From Business Insider, one of the few articles I've seen actually taking Tara Reade's allegations seriously:
A former neighbor of Joe Biden's accuser Tara Reade has come forward to corroborate her sexual-assault account, saying Reade discussed the allegations in detail in the mid-1990s
I think the Democratic Party has some serious soul searching to do right now. Seriouy. While I understand that accusations aren't proof, I honestly question the morals of a party and its voters who willingly support someone with credible accusations of sexual harassment and assault leveled against them.
While most were ignoring this story and telling everyone that there's no alternative to Joe Biden so you have to support him no matter what, others were digging into this story to find out if anything out there could corroborate it. And guess what? There is. Within a matter of weeks, there are two more people who have gone on the record to say they were told about the incident and a video of what may be her mom calling the Larry King show for advice on where to turn for help besides the press.
After the Me Too and Times Up movement picked up steam, I thought people were finally going to start taking this kind of stuff seriously. But instead, it seems that it's no longer fashionable. People were happy to use this movement to try and stop a conservative Supreme Court nomination, but aren't so keen to us it to try and stop a liberal presidential nomination. Our country has consistently rewarded bad behaviour from white men, and there's little to stop it from continuing to happen except for people getting fed up with the hypocrisy and corruption of the ruling class and those who own and control the economy.
In this case, the rank and file of the Democratic Party need to do what the leadership simply refuses to do and demand that Biden step down. There are a host of candidates who are not only better, they don't have credible assault allegations hanging around their necks. Otherwise, there's little separating the Democratic Party from the immorality, hypocrisy, and corruption that they claim to abhor in the Republican Party. Because if they're not fighting against this, they're enabling it.
Maybe it's my previous interest in religion, philosophy, and ethics before becoming interested in politics that makes me feel so strongly about stuff like this, but the lack of concern and investigation into this, let alone any moral or pragmatic arguments against this situation, deeply disturbs me.
American society had a couple of years of being educated in the objectification and abuse of women, particularly by men in power, and the importance of the need to believe them and take them seriously only to then have all of that ignored or put on hold because of the insidiousness of lesser evilism in the support of the ghost of moderate neoliberalism. I mean seriously, what the fuck?
Monday, April 27, 2020
Friday, April 10, 2020
good friday
Today's Good Friday, the day we reflect on the death of Jesus. What does Jesus' death mean? We're told it means salvation, new life, peace. To be honest, it's a bit hard for me to understand what that means on a deep, theological level. But Jesus' death on the cross can also act as a template for our own lives.
Jesus had a mission, to seek and to save what was lost (Luke 19:10). And when Jesus went out, he went out to teach, to heal, to feed, and to share God's love by loving others, which in itself is radical thing. But his faith, his love, and his compassionate action were threatening to many, from those among the elite to even some among the common people. And they all eventually tried in their own way, whether out of fear, ignorance, misunderstanding, ill will, or attachment to tradition, to take away these treasures he possessed. But try as they may, he wouldn't give them up, even under the threat of death. He held tight to his faith, his love, and his compassion for all of humanity, all the way down to the least among us, and he willingly suffered death on the cross rather than lose them to fear, hatred, selfishness, and inaction.
In essence, his life wasn't just about himself, it was ultimately about his relationship to others, to the whole world, and to God. You could say that his message was "Not me, Us."
His life was an example to us, a mandala, a living tapestry meant to inspire and hearten us. His life was like a lamp shining forth the bright light of hope into the future in order to guide us and help us not lose our way to the kingdom of heaven, that joyful world we wish to one day see, born out of love in action.
Jesus had a mission, to seek and to save what was lost (Luke 19:10). And when Jesus went out, he went out to teach, to heal, to feed, and to share God's love by loving others, which in itself is radical thing. But his faith, his love, and his compassionate action were threatening to many, from those among the elite to even some among the common people. And they all eventually tried in their own way, whether out of fear, ignorance, misunderstanding, ill will, or attachment to tradition, to take away these treasures he possessed. But try as they may, he wouldn't give them up, even under the threat of death. He held tight to his faith, his love, and his compassion for all of humanity, all the way down to the least among us, and he willingly suffered death on the cross rather than lose them to fear, hatred, selfishness, and inaction.
In essence, his life wasn't just about himself, it was ultimately about his relationship to others, to the whole world, and to God. You could say that his message was "Not me, Us."
