community collective common

start of disambiguation, this is about ppl specifically vs commons like land, air, WATER, open source

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During a three-hour interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan some months ago, Elon Musk revealed the core of the ideology animating the richest person in the world.

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is,” Musk said, adding that liberals and progressives are “exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Musk pointed to California’s move to provide medical insurance even to undocumented people who qualify for its low-income Medi-Cal program.

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk continued. Empathy has been “weaponized.”

Musk is now officially out of Trump world but his DOGE lives on. It has already destroyed almost every empathic part of the U.S. government.

IFrame Content

Musk disdains social insurance such as Social Security, which he calls a “Ponzi scheme.”

Musk’s former buddy Donald Trump presumably agrees with him. As do many Republicans, including Joni (“Well, we all are going to die”) Ernst and Mitch (“They’ll get over it”) McConnell.

Trump’s Republicans are now raiding Medicaid and food stamps to make way for a giant tax cut mostly for the rich. No empathy bug there.

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is grabbing people off the streets and from courthouses without warrants and putting them in detention centers.

The number of immigrants detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities across the country has reached a record high of more than 56,000. The result is overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and enormous pain for affected families and communities.

It’s the opposite of empathy — treating people as if they aren’t human, as if they’re the “other.”

Both Musk and Trump are experts in taking selfish advantage of everything, anything, and anybody. Both have altered government programs and regulations to reap personal financial gain. Both have been quick to fire people. Both demand loyalty to themselves but have no loyalty to anything or anyone besides themselves.

They’ve got it all wrong. Empathy is a necessary precondition for a society.

Without empathy, we’d be living in a social Darwinist jungle animated only by selfish individuals pursuing selfish needs, like Musk and Trump.

If everyone behaved like Musk and Trump, we’d have to assume everyone else was out to exploit us if they could. Much of our time and attention would be devoted to outwitting or protecting ourselves from other Musks and Trumps.

Without a shared sense of empathy and responsibility, we would have to assume that everyone — including legislators, judges, regulators, and police — was acting selfishly, making and enforcing laws for their own benefit.

In a world populated by people like Musk and Trump, we couldn’t trust anyone to be truthful if they could do better for themselves by lying. We couldn’t count on any claim by sellers of any product or service. Internet-based “reputational ratings” would be of little value because raters would be easily bribed.

Journalists would shade their reports for their own selfish advantage, taking bribes from advertisers or currying favor with politicians. Teachers would offer lessons to satisfy wealthy or powerful patrons. Historians would alter history if by doing so they gained wealth or power. Scientists would doctor evidence for similar selfish motives. The truth would degenerate into a cacophony of competing factual claims, as, in part, it has.

We couldn’t trust doctors or pharmacists to give us the right medications. We couldn’t trust bankers and accountants not to fleece us, restaurants not to feed us tainted food, lawyers not to hoodwink us.

A society depends on people trusting that most others in society will have a modicum of empathy for others rather than take advantage of them. In this way, civic trust is self-enforcing and self-perpetuating, while civic distrust can corrode the very foundations of a society.

Polls tell us that many of today’s Americans worry that the nation is losing its national identity. Yet the core of that identity has never been the whiteness of our skin, the uniformity of our ethnicity, or the commonality of our birthplace.

Our core identity as Americans — the most precious legacy we have been given by the generations who came before us — consists of the ideals we share and the obligations we hold in common. We are tied together by these empathic meanings and duties. Our loyalties and attachments, guided by empathy, define who we are.

If we are losing our national identity, it is not because we are becoming blacker or browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing the ties that bind us together, our collective empathy.

Musk and Trump typify what has gone wrong. Their most damaging legacies may be the erosion of the trust and empathy on which our society — any society — depends.

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https://www.alternet.org/americas-story/

alternet

Trump has offered extreme versions of America's four basic stories

Robert Reich December 12, 2024

Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that Trump Republicans have succeeded in framing issues to their advantage. While it’s true that Kamala Harris lost by a small margin, the overriding reality is that through many elections, Democrats have failed to speak to America in ways that most Americans understand.

The challenge facing Democrats is deeper than simply finding the right words and phrases. To win back the heart and soul of America, Democrats must retell the four basic stories that have defined and animated the United States since its founding.

For most of the 20th century, Democrats did this instinctively. But in this century, they have tended to speak in technocratic terms, giving Republicans — culminating in Trump — the dominant political narrative.

