Bob Chanin July 2009

Wouldn't you try to say what is said here a little differently?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-piPkgAUo0w

I showed this to my wife, a lifelong and current democrat. She thought it was pathetic.

By Chris Hedges

The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.

The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

Workers in this country paid for their rights by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targeted assassinations of union leaders and armed battles with hired gun thugs and state militias. The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies and the Morgans—the Koch Brothers Industries, Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart of their day—never gave a damn about workers. All they cared about was profit. The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid vacations, retirement benefits and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation. They rallied around radicals such as “Mother” Jones, United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis and “Big” Bill Haywood and his Wobblies as well as the socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.

Lewis said, “I have pleaded your case from the pulpit and from the public platform—not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.”

Those who fought to achieve these rights endured tremendous suffering, pain and deprivation. It is they who made possible our middle class and opened up our democracy. The elite hired goons and criminal militias to evict striking miners from company houses, infiltrate fledgling union organizations and murder suspected union leaders and sympathizers. Federal marshals, state militias, sheriff’s deputies and at times Army troops, along with the courts and legislative bodies, were repeatedly used to crush and stymie worker revolts. Striking sugar cane workers were gunned down in Thibodaux, La., in 1887. Steel workers were shot to death in 1892 in Homestead, Pa. Railroad workers in the Pullman strike of 1894 were murdered. Coal miners at Ludlow, Colo., in 1914 and at Matewan, W.Va., in 1920 were massacred. Our freedoms and rights were paid for with their courage and blood.

American democracy arose because those consciously locked out of the system put their bodies on the line and demanded justice. The exclusion of the poor and the working class from the systems of power in this country was deliberate. The Founding Fathers deeply feared popular democracy. They rigged the system to favor the elite from the start, something that has been largely whitewashed in public schools and by a corporate media that has effectively substituted myth for history. Europe’s poor, fleeing to America from squalid slums and workhouses in the 17th and 18th centuries, were viewed by the privileged as commodities to exploit. Slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants, women, and men without property were not represented at the Constitutional Conventions. And American history, as Howard Zinn illustrated in “The People’s History of the United States,” is one long fight by the marginalized and disenfranchised for dignity and freedom. Those who fought understood the innate cruelty of capitalism.

“When you sell your product, you retain your person,” said a tract published in the 1880s during the Lowell, Mass., mill strikes. “But when you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress. Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism.”

As Noam Chomsky points out, the sentiment expressed by the Lowell millworkers predated Marxism.

At one time in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, a hundred and fifty years ago, working for wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery,” Chomsky told David Barsamian. “That was not an unusual position. That was the slogan of the Republican Party, the banner under which Northern workers went to fight in the Civil War. We’re against chattel slavery and wage slavery. Free people do not rent themselves to others. Maybe you’re forced to do it temporarily, but that’s only on the way to becoming a free person, a free man, to put it in the rhetoric of the day. You become a free man when you’re not compelled to take orders from others. That’s an Enlightenment ideal. Incidentally, this was not coming from European radicalism. There were workers in Lowell, Mass., a couple of miles from where we are. You could even read editorials in the New York Times saying this around that time. It took a long time to drive into people’s heads the idea that it is legitimate to rent yourself. Now that’s unfortunately pretty much accepted. So that’s internalizing oppression. Anyone who thinks it’s legitimate to be a wage laborer is internalizing oppression in a way which would have seemed intolerable to people in the mills, let’s say, a hundred and fifty years ago. … [I]t’s an [unfortunate] achievement [of indoctrination in our culture].”

Our consumer society and celebrity culture foster a frightening historical amnesia. We chatter mindlessly about something called the “American Dream.” And now that the oligarchic elite have regained control of all levers of power, and that dream is being exposed as a cruel hoax, we are being shoved back into the cage. There will be hell to pay to get back to where we were.

