US and Western Political Reform: What Do Democrats Stand For?- by Robert Reich

Thomas Jefferson: US Founding Father

Millions of Americans who are politically engaged for the first time in their lives are crying out for a bold alternative to bigoted and destructive policies.

But Democrats can’t just be anti-Trump or move to the middle.

To be successful Democrats must address the forces that created Trump: The toxic combination of widening inequality and racism.

The richest one percent now own more than the bottom 90 percent. Corporations and the rich are running our politics.

The resulting economic stresses have made many people vulnerable to Trump’s politics of hate and bigotry.

If Democrats stand for one thing, it must be overcoming this unprecedented economic imbalance and creating a multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition of the bottom 90 percent, to take back our economy and politics.

This requires, at the least:

1. Public investments in world-class schools and infrastructure for all.
2. Free public universities and first-class technical training for all;
3. Single-payer Medicare-for-All;
4. Higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for this;
5. Using antitrust to break up powerful monopolies on Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Agriculture.
6. Getting big money out of our politics.

Together, these steps form an agenda to reclaim our economy and democracy for all. Will Democrats lead the way?

Note EU-Digest: it seems highly questionable and unlikely that Democrats (the so called left) will be able to peacefully lead the way towards change 

Bold moves are now required and it might be useful to take note of what US Founding Father Thomas Jefferson ( 04-13-1743 - 07-04-1826)  said back in  1807 to M. deStael : "When patience has begotten false estimates of its motives, when wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality."

 "As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started", says Paul Mason: Bitish writer and broadcaster on economics and social justice.

The time for change is now, not only in the US, but for the whole Western Society, and it will take blood sweat and tears.

 Read more: What Do Democrats Stand For?

Capitalism and the Western World: The western model is broken - by Pankaj Mishra

“So far, the 21st century has been a rotten one for the western model,” according to a new book, The Fourth Revolution, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. This seems an extraordinary admission from two editors of the Economist, the flag-bearer of English liberalism, which has long insisted that the non-west could only achieve prosperity and stability through western prescriptions.

 It almost obscures the fact that the 20th century was blighted by the same pathologies that today make the western model seem unworkable, and render its fervent advocates a bit lost. The most violent century in human history, it was hardly the best advertisement for the “bland fanatics of western civilisation”, as the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called them at the height of the cold war, “who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence”.

Niebuhr was critiquing a fundamentalist creed that has coloured our view of the world for more than a century: that western institutions of the nation-state and liberal democracy will be gradually generalised around the world, and that the aspiring middle classes created by industrial capitalism will bring about accountable, representative and stable governments – that every society, in short, is destined to evolve just as the west did.

Critics of this teleological view, which defines “progress” exclusively as development along western lines, have long perceived its absolutist nature. Secular liberalism, the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen cautioned as early as 1862, “is the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this”.

But it has had many presumptive popes and encyclicals: from the 19th-century dream of a westernised world long championed by the Economist, in which capital, goods, jobs and people freely circulate, to Henry Luce’s proclamation of an “American century” of free trade, and “modernisation theory” – the attempt by American cold warriors to seduce the postcolonial world away from communist-style revolution and into the gradualist alternative of consumer capitalism and democracy.

“So far, the 21st century has been a rotten one for the western model,” according to a new book, The Fourth Revolution, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. This seems an extraordinary admission from two editors of the Economist, the flag-bearer of English liberalism, which has long insisted that the non-west could only achieve prosperity and stability through western prescriptions.

It almost obscures the fact that the 20th century was blighted by the same pathologies that today make the western model seem unworkable, and render its fervent advocates a bit lost. The most violent century in human history, it was hardly the best advertisement for the “bland fanatics of western civilisation”, as the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called them at the height of the cold war, “who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence”.

Niebuhr was critiquing a fundamentalist creed that has coloured our view of the world for more than a century: that western institutions of the nation-state and liberal democracy will be gradually generalised around the world, and that the aspiring middle classes created by industrial capitalism will bring about accountable, representative and stable governments – that every society, in short, is destined to evolve just as the west did.

Critics of this teleological view, which defines “progress” exclusively as development along western lines, have long perceived its absolutist nature. Secular liberalism, the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen cautioned as early as 1862, “is the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this”.