His life was an example to us, a mandala, a living tapestry meant to inspire and hearten us. His life was like a lamp shining forth the bright light of hope into the future in order to guide us and help us not lose our way to the kingdom of heaven, that joyful world we wish to one day see, born out of love in action.
normalize diversity
I know I don't post about this kind of stuff much, but every once in a while I see something that makes me feel like I need to because I forget that not everyone is like most of my friends and accepting of other people. So, I get that we live in a cis-normative society—a society where people outside of rigid binaries like man/woman, gay/straight, cis/transgender, etc. face marginalization and violence for being who they are and must present themselves like some kind of exotic animal. Cis people expect it, and many feel justified in reacting violently if they are "surprised." The amount of hate and violence directed towards LGBTQIA+ individuals is astounding. But it shouldn't matter what gender or sex you are or somebody else is. Seriously. If you find it weird, shocking, or offensive that someone is different than you expect or wish them to be, then it’s up to you to educate yourself and learn to appreciate and enjoy the diversity of people in this world. We need to stop making excuses for this kind of belief and behaviour and deprogram ourselves of what society has taught us about rigid binaries and what's "normal." If you find someone you're fond of and attracted to, then explore ways to enjoy being together. It's not a difficult concept.
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
what's capitalism got to do with it?
Instead of doing my school work today, I decided to elaborate upon an idea I found in a tweet because I think it's important.
One of the main reasons that people like me always take aim at capitalism when criticizing social phenomena, including our political system, is the basic Marxian concept of base/superstructure relations. It's the idea that a capitalist state and its ruling class (political superstructure) are a manifestation or reflection of underlying economic social relations (economic base), where the few exploit the many for profit. In the US, we can see empirical examples of political inequality as it manifests out of inherently unequal social relations of production. [1] But you don't really need in-depth studies to see things like, maybe there's something wrong when one person is making $8 million an hour while the majority of workers in the US make less than $20 an hour, half make less than $15 including most of the "essential workers" working right now [2], and over 10 million people have filed for unemployment in 2 weeks and are unsure how they're going to pay for things like rent, healthcare, and food. [3] Some think that a tweak to the system here, or a higher tax there, will fix economic inequality and a host of oppressive isms that have been built into the system from its inception.
But critics like Marx, seeking answers to similar problems and a better alternative, uncovered some of the underlying logical contractions inherent to how capitalism functions, as well as the historical violence, oppression, and theft that heralded the beginning of this relatively new mode of production. The short version is, countries with emerging mercantile markets enclosed local common land; colonized other lands; stole land, wealth, and resources; and exploited slave labour in what Marx called the process of 'primitive accumulation.' [4] Then after the industrial revolution, those in power further forced their own people off of communal land and into the cities to work in the factories under new social relations, one in which they were forced to sell their labour-power to someone for a wage, not fully realizing that the person who now owns that labour-power owns the products of that labour and all the extra value added by their labour. [5] So first they accumulated by theft, then they accumulated by the exploitation of wage workers once feudalism gave way to mercantilism and then capitalism. And into that system was planted all of the racism and sexism of the time because they fostered this growing system. Racism was used to dehumanize other people so that their slave labour and colonial exploitation was accepted by the colonizers. Sexism was used to keep women at home to do all the unpaid labour of raising the next generation of workers (children) as well as sustain the current generation (husbands), allowing the ownership class to keep the maximum amount of the wealth their workers created for themselves as less was needed to materially maintain the workers thanks to this unpaid, supportive labour. (Wages are essentially a fraction of the total value created in the labour process that's given back to the worker by the capitalist so they can materially reproduce their labour-power, i.e., live.) The US was no exception as it followed the basic model of the rest of Europe. It was based in part on Enlightenment ideals and English and Roman political models in which white, male property owners had the most freedom and power. Combine that with the colonization of the Americas and theft of land and resources of the native inhabitants, slave labour from Africa, and the support role women played predominantly in the background, and you have the soil in which our system grew. It, too, was built on slave labour as well as gender discrimination. And once both black people and women were somewhat liberated from the worst of their oppression, they were allowed to go to school and into the workplace and eventually vote, but even there the racism and sexism continued, so that they were marginalized and paid less for the same work and were often used to suppress wages overall.