Slick public relations campaigns, the collapse of public education—nearly a third of the country is illiterate or semiliterate—and the rise of amoral politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who posed as liberals while they sold their souls for corporate money, have left us largely defenseless. The last vestiges of unionized workers in the public sector are reduced to protesting in Wisconsin for collective bargaining—in short, the ability to ask employers for decent working conditions. That shows how far the country has deteriorated. And it looks as though even this basic right to ask, as well as raise money through union dues, has been successfully revoked in Madison. The only hope now is more concerted and militant disruptions of the systems of power.

The public debate, dominated by corporate-controlled systems of information, ignores the steady impoverishment of the working class and absence of legal and regulatory mechanisms to prevent mounting corporate fraud and abuse. The airwaves are saturated with corporate apologists. They ask us why public-sector employees have benefits—sneeringly called “entitlements”—which nonunionized working- and middle-class people are denied. This argument is ingenious. It pits worker against worker in a mad scramble for scraps. And until we again speak in the language of open class warfare, grasping, as those who went before us did, that the rich will always protect themselves at our expense, we are doomed to a 21st century serfdom.

The pillars of the liberal establishment, which once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, have collapsed. The liberal church forgot that heretics exist. It forgot that the scum of society—look at the new Newt Gingrich—always wrap themselves in the flag and clutch the Christian cross to promote programs that mock the core teachings of Jesus Christ. And, for all their years of seminary training and Bible study, these liberal clergy have stood by mutely as televangelists betrayed and exploited the Gospel to promote bigotry, hatred and greed. What was the point, I wonder, of ordination? Did they think the radical message of the Gospel was something they would never have to fight for? Schools and universities, on their knees for corporate dollars and their boards dominated by hedge fund and investment managers, have deformed education into the acquisition of narrow vocational skills that serve specialized corporate interests and create classes of drone-like systems managers. They make little attempt to equip students to make moral choices, stand up for civic virtues and seek a life of meaning. These moral and ethical questions are never even asked. Humanities departments are vanishing as swiftly as the ocean’s fish stocks.

The electronic and much of the print press has become a shameless mouthpiece for the powerful and a magnet for corporate advertising. It makes little effort to give a platform to those who without them cannot be heard, instead diverting us with celebrity meltdowns, lavish lifestyle reports and gossip. Legitimate news organizations, such as NPR and The New York Times, are left cringing and apologizing before the beast—right-wing groups that hate “liberal” news organizations not because of any bias, but because they center public discussion on verifiable fact. And verifiable fact is not convenient to ideologues whose goal is the harnessing of inchoate rage and hatred.

Artists, who once had something to say, have retreated into elite enclaves, preoccupied themselves with abstract, self-referential garbage, frivolous entertainment and spectacle. Celebrities, working for advertising agencies and publicists, provide our daily mini-dramas and flood the airwaves with lies on behalf of corporate sponsors. The Democratic Party has sold out working men and women for corporate money. It has permitted the state apparatus to be turned over to corporate interests. There is no liberal institution left—the press, labor, culture, public education, the church or the Democratic Party—that makes any effort to hold back the corporate juggernaut. It is up to us.

We have tolerated the intolerant—from propaganda outlets such as Fox News to Christian fascists to lunatics in the Republican Party to Wall Street and corporations—and we are paying the price. The only place left for us is on the street. We must occupy state and federal offices. We must foment general strikes. The powerful, with no check left on their greed and criminality, are gorging on money while they busily foreclose our homes, bust the last of our unions, drive up our health care costs and cement into place a permanent underclass of the broken and the poor. They are slashing our most essential and basic services—including budgets for schools, firefighters and assistance programs for children and the elderly—so we can pay for the fraud they committed when they wiped out $14 trillion of housing wealth, wages and retirement savings. All we have left is the capacity to say “no.” And if enough of us say “no,” if enough of us refuse to cooperate, the despots are in trouble.

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms,” Frederick Douglass said in 1857. “The whole history of the progress of human history shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. ... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...”

