — most importantly — values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago. A fierce independence among black pastors and a preference for more traditional approaches to social involvement (supporting candidates for office, providing shelters for the homeless) have prevented the black church from bringing its full weight to bear on the political, social and economic arenas of the city.
Over the past few years, however, more and more young and forward-thinking pastors have begun to look at community organizations such as the Developing Communities Project in the far south side and GREAT in the Grand Boulevard area as a powerful tool for living the social gospel, one which can educate and empower entire congregations and not just serve as a platform for a few prophetic leaders. Should a mere 50 prominent black churches, out of the thousands that exist in cities like Chicago, decide to collaborate with a trained organizing staff, enormous positive changes could be wrought in the education, housing, employment and spirit of inner-city black communities, changes that would send powerful ripples throughout the city.
In the meantime, organizers will continue to build on local successes, learn from their numerous failures and recruit and train their small but growing core of leadership — mothers on welfare, postal workers, CTA drivers and school teachers, all of whom have a vision and memories of what communities can be. In fact, the answer to the original question — why organize? — resides in these people. In helping a group of housewives sit across the negotiating table with the mayor of America’s third largest city and hold their own, or a retired steelworker stand before a TV camera and give voice to the dreams he has for his grandchild’s future, one discovers the most significant and satisfying contribution organizing can make.
In return, organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people. Through the songs of the church and the talk on the stoops, through the hundreds of individual stories of coming up from the South and finding any job that would pay, of raising families on threadbare budgets, of losing some children to drugs and watching others earn degrees and land jobs their parents could never aspire to — it is through these stories and songs of dashed hopes and powers of endurance, of ugliness and strife, subtlety and laughter, that organizers can shape a sense of community not only for others, but for themselves.
Illinois Issues, September 2008
Second rule for Election Day
You must remember Mt Rushmore!
Washington defined leadership
Jefferson defined the reason
Lincoln defined the republic
Roosevelt defined the responsibility
_______________
"Every male citizen of the commonwealth, liable to taxes or to militia duty in any county, shall have a right to vote for representatives for that county to the legislature. "
"Should things go wrong at any time, the people will set them to rights by the peaceable exercise of their elective rights. "
"The elective franchise, if guarded as the ark of our safety, will peaceably dissipate all combinations to subvert a Constitution, dictated by the wisdom, and resting on the will of the people. "
"The rational and peacable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people. "
Thomas Jefferson, The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, John P. Foley, ed. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1900), p. 842.
NEiLc note: don't deflect on Jeffersons use of the term "male" in the first quote... the topic of women's and minority rights is not the discussion here.... Equal rights for all voters is..
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Saturday, October 27, 2012
No purple Dino here
Barney Frank said "The GOP's interest in the fetus begins at conception and ends completely at birth."
Friday, October 26, 2012
McCainunu way off the tracks
…John McCain, Iraq War supporter, Iraq War voter-for, let it be known that it was all Colin Powell's fault that we were in Iraq in the first place:
“Colin Powell, interestingly enough, said that Obama got us out of Iraq,” McCain told the National Review. “But it was Colin Powell, with his testimony before the U.N. Security Council, that got us into Iraq.”
rss@dailykos.com (Hunter)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/26/1150743/-John-McCain-says-the-Iraq-War-was-Colin-Powell-s-fault
“Colin Powell, interestingly enough, said that Obama got us out of Iraq,” McCain told the National Review. “But it was Colin Powell, with his testimony before the U.N. Security Council, that got us into Iraq.”
rss@dailykos.com (Hunter)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/26/1150743/-John-McCain-says-the-Iraq-War-was-Colin-Powell-s-fault
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Small government GOP style
If Romney is so anti choice and concerned about keeping government small, and if he gets to be president and his Congress votes for repeal of Roe versus Wade who makes the decision to allow an abortion on the issue of allowing an Abortion? When she says, he says, the judge, the cop?
Leave women's issues their issues.
Let women keep their freedom and privacy. Government should stay out of the bedroom and out of the medicine cabinet... Nancy Keenan NARAL President
Leave women's issues their issues.
