SOCIALISM -IST
belated redumbdent 1/20
sparked by spain carbon pledge and uprisings to inequality
SEE DSA MAMDANI AOC BERNIE
see anti-commie for earlier
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AN 11 25
Ronald Reagan Republican and GOP strategist Frank Luntz says the word “capitalism” has become a dirty word that Republicans must avoid if they want to win election in the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani.
With communication strategist Luntz, winning elections is primarily about messaging, and the word ”capitalism” is no longer a winning message as billionaire “capitalists” accrue most of the wealth and leave Americans worrying about their rent and food pantries. Just recently, the Top 10 U.S. billionaires’ collective wealth grew by nearly $700 billion and analysts warned government policies are driving inequality to new heights.
“Is it fair that some people's children will be born billionaires without having to work a day in their life, while others will work two or three jobs just to put food on their table and a roof over their heads,” Luntz asked CNN anchor Michale Smerconish. “Second, is it fair that some schools have all the technology, all the resources, and others can't even afford books or chalk?”
“Why do I ask that? Because you can see it. You can visualize it,” said Luntz, who correctly predicted Tuesday’s off-year elections would “go badly” for the Republican Party. “And third, does everyone … who works hard and plays by the rules — shouldn’t they have a genuine shot at the American dream? These are the questions that you ask at the beginning to bring audiences over to you. And without asking those questions, you're cutting people out.”
“[Democratic socialist Sen.] Bernie Sanders is on Line 2 for you because he's finding this pretty convincing,” Smerconish responded, and then asked Luntz if the U.S. would “be properly cast as a democratic socialist nation” by 2050.
“It’s already happening,” said Luntz. “I work with young people all across the country. Under age 30, they prefer socialism to capitalism already. The 30s, they are about dead even. It's only when you get to be older 40 that you become more supportive [of capitalism].”
“We should be calling it ‘economic freedom,’ not capitalism, because capitalism is about CEOs,” Luntz added. “It's about billionaires, and it's about Wall Street. Economic freedom is about Main Street, about the workforce and about the opportunities for the future. And I want to give you one bit of language that whoever wins this wins the entire debate, whether it's capitalism or socialism.”
Whether or not they vote that way, Luntz advised Republicans to sell America as “a place for new ideas, better solutions and where good people thrive if we want to move forward as a country … and no one is left behind.”
“Whoever controls that language wins the debate,” he said.
“I think AOC, Mamdani and Bernie are all going to be clamoring for your services after the first part of our exchange,” said Smerconish — but Luntz jettisoned any notion that he stood behind the policies of the three politicians.
“They won’t get it,” Luntz said.
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tucker hellscape: free gubmint kitties!
6 22
bkgd grfx childless, penniless, joyless (pink)
fox News' Tucker Carlson is attempting to spin a new conspiracy theory with a tall accusation involving the United States government.
During his latest segment of "The Tucker Carlson Show" on Tuesday, the conservative primetime host claimed the U.S. government will be lacing the country's water supply with "SSRIs – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors – in an effort to placate an increasingly dissatisfied population," Mediaite reports.
Broadcasting from Rio de Janeiro, Carlson expressed concern about the United States' low fertility rates. On multiple occasions, Carlson has leveled attacks at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) over her concerns about having children. In fact, last year, the Fox News host reportedly said claimed: "some liberals are 'offended by fertility and nature and the idea that people reproduce.'”
During Tuesday's segment, Carlson revisited the same argument but went a step further this time.
“The more atomized and unhappy American society becomes, theeasier it is for them to control,” said Carlson. “Fewer marriages and babies and family-owned homes means more rootless and dissatisfied people. It means an entire nation of desperately unhappy grad students. Sandy Cortezcould become the queen of a country like that.”
Carlson went on to highlight the inflated cost of having a family as he insisted that the issue is no longer just a temporary problem, but rather a new staple in American society.
“Families are for the tech tycoons in Napa, they’ve got a ton of kids,” he continued. “And for the Haitians huddled underneath the bridges at the border in south Texas, they’ve got a ton of kids too. But for you, a middle-class American, sorry. Your deepest desires are far beyond reach.”