As more and more entered to workforce, either out of necessity or desire, they were confronted with the same discrimination and were paid less; and since they would work for less, white men now had to not only compete with each other and with immigrants, but the other half of the population that had previously been excluded from the workplace and the electorate, and who worked for a fraction of what they could make. This only served to enhance the animosity that many white men had towards women and people of colour. Not only were cultural biases in play, but the system actively pitted them against one another because it helped suppress wages and maximize profits while simultaneously creating more factionalism within the electorate, further diluting the electoral power of workers. And this factionalism was intentional, being expressly created by the founders from the very beginning. Like most forms of government centered around private property rights (a central tenet of capitalism), the basic principle behind the establishment of our form of representative democracy had more to do with the ruling elites wanting to protect the small minority of property owners (including themselves) from the majority of the propertyless than anything else. As James Madison put it in Federalist No. 10, "… the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society." [6] So the ownership of property (which at the beginning included black people and to some extent women) and the social relations arising out of that formed the logical and material economic basis of our society, a basis that was in turn reflected in our political system that was embedded with systemic mechanisms of racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of factionalism and inequality. So while we are still seduced by flowery language of the Declaration of Independence that we are all equal and live in a land of opportunity, to think that a few extra regulations or taxes can fix all of this is naive. It can certainly mitigate the worst of things and provide what we call 'social safety nets,' but even much of those have either been privatized, minimized, or means tested, creating a system of bureaucratic hurdles and public shaming for those who qualify. And then there are the ways this inequality manifests itself in housing, education, the criminal justice system, etc., all of which contain tiers of inequality that are further built upon this socioeconomic foundation. In the end, working people as a class, splintered into various factions that can be more easily managed and pitted against one another, bear the brunt of this exploitation and inequality so that a few may thrive and steer the course of history.
In essence, the US is a capitalist, oligarchical republic. It papers over this reality with ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy, but crises like this poke huge holes in that paper covering, revealing what's truly underneath. And people like Garrett Felber are 100% right when they point out things like, "Coronavirus was just the fuse in the tinderbox. The U.S. nation state is the cause. You don't get one man making 8 million an hour while 10 million file for unemployment from a bug in the system. This is a half-century of privatization and gutted out social welfare built on a permanent war economy, mass consumption, global capitalism, and mass criminalization, on a foundation of settler colonialism and slavery." [7] For the US to truly move away from its oligarchical political-economic makeup and towards real democracy in which social wealth is more equitably managed, it has to fundamentally alter the makeup of its mode of production through a radical economic transformation in which the exploitation, alienation, and commodity fetishism of the present system are gradually eliminated via a more socialized mode of production. And that not only requires fundamental structural changes, it requires the organization of working people into a force that can bring those changes into being. We need a revolution in our thought and in our morals. And more importantly, we need a revolution in our means of production. We need a new foundation to build our society upon, fresh soil in which to plant our future garden of plenty. Because we have the technology and labour needed to provide for the needs of everyone. The only barrier to that is a system predicated upon production for profit, private property rights that give owners as a class disproportionate control over the political and economic life of this country, and an ingrained belief that there is no other alternative. But we have to have the willingness to imagine one or else we're going to be trapped in this socioeconomic version of Plato's Cave for another 200 years, if the planet and our species even survive for that long. [8]
Many are under the impression that if we vote for the better for the two political options available to us, we will eventually achieve this new world. But the contradictions that shape and sustain our economic foundation also help to shape and sustain the political structure built on top of it, and both parties ultimately work to preserve that foundation, not rebuild it. That's not to say that there aren't qualitative differences between them. However, those differences stop short of addressing the real problem—capitalist social relations. Our strength as a class is in our numbers and our labour. We, together, are the true foundation of this society, and it's well past time that the world we live in reflects that. To summarize, I'm a leftist because I think the system itself needs to be fundamentally changed, and I think that a better system is one that is more democratic and more equitably distributes the wealth of our labour. In addition, working people have to be involved because such a change requires us as a force to make it happen, through our numbers, the withholding of our labour, the reclaiming of our ownership of that labour, etc. We need to realize our true political and economic power. I know I've sounded like a broken record for the last 10 years, and I may not be the smartest or most educated person, but I've seen and experienced much to validate this and little to disprove it.