Let women keep their freedom and privacy. Government should stay out of the bedroom and out of the medicine cabinet... Nancy Keenan NARAL President
Monday, October 8, 2012
Elizabeth Warren
“No, Mitt, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they love, they cry, they dance, they live and they die. Learn the difference.”
Friday, September 21, 2012
Research shmesearch
So the joke goes if I didn't have a pacifier and I didn't have a tit I'm really emotionally screwed up?
Research Suggests That Pacifiers Help Turn Baby Boys Into Emotionless Robocops Later in Life
By Doug Barry, Sep 18, 2012 11:55 PM
SHARE
A new study so hot and fresh out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison that Bucky Badger singed his adorable little paws on when he took it out of the lab suggests that pacifiers stunt the emotional development of baby boys by robbing them of the opportunity to mimic adults by refining their Jim Carrey rubber faces. Since a big part of learning emotional cues for infants involves observing and mimicking adults' facial expressions, boys who log a lot of pacifier time could experience a deficit of emotional intelligence as a direct result of having a rubber nipple stuffed into their mouths too often.
Research Suggests That Pacifiers Help Turn Baby Boys Into Emotionless Robocops Later in Life
By Doug Barry, Sep 18, 2012 11:55 PM
SHARE
A new study so hot and fresh out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison that Bucky Badger singed his adorable little paws on when he took it out of the lab suggests that pacifiers stunt the emotional development of baby boys by robbing them of the opportunity to mimic adults by refining their Jim Carrey rubber faces. Since a big part of learning emotional cues for infants involves observing and mimicking adults' facial expressions, boys who log a lot of pacifier time could experience a deficit of emotional intelligence as a direct result of having a rubber nipple stuffed into their mouths too often.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
More interdependence more education
So a more focused curriculum in the schools means future employment ..
Fiat / Chrysler also received the same concessions for its new plant
Now when we retool the schools enough... Apple will have to move their manufacturing assembly plants to the US.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/siemens-plant-in-charlotte-offers-lessons-as-obama-romney-talk-job-creation/2012/09/04/f52304fa-f30c-11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_print.html
.And they talk about the quality of the workforce in Charlotte, where local leaders are retooling the public education system to churn out the engineers and skilled technicians needed to operate one of the most efficient gas-turbine plants in the world
Neilc
Fiat / Chrysler also received the same concessions for its new plant
Now when we retool the schools enough... Apple will have to move their manufacturing assembly plants to the US.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/siemens-plant-in-charlotte-offers-lessons-as-obama-romney-talk-job-creation/2012/09/04/f52304fa-f30c-11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_print.html
.And they talk about the quality of the workforce in Charlotte, where local leaders are retooling the public education system to churn out the engineers and skilled technicians needed to operate one of the most efficient gas-turbine plants in the world
Neilc
Monday, September 17, 2012
Jobs retooling and redistribution
go to the web cause the links inside the article Are enlightening.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/16/1131863/-The-Republicans-want-to-talk-about-unemployment-Let-s-accommodate-them
The Republicans want to talk about unemployment. Let's accommodate them.
The Republicans would prefer to change the subject from the latest appalling proof that Mitt Romney is fundamentally unfit to be even within the same zip code as the Oval Office. They would much prefer that everyone focus on unemployment. Because we are nice people, let's accommodate them. Because this election very quickly is moving past the question of who will be president next year, and now is more about control of next year's Congress. This election also has become about reframing false political narratives, for the benefit of Democrats, the nation, the world, and the very concept of truth, going forward.
The Republicans have no credibility on deficits. The Republicans have no credibility on national security. For decades, both have been all but ceded as Republican strengths, despite plenty of evidence that they shouldn't be. On those issues, Democrats have often played on the Republican home field, to the detriment of everyone. The Republicans would like for the same dynamic to pertain on the economy and unemployment. At the end of last week, while President Obama was enjoying the early indications of what we now know is a substantial post-Convention bounce, Republicans rejoiced at the release of a lousy jobs report. They were sure that would deflate what they deluded themselves into believing was but a temporary Obama polling bubble. It's the economy, stupid—Republicans rejoiced. And it is the economy. And unemployment still will be one of the key issues in this election, up and down the ballot. But not in the way Republicans think.