Chris Hedges, a fellow at The Nation Institute and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of “Death of the Liberal Class.”

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This is why the "power point" was made - yes, an unfortunate choice of words destined to be pounced upon by those seeking advantage using whatever they can. But a careful reading and UNDERSTANDING of the points made by C Hedges in this essay indicates that power must be met with power.

This essay is important to read and absorb.

Wow - where to start? At first I thought this was a brilliant reply, but I realized that you're probably not Bob Chanin, and the Hedges piece summerizes your interpretation of Chanin's use of "power" in his speech.

Who are "they"? It seems like anyone who isn't highly liberal qualifies for this dubious distinction. Would you think that those who are not "they" are a minority? It almost validates Brooks' concept of the 30% coalition, and seemingly confirms that there is indeed a battle - "The only hope now is more concerted and militant disruptions of the systems of power."

Check out this quote, "Europe’s poor, fleeing to America from squalid slums and workhouses in the 17th and 18th centuries, were viewed by the privileged as commodities to exploit." Really? Where's the citation on that one? I guess it's myth that many came here for an opportunty, and many got one.

I do appreciate the artcle though. It is very interesting and educational aside from the "rant" aspect every liberal seems to incorporate.

Here's an interesting article on the progressive movement (it's brutally long).

http://www.americanprogress.org/issu...economics.html

I kind of get a laugh out of this, "Case in point: Responding to the currency problems of the late 19th century, progressives devised the Federal Reserve System to ensure a steady and stable money supply and to check inflation and excessive risk in the economy."

Who owns the Federal Reserve? Quick answer, the same Wall Street firms liberals rail on daily (aka "the rich" - many of the top 1% who hold 33% of the wealth). http://www.factcheck.org/askfactchec...erve_bank.html

Apparently, the progressives literally gave away the control of money, orginally given by the Constitution to the Congress (our elected officials), TO RICH WALL STREET BANKERS.

Please tell me I missed something?

"....yes, an unfortunate choice of words destined to be pounced upon by those seeking advantage using whatever they can."

This from the KING of pouncing. LOL. You have a whole thread dedicated to pouncing!

4:42 story on the Federal Reserve - and the progressives like to take claim of this?

http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve2.htm

More detail yet (do yourself a favor and turn your volume way down). Scroll down and read the history. Try not to think about Flounder at Dean Wormers desk (ok - for those that might not catch that one - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yroKI...eature=related

But I digress. Viola.

http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/BIGGESTSCAMINHISTORY.HTML

1908: THE MONETARY
COMMISSION
The initial response of Congress was
feeble. In 1908 it passed the Aldrich-
Vreeland Act, which was designed to
make the money supply somewhat more
elastic during emergency currency shortages.
This was not financial reform but a
temporary palliative. Another provision of
the law created the National Monetary
Commission. This body, composed of
nine senators and nine members of the
House of Representatives, had the responsibility
of making a comprehensive
study of the necessary and desirable
changes in the money and banking system
of the United States.
The chairman and dominant member
of the commission was Senator Nelson
W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, the single
most powerful member of the United
States Senate and a pillar of the eastern
establishment. Aldrich’s prominence and
power sharply reflected the political controversies
of the period. In the 1890s the
rural populists of the South and West
had challenged the institutions and the
power of finance and business, for they
felt that the wealth and "special privYleges"
enjoyed by the few were resulting
in the exploitation of the many.
In the first decade of the twentieth
century, the progressive movement more
broadly based than the populists,
better educated, more urban, and more
sophisticated in understanding and in using
political power -- won control of many state governments and elected
many senators and representatives.
Though the progressive movement comprised
a diversity of people and took a
variety of forms, its major purpose was
to limit and regulate the new aggregations
of economic and political power
which the growth of industrial America
had spawned. In the bitter controversies between
the progressives, who generally represented
the small businessman and the
small town and farming population, and the conservatives, who generally represented
the most powerful business and
banking groups of the large eastern cities, Aldrich was a central figure. The Rhode
Island senator was one of the most prominent
critics of the progressives, and the
progressives, in turn, found Aldrich to be
one of the most bitter and stalwart champions
of American conservatism. (The
marriage of Aldrich’s only daughter to
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., further convinced
many Americans that Aldrich was
the champion of the rich and financially
secure.)
In short, the need for financial reform
had become most evident just when
the progressives were attempting to limit
the power of the financial community.
While most bankers were interested in reforming
the financial structure of the
nation to make it more efficient and centralized,
the progressives were interested in reforming the financial structure by
making the banking system less powerful.The National Monetary Commission,
under Aldrich’s direction, was empowered
to undertake a broad study of
the nation’s financial needs; while the
bankers generally applauded the Commission,
the progressives viewed it with
suspicion, believing that anything that AIdrich
and the banking community supported
would serve their narrow interests
rather than the interests of the American
people.