I want to tell you about how the four basic American stories have been told and explain why it’s urgent that the real story of our era be told: that wealth and power concentrated at the top are corrupting American democracy and shafting most working people.

There are four essential American stories. The first two are about hope; the second two are about fear.

The Triumphant Individual. This is the tale of the little guy who works hard, takes risks, believes in himself, and eventually gains wealth, fame, and honor.

It’s the story of self-made people who buck the odds, spurn the naysayers, and show what can be done with enough gumption and guts. They’re plainspoken, self-reliant, and uncompromising in their ideals — underdogs who make it through hard work and faith in themselves.

Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is the first in a long line of U.S. self-help manuals about how to make it through self-sacrifice and diligence. The same story is epitomized in the life of Abe Lincoln, born in a log cabin, who believed that “the value of life is to improve one’s condition.”

The identical theme was captured in Horatio Alger’s hundred or so novellas, whose heroes all rise promptly and predictably from rags to riches. It’s celebrated in the tales of immigrant peddlers who become millionaire tycoons. And it’s found in the manifold stories of downtrodden fighters who undertake dangerous quests and find money and glory. Think Rocky Balboa, Norma Rae, and Erin Brockovich. The moral: With enough effort and courage, anyone can make it in the United States.

Trump wants Americans to think of him as the Triumphant Individual, and he has extolled others, such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, as similarly triumphant.

The Benevolent Community. This is the story of neighbors and friends who roll up their sleeves and pitch in for the common good.

Its earliest formulation was John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered on board a ship in Salem Harbor just before the Puritans landed in 1630 — a version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, in which the new settlers would be “as a City upon a Hill,” “delight in each other,” and be “of the same body.”

Similar communitarian and religious images were used by the abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s. “I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low,” said Martin Luther King Jr., extolling the ideal of the national community.

The story is captured in the iconic New England town meeting, in frontier settlers erecting one another’s barns, in neighbors volunteering as firefighters and librarians, and in small towns sending their high school achievers to college and their boys off to fight foreign wars. It suffuses Norman Rockwell’s paintings and Frank Capra’s movies. Consider the last scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when George learns he can count on his neighbors’ generosity and goodness, just as they had always counted on him.

Trump Republicans have distorted the story of the Benevolent Community to show what America would be without “woke”ism, Critical Race Theory, transgender kids using bathrooms or being on high school sports teams inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth, “cat ladies” who choose not to have children, and other cultural bogeymen.

The Mob at the Gates. In this story, the United States is a beacon light of virtue in a world of darkness, uniquely blessed but continuously endangered by foreign menaces. Hence our endless efforts to contain the barbarism and tyranny beyond our borders.

Daniel Boone fought Native Americans — white America’s first evil empire. Davy Crockett battled Mexicans. The same story is found in the Whigs’ anti-English and pro-tariff histories of the United States, in the anti-immigration harangues of the late 19th century, and in World War II accounts of Nazi and Japanese barbarism.

It animates modern epics about space explorers (often sporting the stars and stripes) battling alien creatures bent on destroying the world. The narrative gave special force to Cold War tales during the 1950s of an international communist plot to undermine U.S. democracy, and subsequently of “evil” empires and axes.

The underlying lesson: We must maintain vigilance, lest diabolical forces overwhelm us.

Trump and his Republican enablers have emphasized this story to scare Americans into believing we’re being overridden by undocumented immigrants and taken advantage of by foreign nations who are allied with us and major trading partners.

The Rot at the Top. The last story concerns the malevolence of powerful elites. It’s a tale of corruption, decadence, and irresponsibility in high places — of conspiracy against the common citizen.

It started with King George III, and, to this day, it shapes the way we view government — mostly with distrust.

The great bullies of American fiction have often symbolized Rot at the Top: William Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, Willie Stark as the Huey Long-like character in All the King’s Men, Lionel Barrymore’s demonic Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and the antagonists who hound the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath.

Suspicions about Rot at the Top have inspired what historian Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in U.S. politics — from the pre-Civil War Know-Nothings and Anti-Masonic movements through the Ku Klux Klan and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts.

The myth has also given force to the great populist movements of U.S. history, from Andrew Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the United States in the 1830s through William Jennings Bryan’s prairie populism of the 1890s.