President Obama and the Democrats have tried to pass jobs bills. The Republicans killed the American Jobs Act. The Republicans killed the jobs bill that would have repaired our badly crumbling national infrastructure. The Republicans killed the jobs bill that would have given tax cuts to small businesses that create jobs. They're even holding up a bill specifically designed to create jobs for military veterans. The Republicans don't care about creating jobs. Republicans do care about playing politics over jobs, obstructing bills that would actually create jobs so they can exploit the lack of jobs for political gain.
Last Sunday, in the wake of that Convention bounce and that lousy jobs report, the New York Times did us all the great service of providing a case study in how false narratives are framed and propagated, even by supposed journalists working for one of the best traditional media outlets. The culprit was Jackie Calmes, but the lesson is much larger than one person's incompetence or dishonesty. This exemplifies what is so wrong with our national political conversation:
With both parties’ conventions now concluded, what is clear is that each played to type — Republicans as the party of business, Democrats of the worker. For President Obama, however, the week here captured his tricky balancing act: a four-year struggle to show that pro-worker does not mean antibusiness.
Of course, the basic facts prove otherwise, and the only reason anyone could be said to be playing to type is because people like Calmes are typecasting rather than reporting. President Obama's record on business is clear:
The U.S. economy may not be recovering as fast as President Obama likes, but at least he can make one claim: The stock market has done better under his watch than with any other recent president.
Since Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20 2009, all three major U.S. stock indexes are up more than 60 percent. The Nasdaq Composite alone has soared a whopping 105 percent.
And of course those numbers reflect the recovery from the economic meltdown President Obama inherited, and the Fed also gets some credit, but that meltdown occurred under those supposedly pro-business Republicans.
Even so, the market has performed better during Obama's 43 1/2 months in office than in any of the five prior administrations. In fact, the S&P 500 has outperformed most of the major world indexes during his presidency.
(Continue reading below the fold.)
Calmes would seem to be mistaken:
U.S. farmers are heading for their most profitable year on record despite the worst drought in half a century as high grain prices and payouts from a federal crop insurance program compensate for a smaller harvest.
The standard political narrative that Democrats are bad for business would seem to be flat wrong:
The Fortune 500 generated a total of $824.5 billion in earnings last year, up 16.4% over 2010. That beats the previous record of $785 billion, set in 2006 during a roaring economy. The 2011 profits are outsized based on two key historical metrics. They represent 7% of total sales, vs. an average of 5.14% over the 58-year history of the Fortune 500. Companies are also garnering exceptional returns on their capital. The 500 achieved a return-on-equity of 14.3%, far above the historical norm of 12%.
Calmes does include some of the positive economic news, but she buries it amidst more right-wing propaganda, where it can barely be found. But even worse is how she promotes the standard political narrative that what's best for business is best for workers, that job growth is tied to political success, and that the reason we don't have job growth is because businesses are over-regulated and over-taxed.
Calmes:
The challenge for the campaign was to counter Republican attacks at their Tampa, Fla., convention depicting Mr. Obama as the enemy of job creators when unemployment persists, while energizing his liberal base in the convention hall and beyond. The delicate juggling was most evident on Wednesday, during the brief daily window of network television coverage.
Why that is a challenge, Calmes never explains. Because she seems to be tacitly accepting and promoting the Republican narrative, both that Obama is the enemy and that businesses are job creators rather than profit-making enterprises that don't care whether or not they create jobs, just so they create profits— and in many cases make profits by destroying jobs. You know, the way Bain Capital has done. Under Mitt Romney. The same Mitt Romney who would most benefit if anyone took seriously this dishonest and perhaps deliberately calculated Calmes' narrative.
