BartBlog

In 1963, Hannah Arendt wrote a 368-page book called On Revolution. It is a hard slog to get through but basically boils down to one sentence. “It takes a village to raise a democracy.”

And yet here we are, in America, almost 70 years later — and only allowed to have our say once every four years, for perhaps 30 seconds spent in electronic voting booths that are rigged — if we are even allowed to vote at all.

Professor Arendt, you were living in dreamland. In America today, our much-touted yeoman citizen-voice of freedom simply doesn’t exist.  Republicans tell us to vote for Ken dolls.  Democrats tell us to vote for anyone who isn’t Bernie, Elizabeth or Tulsi.

Instead, we gots numerous public relations firms, endless commercials and whole bunches of media-savvy billionaire pundits telling us how to vote and even what to think. “Vote for me,” the guys at the top always tell us. “We will stop abortion, stop gay marriage, stop affirmative action.” Seriously? Those three agenda items were Jesus’s major concerns? Give me a break.

Meanwhile the guys at the top of the American pyramid scheme are stealing our money, our jobs and our values — while laughing all the way to the bank as millions die in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, the slums of Mumbai and Brazil, and the homeless camps on the fringes of San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas and Washington DC. https://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2019/11/homelessness-in-dallas-dangerous.html

You don’t have to read Hannah Arendt to know which way the wind blows in America right now — but her major premise is still spot-on even today. Democracy can only truly exist at the village level. We’ve been conned. Democracy in America hasn’t existed in over a century.

However.

Professor Arendt’s ideal of the citizen-democrat might still be a possibility, even in this modern age of billionaire politicians, mega-corporate lobbyists and electoral pyramid schemes. We might still be able to demand “government by the people, of the people and for the people” — governent by individual town-hall meetings like she advocated for, where everyone has his or her say and we aren’t kicked around by power-mad leaders in a top-down Ponzi scheme where we at the bottom lose all.

But if that is ever going to happen, we gotta start organizing locally. Join a union. Join a town-hall meeting. Speak up. Participate. Join the freaking PTA!

And perhaps our town hall meetings could also be electronic. Don’t laugh. Perhaps this new utopia could be called “FaceBook”. Or “Twitter”. If only. If only FaceBook and Twitter weren’t part of the current top-down pyramid scheme too.

What do you think?

PS:  Professor Arendt also went on to say that freedom is a really big deal — even more important than food or shelter.  And yet RepublDems tamper with our freedom even more than they tamper with our food and our shelter.  Forget that.  Why can’t we have all three?

     Some of us are sick and tired of being at the bottom of America’s pyramid Ponzi schemes.

 

According to Gayle Greene in her excellent book Insomniac, sleep is very important. According to me, I do my very best thinking in my sleep. So when I went over to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco recently to hear a lecture by Peter Dale Scott, I couldn’t really understand what he was talking about — until I slept on it. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520259966/insomniac

Scott said that American history has been composed largely of various social movements. Even the American Revolution was more of a social movement than a war. “For instance, when the majority of Americans finally got fed up with all that wealth disparity during the Gilded Age, they initiated the graduated income tax back in 1909.”

This tax was originally designed to cut wealthy Robber Barons down to size — except that now it has become graduated in the opposite direction. You and I pay more. Billionaires pay less.

And after a good night’s sleep last night, another idea just dawned on me with regard to current social movements here in America. Let’s take a look at our current voting system for instance. What do you think about that? America’s wealthy elite have hacked our voting machines, smothered us with commercials paid for by Citizens United, gerrymandered us like pretzels, bought off Congress, stacked the Supreme Court, put a yes-man in the White House and even physically crossed a whole bunch of us off the voters’ rolls.

And yet.

Even despite all these vote-suppression tactics, Americans still arise from the ground up to vote with our feet. We march. We sign petitions. We boycott. We picket. We strike. We turn to alternative news sources. We even sometimes begin to think for ourselves. Yikes!  https://environmentaljusticetv.wordpress.com/2017/12/04/derrick-jensen-keynote-speech-earth-at-risk-conference-2014/

And another social movement that is developing here in America is a new anti-war surge. “You know you want it,” our leaders tell us. “That war on Iran is gonna be even better than Christmas morning!” No, it’s not. We Americans are finally becoming sick and tired of having our money spent on oil-baron piracy in the Middle East and our kids coming home in a box. And so an anti-war social movement is gradually building up again too. https://alphahistory.com/vietnamwar/feel-like-im-fixin-to-die-rag-1969/

According to Scott, however, the biggest American social movement of all is about to happen and is now in the works. Consensus is about to be reached here — no matter what the pundits tell us or Washington decides.