Trump and his Republicans have used this story against government workers, civil servants, independent agencies, the FBI, and other examples of a so-called “deep state.”

Speak to these four stories and you resonate with the tales Americans have been telling each other since our founding — the two hopeful stories rendered more vivid by contrast to the two fearful ones.

These four mental boxes are always going to be filled somehow, because people don’t think in terms of isolated policies or issues. If they’re to be understandable, policies and issues must fit into these larger stories about where we have been as a nation, what we are up against, and where we should be going.

Major shifts in governance — in party alignments and political views — have been precipitated by one party or the other becoming better at telling these four stories.

In the early decades of the 20th century, progressives and Democrats filled all four boxes.

They accused leaders of big business of being the Rot at the Top. They argued that the large industrial concentrations of the era, the trusts, were stifling the upward mobility of millions of potential Triumphant Individuals and poisoning democracy.

During his 1912 campaign, Woodrow Wilson (who also promoted racism) promised to wage

“a crusade against powers that have governed us ... that have limited our development, that have determined our lives, that have set us in a straitjacket to do as they please.”

The struggle to break up the trusts would be nothing less than “a second struggle for emancipation,” by a national Benevolent Community intent on restoring freedom and democracy.

Wilson’s Mob at the Gates was composed of the large, bellicose states of prewar Europe who posed similar challenges to democratic freedoms. Wilson grimly rallied Americans to “defeat once and for all ... the sinister forces” that rendered peace impossible.

Theodore Roosevelt shared Wilson’s antipathy toward trusts, but by the 1920s, Republicans were mostly apologists for big business and Wall Street. That was okay with Americans as long as the economy roared, but it left the Grand Old Party vulnerable in harder times, which soon came.

Like today’s Trump Republicans, the GOP’s approach to foreign policy through most of the 20th century was mainly to avoid the Mob at the Gates — close the doors to immigrants, erect tariff walls, and isolate the nation.

They celebrated the wealth of Triumphant Individuals but didn’t champion upward mobility or equal opportunity, and they offered no particular view of the United States as a Benevolent Community. As such, they stayed firmly in the minority most of the first half of the 20th century.

The Great Depression and World War II presented the United States with palpable illustrations of the Democratic stories.

By the 1930s, the Rot at the Top included Wall Street as well as big business. In the 1936 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt warned against “economic royalists” who had impressed the whole of society into service. “The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor ... these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship,” he warned. What was at stake, he concluded, was nothing less than the “survival of democracy.”

To cope with the Depression, Americans needed a national Benevolent Community. “I see one third of our nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” FDR told a nation whose citizens clearly understood they were all in this together. He described the purpose of the New Deal as “extending to our national life the old principle of the local community.” “We are determined,” Roosevelt said, “to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern.”

The Social Security Act was not just a social insurance scheme but the very symbol of national solidarity. Henceforth, all American families would share the risk of becoming unemployed or losing the family’s breadwinner or retiring without adequate savings.

Then came Adolf Hitler’s war, which cemented this national unity as FDR led the country — over the objections of Republican isolationists — into battle with the most fearsome Mob at the Gates it had ever encountered.

Democrats managed the transition from Depression and world war to postwar prosperity and the Cold War with only slight alterations in story line. The Benevolent Community remained at the core of Harry S Truman’s Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

The upwardly mobile Triumphant Individual depended on federal provisions — the GI Bill, government-backed mortgages, a guarantee of equal civil rights.

Meanwhile, the Democrats continued their assault on the Mob at the Gates, but now the Mob was the dangerous and expansive Soviet Union. Truman stopped the communists in Korea. Kennedy stopped them in Berlin and during the Cuban missile crisis. And he tried to stop them in Vietnam, which he saw as “the finger in the dike” holding back the Soviets.

Johnson, of course, tragically tried and failed to erect a dam against the North Vietnamese and their patrons.

While Republicans continued to wrestle with the isolationists and nervous Nellies — such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio — Democrats spoke of paying any price and bearing any burden to protect the United States.

In the 1960s, the Rot at the Top gradually dropped out of the Democratic message. Gone were tales of greedy businessmen and unscrupulous financiers.

This was partly because the economy had changed profoundly. Postwar prosperity allowed the middle class to explode in size and the gap between rich and poor to shrink. White-collar workers were now abundant, and blue-collar workers got generous wage increases that could be absorbed by the huge postwar market.