Defining businesses as job creators may be the most essential aspect of the Republican disinformation campaign. Sure, some businesses create jobs, but businesses aren't in business to create jobs, and the facts on that are also readily available, if people like Calmes actually cared to report facts honestly. Because if creating jobs was as simple as keeping businesses highly profitable, those record profits businesses have been making would have resulted in the creation of lots of jobs. Instead, those record profits have created this:
At present, cash accounts for more than 6 per cent of the assets on the balance sheets of US non-financial companies. That is the highest in at least six decades, and represents the fruit of record high profit margins. Companies cut costs through redundancies during the post-Lehman economic swoon, while negligible interest rates reduced their borrowing costs. As a result, US corporate profits are higher, as a share of gross domestic product, than at any time since 1950.
But as uncertainty persists, groups are reluctant to repay that cash to shareholders by buying back stock or – particularly – paying dividends. The pay-out ratio (the proportion of earnings that go in dividends) for the S&P 500 index is at its lowest since 1900.
Record corporate profits. The largest piles of cash in six decades. The lowest dividend pay-out ratio in more than a century. Lagging job creation. Maybe businesses aren't, by definition, job creators. Maybe further greasing the skids for businesses isn't the way to create jobs. Maybe if corporate success meant the creation of jobs we would be seeing lots of jobs created. Which we aren't. But we are seeing this:
Profits at big U.S. companies broke records last year, and so did pay for CEOs.
The head of a typical public company made $9.6 million in 2011, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using data from Equilar, an executive pay research firm.
That was up more than 6 percent from the previous year, and is the second year in a row of increases. The figure is also the highest since the AP began tracking executive compensation in 2006.
Record corporate profits. The largest piles of cash in six decades. The lowest dividend pay-out ratio in more than a century. Record CEO pay. Lagging job creation. Maybe businesses aren't, by definition, job creators. Maybe further greasing the skids for businesses isn't the way to create jobs. Maybe if corporate success meant the creation of jobs we would be seeing lots of jobs created. Which we aren't. But I repeat myself. Because the facts bear repeating.
Maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with the narrative about job creation that is promoted by the Republicans and their propagandists, such as Calmes. Or maybe we're missing one final element of the Republican narrative that will make it all work. Like taxes. Like that the real problem is that these record profits and this record CEO pay and these alpine mounds of cash are getting so gobbled up by high taxes that there just isn't enough left for job creation. Or maybe not:
The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy.
James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group – sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.
I'm guessing $32,000,000,000,000 could create a lot of jobs, if the accumulation of staggering amounts of wealth by a very small number of people actually had anything to do with job creation. Which it clearly doesn't. Record corporate profits. The largest piles of cash in six decades. The lowest dividend pay-out ratio in more than a century. Record CEO pay. A staggering $32,000,000,000,000 squirreled away somewhere so it can't be taxed. So where are the jobs? And wouldn't it be nice just once to hear reporters ask that question of Republican leaders? Like maybe asking the Republican presidential nominee, like maybe at one of the televised debates?
The Republican answer to pretty much any economic situation is to cut taxes. High inflation? Cut taxes. High unemployment? Cut taxes. Economy in danger of over-heating? Cut taxes. Economy imploding? Cut taxes. So maybe someone ought to ask Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republicans how exactly cutting taxes is supposed to create jobs. What is the mechanism? What is the rationale? If corporations are making record profits, if they're sitting on mountains of cash, if CEOs are making record pay, and if a staggering $32,000,000,000,000 is sitting somewhere already untaxed, then how is lowering taxes going to create jobs? The ostensible job creators are doing awfully damn well, but they're not creating anywhere close to enough jobs. Maybe that's because the ostensible job creators aren't actually interested in creating jobs.
Remember how President Bill Clinton raised taxes, without getting a single supporting vote from Congressional Republicans? Remember the economic boom that followed, with near full employment and low inflation? Remember how the Lesser Bush cut taxes and cut regulations and produced the worst economic crash since the Great Depression? That's the honest economic narrative. Cutting taxes doesn't create jobs. Allowing the wealthy to accumulate more wealth doesn't create jobs. And in case the Republicans trot out their other tired and dishonest rationale, the problem isn't over-regulation, either:
Labor Department data show that only a tiny percentage of companies that experience large layoffs cite government regulation as the reason. Since Barack Obama took office, just two-tenths of 1 percent of layoffs have been due to government regulation, the data show.
