If I remember correctly, Piketty points out that this is not inevitable at all, but it requires effort to avoid it.
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On the contrary – you are both entitled and worthy.
The visitor’s perspective is often valuable: Alexis de Tocqueville comes to mind.
Besides, the planet is small enough, and our species fast enough, that we are all neighbors in the twenty-first century. There is no Them any more; we are all Us now.
(Update: changed “outsider’s” to the more gracious “visitor’s”.)
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Some of the Resistance art is pretty good, tho. Enjoy it whilst you may.
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Indeed you are right.
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America today feels like the last days of the Soviet Union
Let me correct the headline: “America today may feel like the last days of the Soviet Union for some people, who never lived in the Soviet Union.”
Apathy in the USSR was the life form for everybody for at least five decades before the collapse.
The original article draws parallels the same way like saying “the neighbor’s dog died after sleeping all morning, so mine will too.”
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Stealing this! And sending to my 94 yr old Grandmother. She hates trump.
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America today feels like the last days of the Soviet Union
as observed by Americans surreptitiously circulating mimeographed samizdat, oops, I mean, posting explicit anti-government comments on a message board open to the public.
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Art? That hippy, libr’ul shit? Why would the GOP piss away money on something that useless?
[Sincerely hope this isn’t needed, but…/s]
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I feel like a prediction I recall making at a rather precocious age has come sadly to pass: the 20th Century United States, the “superpower,” needed our adversaries. If Hitler hadn’t made fascism unfashionable, we would have had black people in camps in the 1950s instead of the civil rights movement. If we hadn’t had the Soviet Union, with its corrupt elite and faltering command economy, to point at as a lower bar on national performance, to say “see, our ways are better than that,” then our own internal corruption would’ve flourished as it began to immediately after the collapse of the USSR.
We “won” the Cold War not because laissez-faire capitalism is without flaw, but because it is more resilient than a command economy, so we were able to spend them into the ground, by running up tremendous debts. We weaponized our economy during the 1980s, and it worked. The problem is backing down from that position. On the contrary, without the practical constraints of an actual threat, the spending is driven solely by internal self-interests and grows literally without reason or restraint.
The fall of the Soviet Union, I guessed at the time, would be followed by our own fall some years later, because all the structures we built to oppose them have too much inertia to overcome. I am increasingly depressed to see that I seem to have been correct.
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Whining about it and then voting to give the government more power anyway ( or voting for politicians who will vote to give the government more power anyway) doesn’t really count as resisting in my book. Look at France if you want to see what peaceful resistance looks like.
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Obama had a strong mandate from the voters at the beginning of his first term, and Democrats had control of both Houses of Congress. He could have at least attempted to strong arm single payer healthcare. Instead, he punted to Congress and told them to work something out with the GOP. He wanted consensus. So we got the ACA, which was originally Romneycare, a GOP idea. The ACA is a Republican healthcare solution. That’s what Democrats did the last time they had the power. They implemented a Republican program.
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Well America is circling the drain but not all hope is lost.
The US needs a president that cares about its citizens and is not in for the power.
Then that person has to push two key legislation though congress. One is to erase the student debt crises and the other is to push for national healthcare.
Without crippling debt and having to worry about health insurance, young healthy Americans will drive the economy forward. Its probably a bit simplistic, but its a universal truth that an economy is only as healthy as its middle class, if the middle class is pushed into the lower class it won’t spend money on luxuries and the machine grinds to a halt because the lubricant (money) has dried up.
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Yeah that was pretty stupid, he should have opted to push it through without the GOP. Then assuming it was successful even if the GOP wrested back control the more reasonable members of its ranks would want to keep the program.
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Funny thing is, as an amateur painter who has spent months making a canvas look like something, it has always made me a little bit crazy to see Rothko hanging in the Smithsonian. Makes no goddamned sense. If I’d produced his work I couldn’t get it hung in a local coffee shop, much less get someone to pay actual money for it.
At least it made no goddamned sense until I learned that the entire “modern art” movement was funded and promoted by the CIA along with the narrative that the Soviet realist style that appears in all those great propaganda posters was quaint and stodgy. The idea was to convince the world that the US had “won” art.
So the reason all that old Soviet propaganda seems to have such great kitsch value today is itself a result of a more subtle propaganda campaign.
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That neglects that the Democrats did not have 60 votes in the Senate required for passing legislation with appropriations, as well as an unprecedented level of obstruction from Republicans. Remember, that was the period of time when Harry Reid had to invoke the “nuclear option” of moving forward with nominations with under 60 votes because the Republicans wouldn’t allow confirmation of any nominees.
I’m not sure how you expected Obama or the Democrats in Congress to have “strong armed” the Republicans to pass anything that involved funding. The same constitutional backstop that prevented it also prevented Trump from ramming through most of his shitty agenda in his first half term. As it was, exercising the “nuclear option” turned out to be a tactic that bit Democrats in the ass, as it was later used by McConnell to get Trump’s Supreme Court nominees through.
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I haven’t played it so I can’t tell if it’s awesome, but definitely counts as propaganda:
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Read Stacey Abrams, “Lead from the Outside”.
We have the power and ability to change our destiny. Things seem unreal. The system is broken. This may be our best time.
Start a small group. Act as one.
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If you want to take the analogy further. It’s like the USSR also because it has economic gigantism. Six media companies controlling or creating the majority of the content. About as many companies controlling are processed foods. And so forth. The US and the USSR share in the same lumbering slow and inefficient organizations both public and private that refuse to adapt to the real world. Rather, they would force the world to adapt to it. But as folks in the past said about Nature, it must be obeyed no matter how forceful humans can be against it. So I expect the analogy to become fully realized in the coming years as more and more nepotism becomes open and even rewarded/desired in our society with all the consequences therein. Of course, this is inevitable when you keep thinking “the free market” will fix everything.
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It’s why Cybersyn should be explore more in the fact that it could prove to be a template for a distributed non-market economy or even a market economy but with more decentralization in production.
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So because you don’t have a 60-40 majority, you implement the ideas of the minority? Because that’s what happened. Jeez, I wish the GOP did business that way.
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