Rot at the Top rhetoric was also a casualty of the Vietnam War, which spawned an anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian New Left and split Democrats down the middle.

For many liberals, the Rot came to be personified by Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and even the federal government itself. (Ironically, Richard Nixon’s White House and the Watergate scandal would hurt the Democrats, too, by confirming that the Rot at the Top was to be found in government rather than among business elites.)

The Vietnam War also undermined Democrats’ confidence about the Mob at the Gates. Soviet communism remained dangerous, to be sure, but the McGovern wing of the party had no clear plan of action. Indeed, its approach seemed redolent of the Republican isolationists of the earlier part of the century, who wanted the United States simply to turn its back on the Mob.

After President Carter and the hostage crisis, even when Democrats did try to tell this story, they seemed uncertain of themselves.

In short, Democrats and progressives came off as confused and conflicted about the dangers the United States faced. They stopped talking about both the Rot at the Top and the Mob at the Gates and thus ceased giving Americans convincing stories about what the nation was up against.

Tomorrow, in Part 2, I discuss why the Democrats left Trump to tell his fake version of the Rot at the Top, not the real one.

NOW READ: A reckoning is coming for the people who didn't care about their country

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

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AlternetFor Republicans — the outgroup can take care of itself — or die trying

John Stoehr October 10, 2024

During a national emergency, it’s good to say that “we’re all in this together.” Whether it’s a war, a pandemic or a hurricane, everyone is affected. Everyone has a stake in the outcome. And if we don’t believe and act like we are all in this together, the crisis will get worse.

This idea of collective fate in the face of dire threats to our lives and fortunes is conventional. So much so that it beggars belief when rightwing politicians tell us that, actually, we’re not all in this together.

It beggars belief so much that it’s just easier, mentally speaking, for ordinary people who have a sense of the national good to say that rightwingers don’t really mean it. It’s easier to believe they really do share the same core values as we do, but aren’t living up to them.

It’s easier to call them hypocrites.

In defiance of God

Rightwingers are not hypocrites, though. They believe American society is divided into ingroups and outgroups. The former is good, right and deserving. The latter is bad, wrong and undeserving. When there’s a national emergency, the federal government should help the ingroup, because it’s the only group that constitutes a “real nation.”

Meanwhile, the outgroup can take care of itself.

Or die trying.

Not only do they believe American society is divided into ingroups and outgroups, they believe it ought to be. The orders of power should be vertical and hierarchical. That is the ideal, because that is “natural.”

For this reason, liberal efforts to flatten the orders of power, so that the outgroup has as many rights and privileges as the ingroup, are seen by rightwingers as a perversion of the natural order of things.

To them, we are not all in this together, because we can’t be.

If we were, that would be in defiance of God.

Barbarism, not hypocrisy

No matter how many times rightwingers tell us what they really believe, the rest of us cling to the belief that they really don’t.

Stubbornly, we insist that they will set aside politics during a national emergency and that, in the end, they will choose nation over party.

While some of us realize that they will never set aside politics, not even during a national emergency, most of us don’t understand why.

The reason?

They already put the nation above all else. The politics that we keep expecting them to set aside are in service to the nation as they define it, and they define the nation in ways most Americans never would.

For most people, the nation is everyone. We’re all in this together.

For rightwingers, the nation is them. You’re with us or against us.

They are not hypocrites. They are the “real Americans,” God’s chosen. They are not failing to live up to their values. They are realizing them.

What the rest of us fail to understand is that those values are horrible. They are not only illiberal and anti-democratic, they are barbarous.

So barbarous that it beggars belief.

It’s easier to call them hypocrites.

You can’t shame a zealot

Barbarism, not hypocrisy, is the reason why a Florida Republican could say with a straight face that FEMA funding should come in advance of Hurricane Milton even though she voted to cut it a few weeks prior.

Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna falsely implied that Kamala Harris and the Biden administration were withholding disaster relief, even though she “voted to shut down the federal government, vetoing a measure to extend FEMA funding by $20 billion,” according to the New Republic. “Luna was among 82 House Republicans who voted against the deal and one of 11 Florida lawmakers who cast dissenting votes.”