The host concluded with a conspiratorial prediction about what the U.S. government may do next to "numb the public into accepting their childless fate," per Mediaite.
“You have to wonder, how long before Democrats sponsor legislation to distribute free cats to young people in the cities, placebos to replace the families they can no longer have,” he said. “That’s coming, along with SSRIs in the water supply, so you don’t have to think too much about it. We’re finally getting to see what their utopia feels like. Hope you feel better.”
**Watch the video below or at this link.**
aa woman
socialist buff 4 term
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/india-walton/
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/joe-biden-gop/
biden not good for gop $raising;mtg called him socialist fail 621 an
socialist and extremeist were clearly what trump thot he was going to win on
Fast Company
Better Technology Isn’t The Solution To Ecological Collapse
We cannot innovate our way out of planetary disaster. We need to ditch our addiction to GDP growth
Follow
Mar 26, 2018 ·
BY JASON HICKEL
It’s hard to ignore the headlines these days, with all their warnings about ecological breakdown. Last year brought troubling news on everything from plastic…
for
hickel
no lnx
03-26-18WORLD CHANGING IDEAS
Better Technology Isn’t The Solution To Ecological Collapse
We cannot innovate our way out of planetary disaster. We need to ditch our addiction to GDP growth
Better Technology Isn’t The Solution To Ecological Collapse
BY JASON HICKEL
It’s hard to ignore the headlines these days, with all their warnings about ecological breakdown. Last year brought troubling news on everything from plastic pollution to soil depletion to the collapse of insect populations. These crises are worsening as our demands on the Earth intensify. Right now, virtually every government in the world is committed to pursuing economic growth: ever-expanding levels of extraction and consumption year on year.
And the more we grow, the more we eat away at the web of life on which we all depend.
We have known about this problem for decades now, but we’ve been told not to worry: As technology improves and becomes more efficient, we’ll be able to keep growing the economy while nonetheless reducing our impact on the natural world. The technical term for this is “green growth,” which requires absolute decoupling of GDP from material use. According to the theory, we can speed this process along by incentivizing innovation; if we tax carbon emissions and material extraction, we can spur companies to invest in more efficient tech.
It sounds great, it’s promoted at the highest levels by tech billionaires like Elon Musk and international organizations like the World Bank and the United Nations, and it sits right at the center of big global plans like the Paris Climate Accord and the Sustainable Development Goals. We’re all hanging our collective future on this hope. But is it really possible?
Here’s the magic number: 50 billion tons. That’s how much of the Earth’s materials and life forms we can safely use each year. That includes everything from wood to plastic, fish to livestock, minerals to metals: all the physical stuff that we consume. Right now, we’re using about 80 billion tons each year–way over the limit. So for growth to be green, we need to somehow get back down to 50 billion tons despite expanding the GDP.
When green growth theory was first proposed, there was no evidence on whether it would actually work–it was purely speculative. But over the past few years, three major studies have set out to examine this question. All have arrived at the same rather troubling conclusion: Even under best-case scenario conditions, absolute decoupling of GDP growth from material use is not possible on a global scale.
It was a team of scientists led by Monika Dittrich that first pointed this out. They ran a model showing that under business-as-usual conditions, growth will drive global resource use to a staggering 180 billion tons per year by 2050.At more than three times the safe limit, that means game over for human civilization as we know it.
Then the team ran the model with the optimistic assumption that every nation on Earth immediately adopts best practice in efficiency, with all the best available technology. The results were a bit better: We would end up hitting 93 billion tons per year by 2050. But that’s not absolute decoupling, and it’s a far cry from anything approaching green growth.
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A second team of scientists tested the same question again in 2016, and found that even aggressive measures like a carbon price as high as $250 per ton and a doubling of technological efficiency don’t do the trick. If we keep growing the global economy by 3% each year, they found, we’ll still hit about 95 billion tons by 2050. No absolute decoupling. No green growth.
