What is dead peasant insurance?
Large companies take out life insurance on their rank-and-file employees, so if the employee dies, the company gets all the money. The employee’s family gets nothing. In fact the employee usually doesn’t know about this. No surprise, WalMart has dead peasant insurance on its employees – here
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Keeping the pilot light on
Since the late 1970s and Ronald Reagan’s inauguration we’ve seen supply side economics, deregulation, an explosive growth of free markets, the sapping of union power.
The Left’s objective is still vague. Liberalism gets its spirit from equity, justice, and collective action. That spirit is all but broken, witness the precipitous inequalities in America, witness the virtual disappearance from our language of terms like “the common good,” witness unions at their all-time low memberships, witness the Supreme Court retreating from enforcement of anti-trust laws.
During the Bush administration, the Left’s tolerance melted into passivity. Energetic leftists of the 1960s, once in the media spotlight, grew wealthy and cautious.
Not just that. Any spirit on the left was also broken down into fractions. Watch a peace march, a good place to find leftists, and you saw a sea of different banners, for as many different causes. All of them good. But there is no center.
Ten years ago, the left reached crisis point. Since then, an agitated search for what’s to blame.
It’s the money. The left needs to find something else besides wealth.
Today, everybody in America sleeps safe under a star, the idea that one day, they will be rich.
Americans navigate their whole lives by that star. So commercialism dominates everything – and it has saturated even the left. Commercialism everywhere. Look around – commercials even dominate left-wing blogs.
And in Congress, too. Too often, Democrats sit quietly, waiting for the lobbyists to call.
Sold out.
This President is new. But which way to turn?
No fallen flag to grab up. Well, what have Democrats been doing?
In Congress, the first order of business is the economic collapse – undoing the money mess created by the previous administration. Rebuilding our infrastructure. Rebuilding our schools. – But all of those have the tone of cleaning up somebody’s old wreckage. Fixing health care. Job by necessary job. But that is not ‘forward.’
It looks like there is no unified ‘forward.’
The heart of the matter is that there is no new ideology.
Of course there’s leftist commentators. Talk show liberals who churn the air like windmills.
But no coherent new theory, to unify.
Except here.
Only on this blog can you read whether exploitation is ethical. Only here can you read about the contradiction between the American workplace – undemocratic and authoritarian – and the surrounding democracy. Read why social inequality is a killer (there’s new scientific evidence). About the long shadow of materialism. On widening corruption. Here the zero-sum concept is explained. Read how, in the long run, exorbitant greed may threaten democracy itself. A brief summary of opposing Right and Left philosophies here and here.
Opinion is power.
But every year for the last 30 years, debate has faded; the left almost became mute. Liberals have avoided theory confrontations. Not in Congress, not at beer parties.
Every time that happened, the left’s light dimmed.
Left ideology. This blog is where we keep the pilot light on.
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How the Right dominates
People are fascinated by conflict.
The Right wing is energetically shoving blame for the national economy onto the Left. One of the right’s bullies, Bill O’Reilly, deals out his thrashings on t.v.
Bill O’Reilly runs an ostentatious tyranny. It is the source of the public’s fascination with the Right. In this particular episode, Barney Frank is put through the meat grinder.
The Left considers itself too nice for this bruiser style. The Left simply doesn’t have head-crushers like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. There is no Fox News on the left, and right-wing radio shows vastly outnumber left-wing. The Left thinks that being morally good should be enough to prevail.
Like all good theater, this domination is a performance. Watch the body language, and deconstruct how O’Reilly crafts drama with his arm-flinging in this YouTube.
Surviving a reactionary
One look at this man and you know you’re dead: here.
Civil war looming within the Democratic party?
The Democratic party has lost its soul. Here’s why.
If our children are being raised on Ayn Rand, we’re in trouble
- here’s why.
Poll: foreign war
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