Luna’s critics would allege that she’s saying one thing but doing another, but it’s the opposite to her. Demanding government money if it helps the ingroup is in keeping with withholding government money if it hurts the outgroup. Indeed, the concept is so natural to Luna that she’s falsely accusing the vice president of doing the very same thing.

When Republicans like Luna do this, critics often despair. They say there’s no bottom for these people. There’s no shame. They’ve abandoned their principles. They’ve followed Donald Trump too far.

Again, it’s the opposite.

They are realizing their principles.

They want a society in which the ingroup gets the blessings of freedom and democracy, and all the government assistance, while the outgroup gets whatever’s coming to it. If a hurricane plows into Florida, God’s chosen must be helped! If it plows into Puerto Rico, well, tough luck.

They want such tyranny, because they believe God wants it.

You can shame a hypocrite.

You can’t shame a zealot.

No such thing as collective fate

Barbarism, not hypocrisy, is also the reason Trump can betray America without risking his reputation among zealots for putting America first.

To them, it doesn’t matter that, as president during the pandemic, he sent Vladimir Putin covid tests for his personal use, as the country struggled with shortages. It doesn’t matter, as my senator Chris Murphy said, that “he decided to let Americans die to keep Putin alive.”

The “America” in “America first” is not America. It’s the ingroup. And the ingroup has more in common with Russia than the outgroup.

Russia is a top-down society in which the orders of power are strictly maintained. Liberal efforts to flatten those orders democratically are crushed, often violently, with every instrument of the state.

In times of national emergency, as there is with Russia’s war against Ukraine, there is no such thing as a collective fate. They don’t believe “we’re all in this together.” The weak are sacrificed by the strong.

Russia is the ideal.

It’s what the ingroup believes America should be.

And if Trump helped an ally in God’s plan, so be it.

:{:{Barbarism is bizarre}:

Joe Biden didn’t say “we’re all in this together,” but he meant that when he said there are neither blue states nor red states in the face of national emergencies like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.

“There’s one United States of America,” he said, “where neighbors are helping neighbors, volunteers and first-responders are risking everything, including their own lives, to help their fellow Americans.”

To meet our collective fate, we must be able to trust each other, and to do that, everyone must have good information. That’s why Trump and the Republicans are lying so much. It doesn’t matter that they’re hurting their own. What matters to them is preventing the spirit of solidarity from destabilizing rightwing forces that keep us apart.

Biden offered a liberal alternative to barbarism.

“Former President Trump has led the onslaught of lies,” Biden said. “Assertions have been made that property has been confiscated. That’s simply not true. They’re saying people impacted by these storms will receive $750 in cash and no more. That’s simply not true. They’re saying the money needed in this crisis is being diverted to migrants. What a ridiculous thing to say. It’s not true. Now the claims are getting more bizarre. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia, is now saying the government is literally controlling the weather – controlling the weather! It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s got to stop.”

The lies and disinformation won’t stop, of course, because zealots like Greene believe they’re fighting for their country. They believe Donald Trump is their champion. They believe they are God’s chosen.

If they were hypocrites, they could be shamed into doing the right thing and acting like we really are all in this together. Hypocrisy isn’t the problem, though. Barbarism is, no matter how bizarre it seems.

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Some members of a rural Wisconsin community wanted to demonstrate a commitment to inclusion during the racial protests last year, but the debate over how to express that has ripped the town apart.

Older white conservatives in Marathon County, whose 135,000 residents are 91 percent white and backed Donald Trump by more than 56 percent in each election, objected to naming theresolution "No Place for Hate," which they found too inflammatory, and the county board's executive committee shot down "A Community For All" last week with a 6-2 vote, reported the *New York Times*.

"They're creating strife between people labeling us as racist and privileged because we're white," said supervisor Arnold Schlei, a 73-year-old retired veal farmer and longtime board member. "You can't come around and tell people that work their tails off from daylight to dark and tell them that they got white privilege and they're racist and they've got to treat the Hmongs and the coloreds and the gays better because they're racist. People are sick of it."

The proposed resolution grew out of the protests over George Floyd's police killing, with the county's people of color wanting an acknowledgement that they faced some disparities based on race -- but conservatives have been whipped into a froth by local GOP chairman Jack Hoogendyk, who claims it would "end" private property and lead to "race-based redistribution of wealth."

The resolution, of course, would not do those things, but even acknowledging the existence of racism in the community is too much for some residents.