But it has had many presumptive popes and encyclicals: from the 19th-century dream of a westernised world long championed by the Economist, in which capital, goods, jobs and people freely circulate, to Henry Luce’s proclamation of an “American century” of free trade, and “modernisation theory” – the attempt by American cold warriors to seduce the postcolonial world away from communist-style revolution and into the gradualist alternative of consumer capitalism and democracy.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption. But the shock to naive minds only further entrenched in them the intellectual habits of the cold war – thinking through binary oppositions of “free” and “unfree” worlds – and redoubled an old delusion: liberal democracy, conceived by modernisation theorists as the inevitable preference of the beneficiaries of capitalism, could now be implanted by force in recalcitrant societies.

Note EU-Digest: Without any doubt Mr. Pankaj Mishra has a lot of arguments and critisism against the Western system of Capitalism, but I don't see any suggestions as to what can be done to improve it - for real change to happen it takes two to Tango Mr. Mishra.  

Read more: The western model is broken | Pankaj Mishra | World news | The Guardian

Consumerism has gone on steroids - by RM

Among the items which received major coverage in the press recently was the launching of the new Apple iPhone 5.  There was an incredible frenzy among large numbers of people around the world to be the first to get this upgraded Apple iPhone . We saw people sleeping in front of stores just to be the first in line to be able to buy this new gadget. How crazy can you get?

The public seems to have grown immune to these sorts of scenes but in reality this iPhone madness was another typical example of consumerism on steroids. 

Even US tourists visiting Europe from America have been overheard, when discussing their European holidays with friends at home, that their major gripe was that malls in Europe were not up to US standards based on the abundance of goods and low prices.  

Some people have become so addicted to shopping that they become irritable if they don't go to a store on a daily basis. 

How have we become so addicted to consumerism? Maybe the answer lies with the news and communications industry. For if consumerism is the bullet in our demise, then undoubtedly the media is the best weapon to get the bullet to its target.

Indeed the media for some time now has become on of the most powerful tools coming to us in many different forms, including the Internet, TV, Radio, Press. It literally goes with us now everywhere we go. Consequently it has become a bigger than life influence on what we think, do and what we buy. 

What makes it even more complex and obviously dangerous is that the media at large is not independent anymore but controlled by large corporations. They mainly look at their bottom-line and not the moral consequences of their reporting anymore.

At one time, the home at least had a natural defense to protect children from this media guided onslaught of consumerism ....it was called parents. They at least had some kind of control over the avalanche of commercialism. As parents they had the authority to decide what their kids watched, ate and did while living under their roof. 

Unfortunately, with the ever increasing numbers of divorced and dysfunctional families, single parent households, working parents and "new generation" parents who believe that giving in to everything their kids want will make them happy, that safeguard has just about become extinct.

Consumerism has also created havoc with individualism and privacy. Facebook and a variety of other social media services and search engines, who in their corporate statements pride themselves to respect your personal privacy, actually make it technically very difficult for you to control what becomes public knowledge or not.

Case in point was the birthday party of a teenager in the Netherlands who did not set her privacy settings properly on Facebook. What had been planned as a small birthday party for friends and family became a nightmare turning the girl's birthday party into a "free for all" battle between some 4000 drunk teenagers, hooligans and the local police.

Consumerism also has a hypnotic effect on your life. Even though you might be thinking – “Just because it’s on TV or in the latest news report doesn’t mean I am forced to go and buy it”, in practice that is usually not the way it works out.

The process basically works like Chinese torture - "drip - drip" - a constant bombardment of images about wealth, material possessions, body images, etc., and before you know it a person slowly gets brain-washed to the point of thinking, “well if everyone else has one of those, maybe I need one too.”  That is how the process works - in one paragraph.

Unfortunately and sad for us is that our consumption focused behavior will eventually be our demise. As American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges wrote, “A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” 

Maybe the most important issue that people need to realize is the impossibility of endless economic growth. The Ponzi-scheme economy that has been sold to us is no more real than a pie in the sky. Once that delusion is gone, we can probably begin to imagine and build a truly sustainable economy.

 

EU-Digest

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