“And what movement is that?” you might ask. The climate crisis movement. Apparently when all our forests burn down, we can no longer breathe safely and our toes curl up from the heat, Americans are finally going to reach a consensus and join together in a movement that will cross political, regional, religious, class and even racial lines. And then Americans are going to truly vote with their feet.

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Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you’re at it, please buy my books. https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Stillwater/e/B00IW6O1RM

 

  

Boy howdy, Trump has truly pissed off the Arab world this time. “It’s as if, back in 1776, that crazy King George III of England had somehow managed to pop a cap on General George Washington,” said a friend of mine yesterday. “People are furious in the Middle East right now. There’s no do-overs here. The colonists are truly up in arms now!” https://resistancenews.org/2020/01/08/iran-strikes-us-bases-in-iraq-to-avenge-martyr-soleimani-threatens-to-target-israel-and-us-bases-in-the-region-al-manar/

That bad? “Yeah.”

It seems that Iranians are sick and tired of “Taxation without Representation” when it comes to their freedom (and their oil too, of course). Who can blame them? John Hancock would have also hated sanctions. If some crazy monarch on the other side of the ocean had murdered Hancock’s top general and sanctioned all his tea, he too would have left Valley Forge and crossed the Strait of Hormuz.

But enough about analogies. You get the point. It has been absolute insanity for Trump to piss off the entire Middle East (and Russia, China and the rest of the world as well) by murdering General Soleimani in cold blood — especially considering America’s own history of demanding self-rule.

And now Trump has got almost everyone in West Asia shouting “Give me liberty or give me death!”

And this new colonial Revolution east of Suez is also bad news for you and me too. Why? Because Trump hasn’t even considered the fact that his monarchy has now driven America twenty-two (22) trillion dollars into debt — and Trump simply doesn’t have the budget to go around murdering everyone in the Middle East without sanctioning us Americans right down to our teabags as well. https://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/06/the-economic-risks-of-trumps-reckless-assassination/

“You gotta pass the smog test!” the department of motor vehicles screams at me. So I obediently drive my sweet little red 1990 Toyota Tercel down to the local gas station — and it passes the emissions test with flying colors.

Good job, little car!

But then the “check engine” light won’t turn off. Defective part. “Sorry but they don’t make that part any more,” sez my mechanic. So my car fails the smog test after all. But am I really ready to let my little red car die? Just like that? After 30 long loyal years of faithful service? What would Greta Thunberg do?

Of course the right thing to do is to give up my little red car — and help save the human race. But then I look around me. No one else is giving up any of their cars.

And no one else is giving up their “wars” either. War is the number-one polluter and cause of climate crisis on the planet today — but I don’t see anyone in Washington DC volunteering to give up their F-35s. https://www.globalresearch.ca/battle-liberate-idlib-province-us-supported-terrorists/5699039

Perhaps we should make it a mandatory requirement that all those thousands and thousands of gas-guzzling toxin-emitting made-in-America tanks, bomber jets, air-craft carriers, drones, space-force launchers, nuclear missiles, etc. be forced to take a smog test too!

    And speaking of whether or not to die peacefully, we Americans are not being given that choice — but Medicare-for-all would go a long way toward solving that problem, right?

     And speaking of all those toxic, smog-emitting tanks, bomber jets, nuclear missiles and other gross weapons of death?  They have all been out there on the front lines both here and abroad, faithfully winning all sorts of “wars”.  They have won various “wars” on Afghans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Central Americans, Syrians, Americans, Palestinians and Yemenis — just to name a few.  The only catch to all these victories is that the winners have only been the greedy and shameless war-profiteers who started them for fun and profit in the first place. https://resistancenews.org/2020/01/04/nasrallahs-statement-about-qasem-soleimanis-murder/

     It’s only average Americans like you and me who have lost all these wars.