Businesses frequently complain about regulation, but there is little evidence that it is any worse now than in the past or that it is costing significant numbers of jobs. Most economists believe there is a simpler explanation: Companies aren't hiring because there isn't enough consumer demand.
Like every Republican excuse for cutting taxes, cutting regulation is just more factually dishonest false narrative:
We asked experts, and most told us that while there is relatively little scholarship on the issue, the evidence so far is that the overall effect on jobs is minimal. Regulations do destroy some jobs, but they also create others. Mostly, they just shift jobs within the economy.
“The effects on jobs are negligible. They’re not job-creating or job-destroying on average,” said Richard Morgenstern, who served in the EPA from the Reagan to Clinton years and is now at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank.
Cutting taxes doesn't create jobs. Cutting regulations doesn't create jobs. The Republican proposals to cut taxes and regulations won't create jobs. But you know what would create jobs and create a full economic recovery? Keynesian stimulus would create jobs and create a full economic recovery. Government spending specifically focused on direct job creation. That was how the Great Depression was resolved. That was how President Obama stopped the economic freefall he inherited from the anti-tax, anti-regulation Republican Bush administration, which was such a friend of business that it created the worst economic collapse, both for businesses and jobs, since the Great Depression.
Republicans want to blame President Obama for high unemployment, but their solution clearly doesn't work. And they do know that it doesn't work. Because they don't really care whether or not it works. Republicans don't care about creating jobs, they only care about allowing fewer and fewer people to accumulate more and more wealth and power. And the media won't call it class warfare, but they will call it class warfare when anyone calls attention to it.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/16/1131863/-The-Republicans-want-to-talk-about-unemployment-Let-s-accommodate-them
The Republicans want to talk about unemployment. Let's accommodate them.
The Republicans would prefer to change the subject from the latest appalling proof that Mitt Romney is fundamentally unfit to be even within the same zip code as the Oval Office. They would much prefer that everyone focus on unemployment. Because we are nice people, let's accommodate them. Because this election very quickly is moving past the question of who will be president next year, and now is more about control of next year's Congress. This election also has become about reframing false political narratives, for the benefit of Democrats, the nation, the world, and the very concept of truth, going forward.
The Republicans have no credibility on deficits. The Republicans have no credibility on national security. For decades, both have been all but ceded as Republican strengths, despite plenty of evidence that they shouldn't be. On those issues, Democrats have often played on the Republican home field, to the detriment of everyone. The Republicans would like for the same dynamic to pertain on the economy and unemployment. At the end of last week, while President Obama was enjoying the early indications of what we now know is a substantial post-Convention bounce, Republicans rejoiced at the release of a lousy jobs report. They were sure that would deflate what they deluded themselves into believing was but a temporary Obama polling bubble. It's the economy, stupid—Republicans rejoiced. And it is the economy. And unemployment still will be one of the key issues in this election, up and down the ballot. But not in the way Republicans think.
President Obama and the Democrats have tried to pass jobs bills. The Republicans killed the American Jobs Act. The Republicans killed the jobs bill that would have repaired our badly crumbling national infrastructure. The Republicans killed the jobs bill that would have given tax cuts to small businesses that create jobs. They're even holding up a bill specifically designed to create jobs for military veterans. The Republicans don't care about creating jobs. Republicans do care about playing politics over jobs, obstructing bills that would actually create jobs so they can exploit the lack of jobs for political gain.
Last Sunday, in the wake of that Convention bounce and that lousy jobs report, the New York Times did us all the great service of providing a case study in how false narratives are framed and propagated, even by supposed journalists working for one of the best traditional media outlets. The culprit was Jackie Calmes, but the lesson is much larger than one person's incompetence or dishonesty. This exemplifies what is so wrong with our national political conversation:
With both parties’ conventions now concluded, what is clear is that each played to type — Republicans as the party of business, Democrats of the worker. For President Obama, however, the week here captured his tricky balancing act: a four-year struggle to show that pro-worker does not mean antibusiness.
