[Peace-discuss] P.S.

[John W.]

On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 10:17 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:



> [1] The writer of "what the authentic Left says" indubitably deserves the
> title,
> and he has a few friends who agree with him.
>

Ah, so Noam Chomsky it is, huh?  Rush Limbaugh has a few friends who agree
with him also, and doubtless consider him the voice of the "authentic
Right".  Your point?  I'm sure you have one here someplace.

So how many citizens has Noam Chomsky actually organized in his long and
illustrious career?  Oh, wait....he's an "intellectual", right?  Hahahaha!




> [2] Rep. Tim Johnson makes far more sense to me on at least one issue than
> his
> faux-left Democratic opponent. He says he was wrong to vote for war in
> Afghanistan and Iraq - and so is voting no on more money for war in the
> Middle
> East. David Gill has not made such a pledge.
>
Yes, we know, Carl.  Your One Note Samba here.  Yet Chomsky was
speaking mostly of domestic issues - though I concede that the two are
inseparable.  In any event, you ignored 98% of what I said...which is what
you always do.  But it doesn't really matter, does it?



> [3] Your picture of FDR - and worse, the lesson you draw from it - needs
> work.
>
So you say.



> Take a look at the late Howard Zinn's account in A People's History of the
> United States and tell us how you disagree with it.  --CGE
>
It's on my list of books to read, Carl.