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Finally, last year the United Nations itself weighed in on the debate, hoping to settle the matter once and for all. It modelled a carbon price rising to a whopping $573 per ton, added a material extraction tax, and assumed rapid tech innovation spurred by strong government policy. The results? We hit 132 billion tons by 2050–even worse than the two previous studies found. Worse because this time the scientists included the “rebound effect” in their model. As gains in efficiency reduce the cost of commodities, demand for those commodities goes up, cancelling out some of the reductions in material use.
And let’s not forget: All three of these models use radically optimistic assumptions. We’re a long way from even testing a global carbon tax, much less a tax of $573 per ton; and we’re not on track to double our efficiency. In fact, quite the opposite: Right now our efficiency is getting worse, not better.
Why the bad news? The main reason is that tech innovation just doesn’t work the way most of us assume. We know that Moore’s law says that chip performance doubles about every two years–but this doesn’t apply to material use. There are physical limits to material efficiency, and once we start to reach them then the scale effect of growth drives material use back up in the long run. For instance you might be able to produce a wooden table more efficiently, but you can’t produce a table out of nothing. In the end you’ll need a minimum amount of wood, and once you reach that limit, then any growth in table production is going to come along with a corresponding growth in wood use.
It would be hard to overstate the impact of these results. Right now, our only plan for dealing with the ecological emergency that’s staring us in the face is to hope that tech innovation and green growth will mitigate the coming disaster. Yes, we’re going to need all the wizardry we can get–but that alone is not going to be enough. The only real option is in fact much simpler and more obvious: We need to start consuming less.
The tricky bit is that our existing economic operating system–capitalism–has a design flaw at its core. It requires that we produce and consume more and more stuff each year. If we don’t, then firms collapse and people lose their jobs and livelihoods. So it’s time to make room for new systems to emerge–systems that don’t require endless exponential growth just to stay afloat. This is where we need to focus our creative energy, rather than clinging to the false hope of “green growth” fantasies.
There are lots of ways to get there. We could start by ditching GDP as an indicator of success in favor of a more balanced measure like the Genuine Progress Indicator, which accounts for negative “externalities” like pollution and material depletion. We could roll out a new money system that doesn’t pump our system full of interest-bearing debt. And we could start thinking about putting caps on material use, so that we never extract more than the Earth can regenerate.
The old generation of innovators believed that tech would allow us to subdue nature and bend it to our will. Our generation is waking up to a more hopeful truth: that our survival depends not on domination, but on harmony.
Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the University of London who works on international development and global political economy, with an ethnographic focus on southern Africa. He writes for the Guardian and Al Jazeera English. His most recent book, The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, is available now.
This story reflects the views of the author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.
Better Technology Isn’t The Solution To Ecological Collapse
It’s hard to ignore the headlines these days, with all their warnings about ecological breakdown. Last year brought troubling news on everything from plastic ...
Are You Ready To Consider That Capitalism Is The Real Problem?
This story reflects the views of the authors, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company. In February, college sophomore Trevor Hill stood ...
The End Of Capitalism Is Already Starting–If You Know Where To Look
These days, Richard Wolff is feeling pretty glad he stuck around teaching this long. Now in his 70s and lecturing at the New School ...
Don’t Be Scared About The End Of Capitalism—Be Excited To Build What Comes Next
This story reflects the views of these authors, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company. These are fast-changing times. Old certainties are ...
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320 bktv
Tony Pecinovsky, "Let Them Tremble"Labor activist and longtime communist Tony Pecinovsky talked about the…
220 richard w interview ; occupy --> bernie --> AOC
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-march-2-2020/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-real-global-threat-to-21st-century-freedom-is-authoritarian-capitalism-not-democratic-socialism/
no lnx
The real global threat to 21st century freedom is authoritarian capitalism — not democratic socialism
Written by Peter Bloom / Common Dreams March 1, 2020
Only days after firmly establishing himself as the clear Democratic nominee frontrunner with a decisive victory in the Nevada caucus last week, Bernie Sanders found himself mired in a fresh controversy. In a widely watched and shared primetime interview he appeared to partially support recently deceased former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, condemning his authoritarianism while praising his mass literacy campaign and health program. Whatever the historical veracity of these arguments, it raised fears again of Sanders supposed “communist” sympathies as a self-described “democratic socialist.”