Of course, the basic facts prove otherwise, and the only reason anyone could be said to be playing to type is because people like Calmes are typecasting rather than reporting. President Obama's record on business is clear:
The U.S. economy may not be recovering as fast as President Obama likes, but at least he can make one claim: The stock market has done better under his watch than with any other recent president.
Since Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20 2009, all three major U.S. stock indexes are up more than 60 percent. The Nasdaq Composite alone has soared a whopping 105 percent.
And of course those numbers reflect the recovery from the economic meltdown President Obama inherited, and the Fed also gets some credit, but that meltdown occurred under those supposedly pro-business Republicans.
Even so, the market has performed better during Obama's 43 1/2 months in office than in any of the five prior administrations. In fact, the S&P 500 has outperformed most of the major world indexes during his presidency.
(Continue reading below the fold.)
Calmes would seem to be mistaken:
U.S. farmers are heading for their most profitable year on record despite the worst drought in half a century as high grain prices and payouts from a federal crop insurance program compensate for a smaller harvest.
The standard political narrative that Democrats are bad for business would seem to be flat wrong:
The Fortune 500 generated a total of $824.5 billion in earnings last year, up 16.4% over 2010. That beats the previous record of $785 billion, set in 2006 during a roaring economy. The 2011 profits are outsized based on two key historical metrics. They represent 7% of total sales, vs. an average of 5.14% over the 58-year history of the Fortune 500. Companies are also garnering exceptional returns on their capital. The 500 achieved a return-on-equity of 14.3%, far above the historical norm of 12%.
Calmes does include some of the positive economic news, but she buries it amidst more right-wing propaganda, where it can barely be found. But even worse is how she promotes the standard political narrative that what's best for business is best for workers, that job growth is tied to political success, and that the reason we don't have job growth is because businesses are over-regulated and over-taxed.
Calmes:
The challenge for the campaign was to counter Republican attacks at their Tampa, Fla., convention depicting Mr. Obama as the enemy of job creators when unemployment persists, while energizing his liberal base in the convention hall and beyond. The delicate juggling was most evident on Wednesday, during the brief daily window of network television coverage.
Why that is a challenge, Calmes never explains. Because she seems to be tacitly accepting and promoting the Republican narrative, both that Obama is the enemy and that businesses are job creators rather than profit-making enterprises that don't care whether or not they create jobs, just so they create profits— and in many cases make profits by destroying jobs. You know, the way Bain Capital has done. Under Mitt Romney. The same Mitt Romney who would most benefit if anyone took seriously this dishonest and perhaps deliberately calculated Calmes' narrative.
Defining businesses as job creators may be the most essential aspect of the Republican disinformation campaign. Sure, some businesses create jobs, but businesses aren't in business to create jobs, and the facts on that are also readily available, if people like Calmes actually cared to report facts honestly. Because if creating jobs was as simple as keeping businesses highly profitable, those record profits businesses have been making would have resulted in the creation of lots of jobs. Instead, those record profits have created this:
At present, cash accounts for more than 6 per cent of the assets on the balance sheets of US non-financial companies. That is the highest in at least six decades, and represents the fruit of record high profit margins. Companies cut costs through redundancies during the post-Lehman economic swoon, while negligible interest rates reduced their borrowing costs. As a result, US corporate profits are higher, as a share of gross domestic product, than at any time since 1950.
But as uncertainty persists, groups are reluctant to repay that cash to shareholders by buying back stock or – particularly – paying dividends. The pay-out ratio (the proportion of earnings that go in dividends) for the S&P 500 index is at its lowest since 1900.
Record corporate profits. The largest piles of cash in six decades. The lowest dividend pay-out ratio in more than a century. Lagging job creation. Maybe businesses aren't, by definition, job creators. Maybe further greasing the skids for businesses isn't the way to create jobs. Maybe if corporate success meant the creation of jobs we would be seeing lots of jobs created. Which we aren't. But we are seeing this:
Profits at big U.S. companies broke records last year, and so did pay for CEOs.
The head of a typical public company made $9.6 million in 2011, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using data from Equilar, an executive pay research firm.
That was up more than 6 percent from the previous year, and is the second year in a row of increases. The figure is also the highest since the AP began tracking executive compensation in 2006.