> John W. wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 9:08 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu<mailto:
>> galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> I take it that, unlike David, you don't agree with "what the authentic
>> Left says," below?  --CGE
>>
>>
>> Christ, Carl.  First of all, there's no such thing as "the authentic
>> Left"; it's a figment of your febrile imagination.  And of course I agree in
>> part and disagree in part.
>>
>> 1) Poor people and lower middle class people have legitimate grievances.
>>  Not
>>  ALL of the grievances they inarticulately try to express, or borrow from
>> Limbaugh and Beck, are even remotely legitimate.  One could write a
>> veritable
>>  BOOK on this statement:  "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a
>> god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a
>> gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted."   But the
>> economic grievances generally are, and of course they affect black and
>> white,
>>  male and female, Christian and atheist, all of whom work hard and are
>> "doing
>>  everything they're supposed to do".
>>
>> 2) One could also write a veritable BOOK on the following statement: "And
>> in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or
>> declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy,
>> there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something
>> to
>>  them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered -
>> it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of
>> course run the media, and they don't care about you -- they just want to
>> give
>> everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on."
>> Suffice it to say here that everything ascribed to Rush Limbaugh before
>> the
>> hyphen is correct, and everything after the hyphen is false.
>>
>> 3) The following is also true with a couple of caveats:  "...gifts don't
>> come
>>  from above; you're going to win them, or you won't have them, and you win
>> by
>>  struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of the
>> options and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot."  The caveats
>> are
>> these: (a) a few gifts DO come down from above, but generally not
>> political progress, which is what we're talking about here; and (b) even
>> with all of this struggle, you don't really "do a lot".  You do a little,
>> incrementally, and then you're knocked back and you have to repeat the
>> process over and over
>>  again. 4) It's true that the crazy, oversimplified answers the tea
>> baggers get from Beck and Limbaugh make sense to them, and that the "left"
>> has no answers for them.  YOU have no answers for them that would make sense
>> to them, Carl.  Rep. Tim Johnson makes far more sense to them than you do or
>> ever will.  And it's largely because the folks we're talking about -
>> relatively poor, largely uneducated, weighed down by literally hundreds of
>> years of stereotypical thinking and prejudices of all kinds - are simply
>> incapable of comprehending a relatively complex, nuanced, historically
>> contextualized world view.  As I've said before, I spent the first
>> forty-three years of my life with people like the Tea Baggers, and I still
>> try to dialogue with them, and they don't get it and they're never going to
>> get it.  I should qualify that:  a great many black folks get it, but white
>> folks are utterly clueless.
>>
>> 5) What is needed in America right now is precisely the opposite of
>> "organizing the masses".  What is needed is a President like FDR was -
>> someone left-leaning with a comprehensive plan and moral courage, who is
>> willing to risk political "suicide" and the scorn of the very people he's
>> trying to help in order to do the right thing for America, let the quips
>> fall
>>  where they may.   A President who isn't afraid to pack the Supreme Court
>> if necessary.  The reality is that almost EVERYONE would bitch and moan and
>> call
>>  him a traitor and worse, but 30 or 40 years from now they'd wonder how
>> they ever got along without Medicare For All and regulation of financial
>> institutions and a "progressive" income tax system and so on.
>>
>> 6) And then a new generation would be born who was quite ignorant of the
>> lessons of history, and the whole cycle would begin all over again....
>>
>> ....ad infinitum....
>>
>> John
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> John W. wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 8:04 PM, unionyes <unionyes at ameritech.net <mailto:
>> unionyes at ameritech.net> <mailto:unionyes at ameritech.net <mailto:
>> unionyes at ameritech.net>>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On a positive note of where and how to focus on " Tea-baggers " are
>> economic
>>  issues that effect them and their families directly and goes beyond the "
>> cultural " identity politics of ; guns, abortion, gays, etc..
>>
>> David J.
>>
>>
>> I don't see how, Dave.  Tea baggers are neo-conservative.  They want "less
>> taxes" and "smaller government", and have no clue that the government
>> actually grows larger during so-called conservative administrations.  They
>> seem unable to escape from their own identity politics, and unable to grasp
>> the notion of the "common good" if it impinges even slightly on their
>> precious "liberties".  I may agree with a Tea bagger that America has
>> problems, chief among them economic, but a Tea bagger and I would never in a
>>  million years agree on solutions to the problem.   I've certainly tried
>> to dialogue with them.
>>
>> John
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "C. G. Estabrook" <
>> galliher at illinois.edu <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu> <mailto:
>> galliher at illinois.edu <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>>> To: "Brussel
>> Morton K." <mkbrussel at comcast.net <mailto:mkbrussel at comcast.net> <mailto:
>> mkbrussel at comcast.net <mailto:mkbrussel at comcast.net>>> Cc: "Peace-discuss
>> List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net <mailto:
>> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> <mailto:
>> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>>>
>> Sent: Saturday, February 06, 2010
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 7:23 PM Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Jokers to the right, maybe, but where
>> are the clowns?
>>
>>
>> I wish the Dems felt uncomfortable for the right reason - guilt for
>> consciously betraying the people who elected them: (1) money for military
>> thugs and contractors and death for the Middle East; (2) bonuses for Wall
>> Street and unemployment for Main Street; and (3) profits for insurance
>> companies and no health care even to the standard of other industrialized
>> countries. It's a sorry record - it's going exactly in the wrong direction -
>>  and it's no wonder that people are rejecting them at the polls. There'll
>> be
>>  more of that in the fall.
>>
>> And who is the Left that the Tea-partiers are supposed to make
>> uncomfortable
>>  or fearful? Here's what the authentic Left says:
>>
>> First of all, don't believe anything you hear from power systems. So if
>> Obama
>>  or the boss or the newspapers or anyone else tells you they're doing
>> this, that, or the other thing, dismiss it or assume the opposite is true,
>> which it
>>  often is. You have to rely on yourself and your associates -- gifts don't
>> come from above; you're going to win them, or you won't have them, and you
>> win by struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of the
>>  options and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot. So take right
>> now,
>>  for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common,
>> even
>>  on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If
>> you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are
>> people
>> with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of
>> interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and
>> just
>> enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand
>> them. I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who
>> feel
>> really aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all my
>> life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard,
>> and
>> I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting
>> shafted."
>> And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have
>> stagnated
>> or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going
>> crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing
>> something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has
>> answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the
>> government,
>> and of course run the media, and they don't care about you -- they just
>> want
>> to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and
>> so
>> on.
>>
>> Well, you know, the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule,
>> but
>>  rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the
>> ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are
>> historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to
>> be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to
>>  groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at
>> least
>>  they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It
>> was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].
>>
>> I mean, the liberal democrats aren't going to tell the average American,
>> "Yeah, you're being shafted because of the policies that we've established
>> over the years that we're maintaining now." That's not going to be an
>> answer.
>>  And they're not getting answers from the left. So, there's an internal
>> coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest
>> of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they're very self-confident,
>> and they have an answer to everything -- a crazy answer, but it's an answer.
>>  And it's our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don't
>> ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and
>> give them a sensible answer...
>>
>> Amen.  --CGE
>>
>
>

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