The onslaught by Republicans and establishment Democrats was as swift as it was predictable. Florida Democrats were particularly strong in their criticisms. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powel (D-Fla.) tweeted “as the first South American immigrant member of Congress who proudly represents thousands of Cuban Americans, I find Senator Bernie Sanders’ comments on Castro’s Cuba absolutely unacceptable.”
The larger worry is that this will be a preview of the general election if Sanders is the nominee. According to conventional thinking, the chance to stop Trump will be halted in its tracks by a Republican-led “red scare.” However, it also offers Sanders an opportunity to fundamentally change the debate to show that the biggest threat to freedom is capitalist oligarchy and militarism not progressives or socialism.
Beyond Damage Control
The obvious and understandable first instinct of the Sanders campaign is to go into damage control mode. In a town hall following the interview, Sanders reiterated once again his rejection of authoritarianism of all types while still highlighting the benefits of mass literacy campaigns—proclaiming “truth is truth.” This commitment to freedom is backed up by his 100% legislative score from the ACLU and the fact that he is the only candidate to completely reject the Patriot Act.
Further, Sanders has sought to shift the discussion into a larger one about the dangers of right-wing authoritarianism, often backed by U.S. imperialism past and present. At the last debate before the South Caroline primary, he declared: “Occasionally it might be good idea to be honest about American foreign policy, and that includes the fact that America has overthrown governments all over the world in Chile and Guatemala in Iran.” While the effects of this tactic remains ambiguous, it represents a substantive and strategically important attempt to put into question the actual cause of authoritarianism both at home and abroad.
It is almost gospel in mainstream U.S. political discourse that socialism and Communism are the greatest threats to liberty. Yet the actual historical record suggests otherwise. While recognizing the death and misery caused by past totalitarian Communist regimes, too often ignored is the role of the free market for spreading oligarchy, dictatorship, and illiberalism across the world. If Sanders wants to win the nomination and generation election, he must go beyond damage control and show progressive values and his brand of democratic socialism is the best defense against such tyranny.
The Global Threat of Authoritarian Capitalism
A huge problem, in this respect, is the narrowness of traditional U.S. popular understandings of authoritarianism and fascism—and the distinctions between such terms as socialism, democratic socialism, and communism. Mounting fears of a Trump dictatorship, for instance, have brought renewed historical attention to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Tellingly, the emphasis has been on the increase in mass intolerance (especially anti-Semitism) and even the “authoritarian personality” both of which are thought to have resonances with the present day situation. While all these factors had a role to play, conveniently forgotten is how economic and social elites supported Nazism to protect their own wealth and status.
This holds strong lessons for our own times. The encroachment of fascism is being enabled through the funding and at times direct political support of the 1% defending their privileges by seemingly any means necessary. The are willing to do whatever they can to protect the upward redistribution of wealth to the rich following decades of neoliberalism. Indeed, we are now confronted with the troubling prospect of a U.S. election between two billionaires—one who has mused that it might be nice to be “President for Life” and another whose campaign merchandise trumpets the need to “bring in the boss.”
Fundamentally, it points to the wider danger corporations and the very wealthy pose to the very survival of democracy and civil liberties. Internally, they have eroded democratic institutions such as union based collective bargaining and idolised the top down dictator like leadership of the “CEO politician”. The scourge of private prisons, moreover, reveals the desire by these conglomerates to profit off the lessening of our freedom and human rights. Internationally, the U.S. continues to undermine democracies that do not serve its corporate interests ranging from Honduras to the Ukraine to Haiti.
This speaks to the broader rise of the 21st century authoritarian capitalism. It reveals the willingness and enhanced ability for governments and corporations to work together to defend the “free market” against social unrest and demands for greater equality and justice.
The Real Danger to Freedom
Again and again Sanders is being attacked as a socialist and by association a friend of totalitarianism. The question instead should be how corporate-funded Democrats and Republicans will be able to stave off the threat of “authoritarian capitalism” despite being primarily funded by the very autocrats who most benefit from and promote it. Indeed, how can they answer for their support for a market system that seems to incetivize and without serious socialist safeguards leads naturally too increased economic repression, political oppression, and military intervention?