http://www.bos.frb.org/about/pubs/begin.pdf
_________
The Federal Reserve System (also known as the Federal Reserve, and informally as The Fed) is the central banking system of the United States. It was created in 1913 with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, largely in response to a series of financial panics, particularly a severe panic in 1907.[2][3][4] Over time, the roles and responsibilities of the Federal Reserve System have expanded and its structure has evolved.[3][5] Events such as the Great Depression were major factors leading to changes in the system.[6] Its duties today, according to official Federal Reserve documentation, are to conduct the nation's monetary policy, supervise and regulate banking institutions, maintain the stability of the financial system and provide financial services to depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign official institutions.[7]

The Federal Reserve System's structure is composed of the presidentially appointed Board of Governors (or Federal Reserve Board), the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks located in major cities throughout the nation, numerous privately owned U.S. member banks and various advisory councils.[8][9][10] The FOMC is the committee responsible for setting monetary policy and consists of all seven members of the Board of Governors and the twelve regional bank presidents, though only five bank presidents vote at any given time. The responsibilities of the central bank are divided into several separate and independent parts, some private and some public. The result is a structure that is considered unique among central banks. It is also unusual in that an entity outside of the central bank, namely the United States Department of the Treasury, creates the currency used.[11]

According to the Board of Governors, the Federal Reserve is independent within government in that "its decisions do not have to be ratified by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branch of government." However, its authority is derived from the U.S. Congress and is subject to congressional oversight. Additionally, the members of the Board of Governors, including its chairman and vice-chairman, are chosen by the President and confirmed by Congress. The government also exercises some control over the Federal Reserve by appointing and setting the salaries of the system's highest-level employees. Thus the Federal Reserve has both private and public aspects.[12][13][14][15] The U.S. Government receives all of the system's annual profits, after a statutory dividend of 6% on member banks' capital investment is paid, and an account surplus is maintained. The Federal Reserve transferred $78.4 billion to the U.S. Treasury in 2010.[16]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System

_____________________________
Have you ever noticed that the dumb don't read - except selectively?

And the Fed should probably be audited.

name calling LMFAO, but I would agree that the Fed should be audited.

1.) Here is a website dedicated to progressives: http://www.americanprogress.org/aboutus

2.) In the link several posts above, said website claims the Federal Reserve as an "achievement". Well now, is it, or isn't it a progressive acheivement? I'm so confused.

3.) With the addition of the information supplied by Atypical - either the progressives were "duped" by Aldrich, or the genuinely believed they were doing something constructive, or the citation from www.americanprogress.org is not all together correct. That's seems like a fair take away, right?

4.) "the progressives were interested in reforming the financial structure by making the banking system less powerful" -- drum roll please........................ THEY MADE THE BANKING SYSTEM MORE POWERFUL. They "privatized" the US financial system!!! The one granted by THE CONSTITUTION to CONGRESS (our elected officials).

Atypical, please stop with the name calling. Have you seen any trend on my behalf? I mean, who really wants to be called dumb?