Fear and The Undeniable Truth
So we now have angry mobs at McCain rallies shouting non-sense and lies and even booing their candidate when he attempts to say something rational. What’s this country coming to?
I’m alarmed at the level of anger in our society right now. I think it was always there, percolating beneath the surface, but now it’s really starting to ooze outward. We saw some of it with Bush and Clinton, but now it’s really pouring out.
Even if people tone it down at the rallies, the sentiments and feelings will still be there. Hatred, ignorance, rage. People will still be calling Obama a “nigger” and a “terrorist” in their little private cliques. People will rage against “socialism,” without really even understanding it, and wrongly blame “socialists like Obama” for their 401K and real estate losses. We first saw these attacks levied at Hillary Clinton, and while I was not a supporter of hers, I felt the attacks were puerile and in extremely poor taste.
Don’t kid yourself and think it’s not happening. It is happening. It’s like we haven’t moved an inch past Kent State or Birmingham. It’s like we’re going backward, or maybe we never made any progress at all and just thought we did. And the worst part is people are just ignorant, and their ignorance fuels their rage.
The wild-eyed camo-clad, Humvee driving pseudo-militarists have been out there for eight years just chomping at the bit. Now their wives are getting in on the action, an angry brigade of Jesus inspired hockey and soccer moms ready to hurl cupcakes at us.
Obama will win, and eventually they will see that he’s not what they thought he was. They’ll find he’s just another Washington politico working to keep the status quo in place, not a reformer attempting to create a more equitable society. Growth capitalism, militarism, fear mongering and healthcare for those that can afford it.
On a related topic, my friend Hayduke has recently posted some interesting comments on the financial crisis, however, I don’t think he goes far enough in his critique of capitalism. You know, with all of this ridiculous talk about socialists taking over the country, why not put something else out on the table: private property, specifically land ownership.
There are some uncomfortable but undeniable truths about the private ownership of land. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
Have I been drinking the red Kool-Aid? No. I’m not a communist, but I do think about things and try to get to the root cause of issues. And when I think about hierarchy, coercion and the current financial crisis and trace all this back to what really makes it possible, I keep coming back to private ownership of land.
Private property contributes to or makes a lot of things possible. The establishment of hierarchy, followed by coercion and the emergence of non-egalitarian systems like growth capitalism. When you own land, especially vast tracts of very expensive land, you hold a lot of power. It’s the most precious commodity anyone can control, and it makes everything else possible.
The United States is perhaps the best example of how private ownership of land contributes to all these issues. Just consider development and the effect of development on ecosystems, and then consider all the other vices made possible by control of land. It’s a valuable resource, our most precious resource, and it has been a vehicle for the establishment of prodigious sums of wealth in our country.
Once upon a time on this continent, we didn’t have such a thing as private land ownership. American Indians found the concept foreign, although they did certainly have territorial boundaries, often protected with violence. But they essentially held land in a “commons” where all people had equal access to the land and its resources, and where no one person or group could misuse the land at the expense of all others.
I’m not advocating Soviet style communism, but I am advocating an eco-anarchistic re-establishment of the commons. I don’t believe people should “lose all their land,” but I do believe in its redistribution and the establishment of a “right to use” lease whereby people can continue to live as they do now, albeit with a few more restrictions. And it would obviously no longer appear on the balance sheet, so yes, billions of dollars of wealth would in fact disappear. If there’s any left after the current crisis….
I honestly don’t know what else to do, and see this as a core problem in our inability to establish a sustainable society. It bothers me, but intellectually, I can’t get past all the problems it causes. I’m firmly in agreement with the American Indian concept of land stewardship and subsistence economies.
You can own your business. Your car, your bike, whatever. Make a fair profit. You just shouldn’t be able to own the land any more than you can own the air or the water ways. Water rights? How ’bout land rights bound by community based and democratically decided upon controls?
The nation would in a sense be a giant commune, where we all worked together for the common good, and the single most precious common resource would be equally shared and cared for by all. This would be made possible by eliminating the single most powerful asset that prevents this from happening and by placing that asset back in the hands of the public trust.
Until this happens, I don’t believe we will ever have an equitable, sustainable society.
Rather than a giant commune, how about thousands of little communes.
The problem is not so much one of ideology as it is scale. During the last real recession, in the 1930s, the population of the world was 1.8 billion; the population of the uS was 120 million.
Think of the place you live with 2/3 fewer people!
Cap our overwhelming human population with an ideology of unlimited resources and a centralized corporate oligarchy running the government, dedicated to “free-market” capitalism (sic), and you’ve got a recipe fro environmental disaster.
All species will overpopulate their territory given no effective predators to keep their numbers in check. Humans have no predators (except maybe Republicans), so humans will quite naturally expand in population until Nature steps up to the plate and bats us down. She’s taking her practice swings right now.
Those in the know, Jack here, me and few others, can prepare the way by supporting existing movements toward cooperative social systems, such as community gardens, farmers markets, housing co-ops, buying clubs, community child care and other forms of cooperative resource management.
It’s a chicken and egg thing; does the democratic/anarchist ideology lead to a cooperative, communist economy or does a cooperative economy foster democratic ideals?
It’s interesting to read various economic philosophies. It seems that the Chicago/Friedman school of maximum free-market capitalism holds that ideology drives the economy, and the economy can be foisted on the population by ideological leaders.
On the other hand, I see economy as the determinant of ideology, with economies (not THE economy) being the basic relationship between people and the earth, and the determinant of overall ideological approach.
People living in a subsistence economy tend to be completely egalitarian, democratic and anarchistic, while those living in a capitalist economy live in some form of totalitarian, centralized government.
The Friedmanites say capitalism is the necessary precursor to democracy, but this is a twisted definition of democracy, viewed as maximum individual choice. I, on the other, view democracy/anarchy as community based, the process by which members of a functioning community decide on the means to maximize the common good.
Land ownership is an economic fiction. What the capitalists want is land and resource control and in “free-market” capitalism, that fiction of ownership is how control is expressed and manipulated.
I would vote for local, cooperative land management with the proceeds shared equally among all community members.
I agree. Especially about the “thousands of little communes.” Obviously, that’s the biologically based reality. But at some point, all of those little communes will work together regionally and then across the continent in cooperation and trade. So the idea expands outward…as we’ve always discussed.
And as you’ve always said about economics, it ignores all the things really important in life. These people live develop their philosophies in a vacuum; I suppose they believe there’s no relationship between what the planet can yield and what the stock markets ultimately yield. Or, they ignore it.
Cooperative land management with shared proceeds, similar to what the Manitos of northern New Mexico had in their subsistence economy before the Anglo invasion is exactly what I’m talking about. I like your choice of words…