To his credit, Sanders has in the past laid out his own foreign policy division that explicitly stresses the global danger of oligarchy to democracy. In a 2017 speech he proclaimed:
Inequality, corruption, oligarchy and authoritarianism are inseparable. They must be understood as part of the same system, and fought in the same way. Around the world we have witnessed the rise of demagogues who once in power use their positions to loot the state of its resources. These kleptocrats, like Putin in Russia, use divisiveness and abuse as a tool for enriching themselves and those loyal to them.
This is the precise argument he must continue to make not just for his own political survival but democracy and freedom worldwide. The real danger to freedom in the 21st century is authoritarian capitalism not democratic socialism and this election is a choice once more for a new generation between “socialism and barbarianism.”
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/poll-shows-democratic-voters-in-texas-and-california-view-socialism-more-positively-than-capitalism/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/how-ceos-behave-like-closet-socialists/
no lnx
How CEOs behave like closet socialists
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg poses a question during the CEO Summit. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Written by Paul Adler / YES! Magazine February 28, 2020
Progressives and socialists in the United States are working towards major economic changes such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. It is urgent that we empower national government to take over such critical functions in society as health insurance and the transition to a green economy. But we often encounter pushback: Many Americans worry about the risks of giving control over so much of our lives to a central authority. Our opponents cite the failure of the USSR.
We need to convince people that centralized economic planning can be democratic and effective. One way is to point to a working model of what that looks like, one they are already familiar with. In my recent book, The 99% Economy, I argue that we can find just such a model in a strange place—in many of our biggest capitalist businesses.
A working model, right under our noses
Many corporate CEOs behave like closet socialists. In public, they defend the superiority of markets over planning. But inside their own corporations, where they could leave their various business units to compete with each other, they rely instead on comprehensive strategic planning. Such planning aims to ensure that the various business units that make up the corporation coordinate their production, investment, and other plans to achieve the best outcomes for the corporation as a whole. Yes, some corporations try to emulate the market in their internal operations, but that approach is relatively rare. In most firms, the activity of business units is coordinated by a strategic plan—just like a government-run health insurance program, a national health service, or a national energy system.
In this internal planning process, corporations confront in miniature the same challenges that bedeviled centralized economic planning in the old USSR. But our corporations have developed effective techniques to deal with those challenges—techniques that could be deployed on a wider scale and to similar advantage in socialist planning.
Consider Kaiser Permanente
Consider how Kaiser Permanente orchestrates its strategy process. KP is the largest private-sector health care provider and one of the largest private health care insurance companies in the U.S., with more than 12 million health plan members, 696 hospitals and medical offices, and more than 217,000 employees.
Many things about the way KP operates anger us progressives—it’s a basically capitalistic enterprise that often puts its own profits over the needs of its workers and patients. But there’s a lot to admire about its planning.
Instead of letting its 22,000 doctors compete with each other as little independent businesses and haggle with insurance companies over prices and services, and instead of putting its hospitals in competition with each other for patients and doctors, KP draws them all into a strategic planning process aimed at maximizing the performance of the system as a whole.
As in many other big enterprises, KP’s strategic goals are informed by both top-down leadership and bottom-up input about opportunities and challenges. Through this vertical and horizontal dialogue, the organization determines goals and mobilizes towards achieving them.
One key feature of KP’s planning is the role of its unions. In 1996, KP formalized a partnership relationship with a coalition of most of its unions, representing the vast majority of its employees. While this labor-management partnership was originally conceived as a labor-relations strategy designed to minimize the risk of strikes, it soon evolved into the organization’s operating strategy. Management came to see that front-line employees could contribute to organizational performance if given a chance.
The leaders of the union coalition worked with KP’s top national leaders to develop a shared set of strategic goals. And the labor-management partnership put into place structures for joint planning and decision-making at every level—national, regional, medical center, and department—to advance those goals. On the front lines, 3500 Unit-Based Teams with management and union co-leads were mobilized to contribute to them.