1. Gilens, Martin and Page, Benjamin I. (2014, September, 18). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
2. Menon, Rajan. (2018, July 16). The Wages of Poverty in America. Common Dreams. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/07/16/wages-poverty-america
3. Schneider, Avie. (2020, April 2). Staggering: Record 10 Million File For Unemployment In 2 Weeks. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/02/825383525/6-6-million-file-for-unemployment-another-dismal-record
4. Marx, Karl. (1867). Capital. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm
5. Marx, Karl. (1867). Capital. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm
6. Madison, James. (1787, November 23). Federalist No. 10. The Federalist Papers. https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-10
7. Felber, Garrett. (2020, April 2). Twitter. https://twitter.com/garrett_felber/status/1245848099928649730
8. Spratt, David & Dunlop, Ian. (2019, May). Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach. https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_a1406e0143ac4c469196d3003bc1e687.pdf
One of the main reasons that people like me always take aim at capitalism when criticizing social phenomena, including our political system, is the basic Marxian concept of base/superstructure relations. It's the idea that a capitalist state and its ruling class (political superstructure) are a manifestation or reflection of underlying economic social relations (economic base), where the few exploit the many for profit. In the US, we can see empirical examples of political inequality as it manifests out of inherently unequal social relations of production. [1] But you don't really need in-depth studies to see things like, maybe there's something wrong when one person is making $8 million an hour while the majority of workers in the US make less than $20 an hour, half make less than $15 including most of the "essential workers" working right now [2], and over 10 million people have filed for unemployment in 2 weeks and are unsure how they're going to pay for things like rent, healthcare, and food. [3] Some think that a tweak to the system here, or a higher tax there, will fix economic inequality and a host of oppressive isms that have been built into the system from its inception.
But critics like Marx, seeking answers to similar problems and a better alternative, uncovered some of the underlying logical contractions inherent to how capitalism functions, as well as the historical violence, oppression, and theft that heralded the beginning of this relatively new mode of production. The short version is, countries with emerging mercantile markets enclosed local common land; colonized other lands; stole land, wealth, and resources; and exploited slave labour in what Marx called the process of 'primitive accumulation.' [4] Then after the industrial revolution, those in power further forced their own people off of communal land and into the cities to work in the factories under new social relations, one in which they were forced to sell their labour-power to someone for a wage, not fully realizing that the person who now owns that labour-power owns the products of that labour and all the extra value added by their labour. [5] So first they accumulated by theft, then they accumulated by the exploitation of wage workers once feudalism gave way to mercantilism and then capitalism. And into that system was planted all of the racism and sexism of the time because they fostered this growing system. Racism was used to dehumanize other people so that their slave labour and colonial exploitation was accepted by the colonizers. Sexism was used to keep women at home to do all the unpaid labour of raising the next generation of workers (children) as well as sustain the current generation (husbands), allowing the ownership class to keep the maximum amount of the wealth their workers created for themselves as less was needed to materially maintain the workers thanks to this unpaid, supportive labour. (Wages are essentially a fraction of the total value created in the labour process that's given back to the worker by the capitalist so they can materially reproduce their labour-power, i.e., live.) The US was no exception as it followed the basic model of the rest of Europe. It was based in part on Enlightenment ideals and English and Roman political models in which white, male property owners had the most freedom and power. Combine that with the colonization of the Americas and theft of land and resources of the native inhabitants, slave labour from Africa, and the support role women played predominantly in the background, and you have the soil in which our system grew. It, too, was built on slave labour as well as gender discrimination. And once both black people and women were somewhat liberated from the worst of their oppression, they were allowed to go to school and into the workplace and eventually vote, but even there the racism and sexism continued, so that they were marginalized and paid less for the same work and were often used to suppress wages overall.
