Universal Establishment against the Resistance

At TRNN, Charles Derber talks about the need to universalize the resistance to fight the establishment. My comment:

"...on the one hand, this universalization, but on the other hand, are we becoming more fragmented?... How does that go together, on the one hand the universalization and on the other hand this fragmentation?" 

The establishment, also known as the system, is unified and highly successful in fragmenting the working people of the world. They use identity and social issues to splinter voters into opposing groups so they are disinclined to organize significant resistance. For example, the Republican and Democratic Parties don't particularly care abortion; so long as individual politicians can get the medical care they seek for their families, they aren't concerned if poor women have access to abortion or reproductive care. They care about policies that their donors want. Abortion is useful because it polarizes their electorate and generates a mock conflict between the pro and anti sides (like pro-wrestling) which distracts the real policy intent of the Republican and Democratic Parties which is to always advance the concentration and transfer of power/wealth to their donors. 

The key to resist voter fragmentation is not to ignore the differences but to unify to respect these differences and advocate for each others' rights to those positions. The poor, brown, white, low wage, immigrant, women, LGBT and other groups are not outsiders; they are insiders, part of the group. In this country, they are all known as Americans but workers should not overlook the same systemic pattern of deliberate fragmentation that is also exercised abroad. The system uses competition between native and foreign workers to sow division internationally. The entire point of corporate/trade globalization is to create wage competition to force down production costs. Worker unity must also cross national borders if the establishment/system is to be contained.

Patterns within

Audio interview at Truthout with two activists addressing economic issues in relation to race. It's curious that while they can see the policy of wealth from black communities, they never apply that same dynamic on a larger scale... other social divisions and economies as a whole. My comment:

"the actual function of how these companies operate is built on the extraction of wealth from people of color" is a microcosm of all economies; economies are hierarchical structures (think pyramid) where everyone in the higher tiers feed off the labor of workers who produce the goods (base). The agriculture sector is an example where farmers, harvesters and food processors/packers literally produce the goods from which workers in all other sectors feed. Based on size alone, workers should have the most power in any economy. Unfortunately, workers are susceptible to division by any number of classifications including color (black, brown, tan, white), sexuality (LGBT, feminism), religion (abortion/prayer/anti-semitism/Islam), and legal status. In the U.S., both major political parties actively incite division amongst workers to counter organized resistance - the 'great' Democratic-Republican political battles are mere puppet shows behind which the same operators pull all the strings.

The reform efforts of your guests are laudable but considering the systemic corruption at the bedrock of the economic/political system, they are only relieving the symptoms, not rooting out the cause.

Culture of Harassment

NPR review Hulu's adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale ends with this:

In a country where sexual harassment scandals regularly land on the front page, the patriarchy of The Handmaid's Tale doesn't feel so far-fetched, which is the most horrific thing about it.

In light of the ousting of Bill O'Reilly from Fox News over sexual harassment, Alisyn Camerota of CNN recently talked about the harassment culture at Fox News. So three questions:

- Do news women have any responsibility to expose the news that they are subject to sexual harassment?

- Some these women at Fox News - Megan Kelly, Gretchen Carlson, Alisyn Camerota - were at the top of their careers at the time. Yet they did not feel they could safely challenge the harassment culture of Fox News. What about that culture made it so irresistible? 

- If women who are at or near the top of the power structure like the Fox News women can't challenge/expose sexual harassment, what tools do women with less power have to counter/defend from harassment?

Sexual harassment is also a mechanism of economic division - the divide and conquer strategy by demeaning women to a lesser status. United we stand, divided we fall.

Division

Comment at TRNN segment with Gerald Horne discussing the economic aspects of 'War on Immigrants:

Yes. But 'divide and conquer' is not a strategy unique to the U.S. Gender stratification is one of the oldest divisions used to exert social control and extract labor from a 'sub' class of people. The three major Abrahamic religions all assign women to a lower status than men; the major eastern cultures also tend to subjugate women relative to men. The body politic of the day uses social issues to the same effect; sexuality, race, class, immigrants, religion and even abortion rights among others are used to divide Americans into in-group and out-group. These internal conflicts are all staged to distract us from the massive transfer of power and wealth exercised by policy makers. 

Right wing media is dangerous for the lies they promulgate. They may be even more dangerous for the division they sow. The left is renown for its lack of organization and division; this is often seen as a strength. It is now necessary to pool this division so the cacophony of voices can speak towards a common goal.

Another economic pro-anti-immigrant lobby is the private prison industry. 'Illegal' immigrants are are not dangerous or unruly criminals so they are cheap to contain in mass housing - to the private prison industry, this means lots of $$ and profits. 

Update: Division in the form of segregation is costly in crime, economics, culture and likely health as described by NPR.

Cult of Fear

This was intended as a comment on a Truthout.org post about how politicians, especially Republicans, use fear to manipulate voters into supporting them. However, my argument got a little too complex for a simple comment, so its only appearance is here:

Marketing appeals to fear and sex to sell because human biology is programmed to respond to these emotions. Monotheistic religions capitalize on fear in two ways: (1) Religions justify fear by providing an object – women are a constant threat to the power of men; their sexuality is their most fearsome weapon and must be brought to heel and under the control of men. (2) A fearsome all powerful, all knowing being has all the answers. But those answers are too much for men’s small brains and most men can’t communicate with the big dude anyway. Only special people (kings, emperors, popes, and the like) get to translate for him.

