During the twentieth century near collapse of capitalism—the Great Depression—relatively enlightened forces of wealth initiated programs to prevent total breakdown and possible revolution. Among these was the origin in America of what already existed in Europe: a proposal to help elders from entering the poorhouse when they were no longer able to work. Known as “Social Security” it became one of the most popular of the New Deal programs of the FDR administration. Continue reading →
The Virgin birth. The Chosen people. The Resurrection of the dead. The Free Market. Which of those is unsupported by material evidence but exists by virtue of practice based on fervent, coerced, or simply uncritical belief and is thus subject to failure at any moment when the belief is shaken to its roots by experienced reality? All of them. Continue reading →
The most expensive election campaign in American history ended with more good than bad results, given the choices allowed. Voters defeated the possibility of cancer, but were unable to cure the polio we still suffer. A reactionary effort to take us further back than we have already gone was mostly unsuccessful. But the advances made were smaller than some wishful thinkers suppose. We need radical change in substance and got nothing more than stylistic moderation in form. Continue reading →
We are nearing the end of the billion dollar assault on consciousness that protects corporate power from the threat of democracy. It’s called the presidential race, or—in hysterical-get-out-the-vote fashion—the most important election since The Creation, or 911, or the last election. Continue reading →
Plutarch wrote, “For at the very delivery of their money, they immediately ask it back, taking it up at the same moment they lay it down; and they let out that again to interest which they take for the use of what they have before lent.” Continue reading →
The Virgin birth. The Chosen People. The resurrection of the dead. The free market. Continue reading →
As Republicans stride in the direction of hardcore fascism and Democrats mince toward a soft-core police state, America endures a campaign with no substance allowed to interfere with corporate capital’s electoral show. Unless the Green Party attracts citizen attention by adhering to the substance of democratic ideals that contrast with the political pimping of the major parties, the people will face endless television mudslinging battles between political pornographers trying to entice them to vote for a lesser evil. As usual. Continue reading →
An employee who had worked at Amalgamated Security Systems for twenty-five years and was slated to receive his pension in two weeks was accused of murdering his boss when he was threatened with being fired. Continue reading →
Millions of global citizens agree with the young Spanish woman and the older American intellectual quoted above, most obviously many in Egypt and Wisconsin. Though the popular uprisings in that nation and that state are hopeful signs of democracy in the making, resort to the electoral process only proves the truth of their words. That process is owned and controlled by the entrenched state power of financial interests and until money is taken out of the supposedly democratic electoral process, it is indeed ultimately worthless. Continue reading →
As the Occupy Wall Street movement spread across the nation, mistakes and setbacks occurred which are minimal when compared to its success in calling attention to the private domination of America’s wealth by the upper 1% as a major cause of our social problems. Agents of that minority are feverishly at work, whether directly on the payroll or simply acting according to anti-social programming that teaches individualism, selfish egoism and the divisive identity politics that reduce the 99% to splintered minorities and assure continued domination by the richest 1%. Continue reading →
Master race chosen people-ism: An infantile disorder
Posted on February 18, 2014 by Frank Scott
The problem of racism is primarily the treatment of darker skinned people by the lighter skinned; that treatment is always murderously damaging to humanity itself and not only the particular people being savaged by those who thought themselves, somehow, more human than others. But reaction to mistreatment on racial grounds, especially without consideration of the economic roots of such inhumanity, may be as dangerous to the survival of the race. Continue reading →