As more and more entered to workforce, either out of necessity or desire, they were confronted with the same discrimination and were paid less; and since they would work for less, white men now had to not only compete with each other and with immigrants, but the other half of the population that had previously been excluded from the workplace and the electorate, and who worked for a fraction of what they could make. This only served to enhance the animosity that many white men had towards women and people of colour. Not only were cultural biases in play, but the system actively pitted them against one another because it helped suppress wages and maximize profits while simultaneously creating more factionalism within the electorate, further diluting the electoral power of workers. And this factionalism was intentional, being expressly created by the founders from the very beginning. Like most forms of government centered around private property rights (a central tenet of capitalism), the basic principle behind the establishment of our form of representative democracy had more to do with the ruling elites wanting to protect the small minority of property owners (including themselves) from the majority of the propertyless than anything else. As James Madison put it in Federalist No. 10, "… the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society." [6] So the ownership of property (which at the beginning included black people and to some extent women) and the social relations arising out of that formed the logical and material economic basis of our society, a basis that was in turn reflected in our political system that was embedded with systemic mechanisms of racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of factionalism and inequality. So while we are still seduced by flowery language of the Declaration of Independence that we are all equal and live in a land of opportunity, to think that a few extra regulations or taxes can fix all of this is naive. It can certainly mitigate the worst of things and provide what we call 'social safety nets,' but even much of those have either been privatized, minimized, or means tested, creating a system of bureaucratic hurdles and public shaming for those who qualify. And then there are the ways this inequality manifests itself in housing, education, the criminal justice system, etc., all of which contain tiers of inequality that are further built upon this socioeconomic foundation. In the end, working people as a class, splintered into various factions that can be more easily managed and pitted against one another, bear the brunt of this exploitation and inequality so that a few may thrive and steer the course of history.
In essence, the US is a capitalist, oligarchical republic. It papers over this reality with ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy, but crises like this poke huge holes in that paper covering, revealing what's truly underneath. And people like Garrett Felber are 100% right when they point out things like, "Coronavirus was just the fuse in the tinderbox. The U.S. nation state is the cause. You don't get one man making 8 million an hour while 10 million file for unemployment from a bug in the system. This is a half-century of privatization and gutted out social welfare built on a permanent war economy, mass consumption, global capitalism, and mass criminalization, on a foundation of settler colonialism and slavery." [7] For the US to truly move away from its oligarchical political-economic makeup and towards real democracy in which social wealth is more equitably managed, it has to fundamentally alter the makeup of its mode of production through a radical economic transformation in which the exploitation, alienation, and commodity fetishism of the present system are gradually eliminated via a more socialized mode of production. And that not only requires fundamental structural changes, it requires the organization of working people into a force that can bring those changes into being. We need a revolution in our thought and in our morals. And more importantly, we need a revolution in our means of production. We need a new foundation to build our society upon, fresh soil in which to plant our future garden of plenty. Because we have the technology and labour needed to provide for the needs of everyone. The only barrier to that is a system predicated upon production for profit, private property rights that give owners as a class disproportionate control over the political and economic life of this country, and an ingrained belief that there is no other alternative. But we have to have the willingness to imagine one or else we're going to be trapped in this socioeconomic version of Plato's Cave for another 200 years, if the planet and our species even survive for that long. [8]
Many are under the impression that if we vote for the better for the two political options available to us, we will eventually achieve this new world. But the contradictions that shape and sustain our economic foundation also help to shape and sustain the political structure built on top of it, and both parties ultimately work to preserve that foundation, not rebuild it. That's not to say that there aren't qualitative differences between them. However, those differences stop short of addressing the real problem—capitalist social relations. Our strength as a class is in our numbers and our labour. We, together, are the true foundation of this society, and it's well past time that the world we live in reflects that. To summarize, I'm a leftist because I think the system itself needs to be fundamentally changed, and I think that a better system is one that is more democratic and more equitably distributes the wealth of our labour. In addition, working people have to be involved because such a change requires us as a force to make it happen, through our numbers, the withholding of our labour, the reclaiming of our ownership of that labour, etc. We need to realize our true political and economic power. I know I've sounded like a broken record for the last 10 years, and I may not be the smartest or most educated person, but I've seen and experienced much to validate this and little to disprove it.
1. Gilens, Martin and Page, Benjamin I. (2014, September, 18). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
2. Menon, Rajan. (2018, July 16). The Wages of Poverty in America. Common Dreams. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/07/16/wages-poverty-america
3. Schneider, Avie. (2020, April 2). Staggering: Record 10 Million File For Unemployment In 2 Weeks. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/02/825383525/6-6-million-file-for-unemployment-another-dismal-record
4. Marx, Karl. (1867). Capital. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm
5. Marx, Karl. (1867). Capital. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm
6. Madison, James. (1787, November 23). Federalist No. 10. The Federalist Papers. https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-10
7. Felber, Garrett. (2020, April 2). Twitter. https://twitter.com/garrett_felber/status/1245848099928649730
8. Spratt, David & Dunlop, Ian. (2019, May). Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach. https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_a1406e0143ac4c469196d3003bc1e687.pdf
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