The result is a health care delivery system that offers impressive levels of efficiency and clinical quality, levels that would be unattainable if KP were organized internally as a market-based, competitive system. One of the many advantages of planning over competition is that—unlike much of the rest of the U.S. health care system—KP units have a strong incentive to invest in preventive care and community health.
In this way, Kaiser Permanente shows how socialists would solve our health care crisis: nationalize the entire industry and implement an expanded version of this type of strategic management process in the new National Health Service. Having nationalized ownership and having thus turned the entire health care delivery system into a public agency, we could overcome the limits imposed by capitalism on KP’s planning. Employees’ voices could be guaranteed, rather than being a conditional privilege accorded by an enlightened management. Financing would be determined by democratic deliberation, rather than subject to the veto power of investors. Patients and community voices would be brought into the governance of the agency on an equal footing.
Beyond health care
Now pivot from health care to, say, the automobile industry, whose products and processes have proven so toxic to the environment. We can nationalize the auto companies and their suppliers. We can integrate them into a national transportation industry planning council to rebalance public and private transportation options. Our democratically elected representatives would develop economic, social, and environmental goals for the industry—just like GM or Ford executives develop strategic goals for their companies today, but on a bigger scale, and with much deeper and wider participation. Workers in the transportation industry as well as the wider community would work in regional and sector councils to formulate their input on these goals and develop plans to achieve them.
Their plans would be funded by the national investment bank in accordance with criteria developed democratically at the national and local levels. We would rationalize the internal structure of this industry, greatly reducing costs by eliminating unnecessary variation in components, designs, and processes. We would task the national investment bank to invest in creating new job opportunities in regions hit by the resulting downsizing.
Some worry that such gargantuan public enterprises would be unaccountable. But socialism would replace the very unreliable accountability provided by the market (remember Enron anyone? Or the banking collapse of 2008?) with a more robust, democratic form of accountability through regulators, courts, legislative oversight, and public advocacy.
Our Aristotle problem
As progressives and socialists, we have to find some way to help people form a mental image of the better world we want to create. But it’s hard for many Americans to imagine that centralized economic planning could be democratic and effective.
We shouldn’t underestimate this challenge. Consider this: Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle—one of the greatest minds of his era or indeed any other—was convinced that if the right to vote were extended to women and slaves, Greece’s glorious political democracy would degenerate into rule by the rabble. Yet most of us today are committed to political democracy with universal suffrage, even if we accept that its implementation is never perfect.
To deal with the many challenges we face today, the democratic principle must be extended from the political realm to the economic. But we have grown up in a capitalist world. It is as difficult for us to imagine the expansion of democratic decision-making to the economic realm as it was for Aristotle to imagine the expansion of democratic rights to women and slaves.
Perhaps pointing to the central planning that already operates in our big corporations can help people overcome this hurdle.
Paul S. Adler is currently Harold Quinton Chair of Business Policy and Professor of Management and Organization, Sociology, and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California. He began his education in Australia, moved to France, and was employed as a research economist for the French government. He came to the USA in 1981, and before arriving at USC in 1991, was affiliated with Barnard College, Harvard Business School, and Stanford’s School of Engineering.
booktv 220
Kate Aronoff, "We Own the Future"Journalist Kate Aronoff discussed the history of socialism and what…
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Bolivia’s Movement for Socialism Candidate Luis Arce Returns to Bolivia
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an 1/20 krugman
What I take from the polling on socialism is that it’s a reaction to right-wing demonizing of every proposal to improve how we live. If you spend 40 years denouncing Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps, antitrust policy, etc as “socialism”; if you say that Denmark is socialist; well, eventually you get a lot of people who say they want socialism.
I suspect that if you asked about what we used to mean by socialism — government control of manufacturing, government-run retailing, and so on — you’d get a much less favorable response.
Paul Krugman’s latest book, “Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better America,” is out today from W.W. Norton.
Keith A. Spencer is a senior editor for Salon. He manages Salon’s science, tech, economy and health coverage. His book, “A People’s History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy,” was released in 2018. Follow him on Twitter at @keithspencer, or on Facebook here.
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an 1/22/20
global poll finds majority believe capitalism does more harm than good
Andrea Germanos / Common Dreams