Record corporate profits. The largest piles of cash in six decades. The lowest dividend pay-out ratio in more than a century. Record CEO pay. Lagging job creation. Maybe businesses aren't, by definition, job creators. Maybe further greasing the skids for businesses isn't the way to create jobs. Maybe if corporate success meant the creation of jobs we would be seeing lots of jobs created. Which we aren't. But I repeat myself. Because the facts bear repeating.
Maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with the narrative about job creation that is promoted by the Republicans and their propagandists, such as Calmes. Or maybe we're missing one final element of the Republican narrative that will make it all work. Like taxes. Like that the real problem is that these record profits and this record CEO pay and these alpine mounds of cash are getting so gobbled up by high taxes that there just isn't enough left for job creation. Or maybe not:
The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy.
James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group – sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.
I'm guessing $32,000,000,000,000 could create a lot of jobs, if the accumulation of staggering amounts of wealth by a very small number of people actually had anything to do with job creation. Which it clearly doesn't. Record corporate profits. The largest piles of cash in six decades. The lowest dividend pay-out ratio in more than a century. Record CEO pay. A staggering $32,000,000,000,000 squirreled away somewhere so it can't be taxed. So where are the jobs? And wouldn't it be nice just once to hear reporters ask that question of Republican leaders? Like maybe asking the Republican presidential nominee, like maybe at one of the televised debates?
The Republican answer to pretty much any economic situation is to cut taxes. High inflation? Cut taxes. High unemployment? Cut taxes. Economy in danger of over-heating? Cut taxes. Economy imploding? Cut taxes. So maybe someone ought to ask Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republicans how exactly cutting taxes is supposed to create jobs. What is the mechanism? What is the rationale? If corporations are making record profits, if they're sitting on mountains of cash, if CEOs are making record pay, and if a staggering $32,000,000,000,000 is sitting somewhere already untaxed, then how is lowering taxes going to create jobs? The ostensible job creators are doing awfully damn well, but they're not creating anywhere close to enough jobs. Maybe that's because the ostensible job creators aren't actually interested in creating jobs.
Remember how President Bill Clinton raised taxes, without getting a single supporting vote from Congressional Republicans? Remember the economic boom that followed, with near full employment and low inflation? Remember how the Lesser Bush cut taxes and cut regulations and produced the worst economic crash since the Great Depression? That's the honest economic narrative. Cutting taxes doesn't create jobs. Allowing the wealthy to accumulate more wealth doesn't create jobs. And in case the Republicans trot out their other tired and dishonest rationale, the problem isn't over-regulation, either:
Labor Department data show that only a tiny percentage of companies that experience large layoffs cite government regulation as the reason. Since Barack Obama took office, just two-tenths of 1 percent of layoffs have been due to government regulation, the data show.
Businesses frequently complain about regulation, but there is little evidence that it is any worse now than in the past or that it is costing significant numbers of jobs. Most economists believe there is a simpler explanation: Companies aren't hiring because there isn't enough consumer demand.
Like every Republican excuse for cutting taxes, cutting regulation is just more factually dishonest false narrative:
We asked experts, and most told us that while there is relatively little scholarship on the issue, the evidence so far is that the overall effect on jobs is minimal. Regulations do destroy some jobs, but they also create others. Mostly, they just shift jobs within the economy.
“The effects on jobs are negligible. They’re not job-creating or job-destroying on average,” said Richard Morgenstern, who served in the EPA from the Reagan to Clinton years and is now at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank.
Cutting taxes doesn't create jobs. Cutting regulations doesn't create jobs. The Republican proposals to cut taxes and regulations won't create jobs. But you know what would create jobs and create a full economic recovery? Keynesian stimulus would create jobs and create a full economic recovery. Government spending specifically focused on direct job creation. That was how the Great Depression was resolved. That was how President Obama stopped the economic freefall he inherited from the anti-tax, anti-regulation Republican Bush administration, which was such a friend of business that it created the worst economic collapse, both for businesses and jobs, since the Great Depression.