In modern times, religion teaches believers to trust their church authority (most people don’t read primary religious texts) over what can be objectively measured (faith over science). When personal faith is imbued in the words of an authority figure, it’s easy to transfer that trust into other people who present similar absolute certainty (for example, Rush Limbaugh is never wrong). Enter right-wing media which gives self-aggrandizing braggarts enormous forums and infrastructure to in essence to form cults (like Fox News under Roger Ailes). As bad as Democrats are, they have not codified the ideological Cult of Fear that Republicans so effectively used to ensnare their followers. Republican followers are told to fear women for taking men’s jobs and dignity; fear immigrants for taking jobs; fear Muslims for terrorism; fear liberals for taking their guns (but not to fear guns); fear science/scientists for their ‘self-interested agendas’; fear President Obama for being a foreign born Muslim; fear black people for existing; fear Obamacare for insurance mandate; fear the poor for needing social services; fear veterans for using the VA… In the face of such terrifying scenarios, cultists are told Republican politicians know how to keep them safe from all these threats.

Fear is the defensive emotion to the unknown. That’s why Republicans fear science. Science is a system of knowledge that seeks to determine patterns capable of accurately predicting the future. In other words, science answers questions about the feared unknown. The question is how to stage a cult intervention on the scale of roughly half the U.S. population.

Update: Yes, evangelical cults exists and they can be difficult to escape from.

Not only right wing media

Comment posted at Crooks&Liars:

Stoking fear and resentment is the major source of division in the U.S. body politic. Racism, immigrant bashing, religiosity, bigotry, homophobia/transphobia, feminism/abortion/reproductive issues etc. can be seen as propaganda. They are social definitions that divide people into 'in' and 'out' groups. When you are distracted fighting your 'out' group, you don't notice when the government changes/enacts/enforces dry policy that takes from you and gives to the rich. Right wing media excels at marketing fear but the rest of the media supports divisive culture/political distinctions with its constant emphasis on conflict.

Stand your ground abortions

If a pregnant woman doesn't want to be pregnant, isn't the embryo/fetus a parasite trespassing on the bodily autonomy of its host? If that's the case, does the woman have the right to 'stand her ground' against the trespasser and defend her bodily autonomy by any reasonable, including fire power? Would doing this in her home doubly justify 'standing her ground'? - after all the 'unborn' is trespassing on both the bodily autonomy of its host and the property of its host.

Just wondering how the rights of each entity is ranked according to the law...

Privilege

When rioting broke out during the protests of Freddie Gray's death (he sustained life threatening injuries while in the custody of the Baltimore police), a mother was caught on tape disciplining her son when she found him participating in the unrest. She apparently told a reporter, “That's my only son and at the end of the day I don't want him to be a Freddie Gray." This is a prime example of white privilege... how often do white parents need to train their kids to be fully conciliatory to police under all circumstances?

And not to diminish the African-American experience, this also brought to mind a recent report of a Maryland couple getting in trouble for allow their children to 'free range'. Privilege came to mind again.

As people, young and old, we all want the privilege of safety wherever we happen to be. Women want to be free of cat calls when walking on a public street; children want to be free (of predators) to play safely anywhere they choose to; people of all stripes want to be free of harassment (police and otherwise) when they are not doing anything illegal and free of excessive force when restrained for any reason; everyone should be free of fear that they may be targeted by a gun totting second amendment 'supporter'. And we should have the expectation of freedom from electronic monitoring unless specifically and explicitly permitted through legitimate and open judicial review.

It is a poor reflection on our founding fathers that rights once conferred by the Constitution are now privileges afforded to select citizens.

Two revolutionary ideas for the civic minded

Digby recently brought up two issues in her blog, Hullabaloo, and I thought: why not try this!

(1) There's a problem in this country with low voter turnout and voter ID laws and expensive and exhaustive investigations into voter fraud do not help. So here's a way around the problem...

-allow any self identified adult citizen who walks past any polling place to vote (polling places would have ballots for all municipalities within some reasonable radius)
-stamp the hand of the voter afterwards to prevent double voting - this works for nightclubs!

At least test the idea. The major source of fraud is people lying about citizenship; outside municipality voting would be another (smaller) source of fraud. This would only be a problem in areas with high immigrant populations... one solution is to have fewer polling places in these areas or make them less visible... but most people tend to be truthful so this is probably not a big problem. It would be interesting to test... two towns with similar population and demographics: one with standard pre-registered voters and one open to all citizens - how many eligible citizens actually vote and how do common candidates do in each situation?


(2) Conflict in the Middle East is ramping up again with ISIS and worries about Iran developing nuclear weapons (and Israel's war drums don't calm the water) amp up the tension. So how about we try something different...

-since it is often women who resist war, why not give them some economic power over their male warmongers? treat women as heads of households in a major humanitarian effort... they must apply in person with their dependent children to register for benefits. need a simple inexpensive and permanent marker of registry... perhaps tattoo a dot on a hand? benefits could be tailored to the needs of the population and adjusted as needed to minimize the possible influence of male authority figures.

This would likely be cheaper in dollars, lives, long term veterans' benefits and international esteem. If the alternative is war, isn't peace worth trying... even something completely wacky?