‘A hungry man is not a free man’
America is the biggest exporter of food.
Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture reveals that at home, 4% of American households are going hungry for lack of money (that’s 4.4 million households), and another 12% are food-insecure: they eat if they don’t pay rent or other bills.
American poverty is a multifaceted disaster. Why do we export liberty and abundance to other lands when America is not taking care of its own?
We have had a conservative leadership. Many conservatives simply don’t want to take care of our poor. More welfare, according to Social Darwinists, just encourages the poor and then they won’t work. These conservatives are proud of their ruthlessness.
Those conservatives who do believe in helping also believe that the only help should be in the form of charity.
Many conservatives believe that charity is the answer to poverty.
(This is obviously wrong, because if charity really worked, there would be no more homeless and hungry.)
What’s the catch?
The catch is the conservative mindset that charity should only be given to people who are ‘deserving.’ (And conservatives insist on making that judgment themselves.)
So we have 18% of American children living in poverty, and their numbers are growing. We’d rather give charity to foreigners. Conservatives are giving charity selectively because of their prejudice against the poor. — These kids’ parents are welfare cases, so are not ‘deserving.’
But a nation with many hungry millions cannot be a strong nation. A hungry person is not a free person (originally Adlai Stevenson’s dictum) because hunger is coercive. A well-fed person can explore his options, read, and act as an informed member of a democracy. But a hungry person is a problem: he’s distracted, fearful, resentful, and he must look for food.
Unequally distributed hunger creates a division in a society.
Next: in a dangerous dog-eat-dog world, which conservatives insist, there’s Darwinian competition between nations. Conservatives keep saying: to survive, we have to be top dog. But how can we be top dog, with these internal divisions? Outsiders, looking at us, certainly see us weakened by them.
I’m not saying conservatives are rational.
Taking care of our own would heal us, naturally. But fathoms deep in the conservative mind is some dark, lurching logic that weakens us. Something even stronger than the fear of outside threats prevents them helping their fellow Americans.
An absurd calculus. It means that while America is the biggest exporter of food, we have hunger. We have poverty and blight. From the outside it cannot look like America is the land of the free.
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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.
The left reached another crisis point. Since then, an agitated search for what’s to blame.
It’s partly 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. Lefties worry about their credit score and worry about security.
Sold out.
This President has abandoned any serious atteempts at facing up to the banks. It looks like loss of nerve.
Which way to turn?
After Obama took the presidency, the first order of business was the economic collapse – undoing the money mess created by the Bush administration. Rebuilding our infrastructure. Rebuilding our schools. – But all of those had the tone of cleaning up somebody’s old wreckage. Fixing health care. Job by necessary job. But all that is not ‘forward.’
It’s partly that Liberals have lost their ‘forward.’ This is as deep a crisis as our submission to Wall Street. It is a collective loss of nerve.
There’s no fallen flag to grab up in the Liberal movement because there is no longer any flag.
Congress has no unified ‘forward.’ The American people have no unified forward. Once, we had the Occupy Movement. It suffered from lack of any forward agenda, and caved to police action. So now liberals talk about their frightening college debts or get fearful about retirement. Since we have no more effective restriction on exorbitant interest rates, they sap anybody’s courage.
The heart of the matter is that there is no new ideology.
There’s few 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 whetherexploitation 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 democracyitself. A brief summary of opposing Right and Left philosophies here andhere.
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, dealt out his thrashings on t.v.
Right wing commentators run an ostentatious tyranny. It is the source of the public’s fascination with the Right.
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, maybe showing a tolerant sense of humor, should be enough to prevail.
It is not, and the Left has no real idea how to push back. So the Left, with its natural compassion, its collective action, its trust, its usury laws, are all being put through the meat grinder.
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’swhy.
Left Blog
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