Republicans want to blame President Obama for high unemployment, but their solution clearly doesn't work. And they do know that it doesn't work. Because they don't really care whether or not it works. Republicans don't care about creating jobs, they only care about allowing fewer and fewer people to accumulate more and more wealth and power. And the media won't call it class warfare, but they will call it class warfare when anyone calls attention to it.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
1 2 3 4 can I have a little more...
Comedy is reality. As of course reality is fun. In this as in most cases there is a punch line. And the joke is on us.
Main Street finally caught up to Wall Street. To keep wages low profits as high as possible ah capitalism. NEiLc
Los Angeles Review of Books - How To Read Žižek
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=897&fulltext=1&media=
... Remaining faithful to the Marxist tradition, Žižek believes that the most apt name for the conflict at the heart of modern society is “class struggle.” The “struggle” is not between two pre-existing classes — the working class and the capitalist or owner class — that happen to enter into some kind of conflict. These two classes are the “fallout” of capitalism, which is itself conflictual in nature: people “worked” before capitalism, but the working class as a massive population of landless laborers who must sell their labor power to survive only came about as a result of capitalist development. Similarly, there were rich people before capitalism, but not a class of people who sought to extract profits from this “free” labor power. The conflict is the system, the system the conflict.
“Class struggle” is important for Žižek because it produces two completely incompatible and conflictual views of the world — the difference between the exploited and the exploiter is more than a difference of opinion, it is a completely different framework. Reasonable people from “both sides” cannot come together and hash out a compromise that takes everyone’s interests into account. The “middle ground” is an unbridgeable chasm, and ideology represents our attempts to paper over and ignore that chasm.
So when people in the U.S. produce the vision of the Mexican immigrant as the workaholic welfare queen, what is really at stake can’t be a conflict between cultures, because for Žižek that would imply pre-existing, more or less stable or homogeneous cultures that first exist and then subsequently happen to come into conflict. Nor can it be about the Mexicans who come to America and disturb the balance of our local culture, because that balance didn’t exist in the first place. No, the conflict is inherent in capitalist exploitation. The Mexicans aren’t taking “our” jobs — the owners are doing whatever they can to suppress wages, with no interest in who they pay.
--------------
Main Street finally caught up to Wall Street. To keep wages low profits as high as possible ah capitalism. NEiLc
Los Angeles Review of Books - How To Read Žižek
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=897&fulltext=1&media=
... Remaining faithful to the Marxist tradition, Žižek believes that the most apt name for the conflict at the heart of modern society is “class struggle.” The “struggle” is not between two pre-existing classes — the working class and the capitalist or owner class — that happen to enter into some kind of conflict. These two classes are the “fallout” of capitalism, which is itself conflictual in nature: people “worked” before capitalism, but the working class as a massive population of landless laborers who must sell their labor power to survive only came about as a result of capitalist development. Similarly, there were rich people before capitalism, but not a class of people who sought to extract profits from this “free” labor power. The conflict is the system, the system the conflict.
“Class struggle” is important for Žižek because it produces two completely incompatible and conflictual views of the world — the difference between the exploited and the exploiter is more than a difference of opinion, it is a completely different framework. Reasonable people from “both sides” cannot come together and hash out a compromise that takes everyone’s interests into account. The “middle ground” is an unbridgeable chasm, and ideology represents our attempts to paper over and ignore that chasm.
So when people in the U.S. produce the vision of the Mexican immigrant as the workaholic welfare queen, what is really at stake can’t be a conflict between cultures, because for Žižek that would imply pre-existing, more or less stable or homogeneous cultures that first exist and then subsequently happen to come into conflict. Nor can it be about the Mexicans who come to America and disturb the balance of our local culture, because that balance didn’t exist in the first place. No, the conflict is inherent in capitalist exploitation. The Mexicans aren’t taking “our” jobs — the owners are doing whatever they can to suppress wages, with no interest in who they pay.
--------------
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Best laugh so far today.
NYTimes: Bill, Barack and Us -
Gail Collins
The Democratic convention was treated to many, many, many words of wisdom from the Talker in Chief.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/opinion/collins-the-roots-are-back.html
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