"[Systemic racism] doesn't exist here," said dairy farmer James Juedes, a public opponent of the resolution who's also organized counter protests against Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

"I have yet to recall any type of racial instances that has been reported in this community that has caused any type of stress," Juedes said.

La'Tanya Campbell, a 39-year-old Black social worker who was at the meeting last week, related a different experience. Ms. Campbell works as an advocate for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking, and said she sometimes had to enlist white colleagues to help clients find apartments to rent in Wausau.

"Typically, the racism you experience is behind closed doors, but since I've started on this resolution I can't believe some of the things that I'm hearing," Campbell said. "You feel unsafe being a woman, I feel unsafe being a Black woman, and doing anti-oppression work, it adds up."

The experience has been crushing to non-white residents, who say they're disappointed in their conservative neighbors for seemingly turning their backs -- or worse.

"I don't have the same type of confidence or faith in the community like I used to," said supervisor Ka Lo, a 39-year-old of Hmong descent who fielded death threats during the debate. "I was born and raised here, and I don't recognize the community that I grew up in right now."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/economist-paul-krugman-gops-cult-of-selfishness-informed-its-destructive-response-to-coronavirus-pandemic/

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has reported a COVID-19 death count of more than 148,000 for the United States, which has become the world’s coronavirus hotspot. Liberal economist Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column, argues that the United States’ high number of coronavirus-related deaths and infections underscores the failures of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.But Krugman also stresses that the problem goes way beyond Trump’s ineptness and exemplifies “America’s cult of selfishness.”

“Premature reopening led to a surge in infections: adjusted for population, Americans are currently dying from COVID-19 at around 15 times the rate in the European Union or Canada,” Krugman laments. “Yet the ‘rocket ship’ recovery Donald Trump promised has crashed and burned: job growth appears to have stalled or reversed, especially in states that were most aggressive about lifting social distancing mandates, and early indications are that the U.S. economy is lagging behind the economies of major European nations.”

Krugman notes that “Trump and allies were so eager to see big jobs numbers that they ignored both infection risks and the way a resurgent pandemic would undermine the economy.” But he goes on to say that “there’s a deeper explanation of the profoundly self-destructive behavior of Trump and his allies: they were all members of America’s cult of selfishness.”

The economist explains, “You see, the modern U.S. right is committed to the proposition that greed is good, that we’re all better off when individuals engage in the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest. In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society."

Republicans who are consumed with selfishness, according to Krugman, have a hard time looking at the big picture.

“I’ve long been struck by the intensity of right-wing anger against relatively trivial regulations, like bans on phosphates in detergent and efficiency standards for lightbulbs,” Krugman writes. “It’s the principle of the thing: many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account.”

According to Krugman, far-right Republicans equate irresponsibility with “freedom.”

“This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom,” Krugman observes. “But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents teargassing peaceful protesters. What they call ‘freedom’ is actually absence of responsibility.”

Krugman concludes his column by warning that during the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans have “sacralized selfishness” with deadly results.

“What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult of selfishness,” Krugman argues. “And this cult is killing us.

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Capitalism has distorted our understanding of community — and it’s making us vulnerable to manipulation

Written by Valerie Vande Panne / Independent Media Institute December 12, 2019

When we talked about community just a generation or two ago, it was understood we were talking about people, not brands—what they enjoyed or cared about, and not where they spent their money. But the definition of “community” has been hijacked by consumerism.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Companies will pay top dollar to know who belongs to which communities, and those labels of community are all about brand loyalty.

The shift of how we see community started with the original offline attention merchants and worsened by the digital age. Think “Nine out of Ten Doctors Smoke Camels”—the beginning of the cigarette smoking community, validated by medical doctors. Or the massive amount of marketing Coca-Cola did in the early 20th century, embedding the alternative to wine into America’s subconscious to the point that Coca-Cola and American patriotism, or Christmas, are quite nearly one and the same. If you’re a part of the American community, the message was, you drink Coke.

Since those days decades ago, there are a few ways “community” has been injected into the consumerist part of the internet, some more overt, and some more behind the scenes. For instance, there’s now an industry that was unimaginable not long ago: Social media community management, which treats people talking about a brand as a community. Facebook has “community standards”; Instagram has “community guidelines”; YouTube has a “community tab” that channels owned by companies can use to “engage” with potential customers. But are these really communities?

Even communities based on product or lifestyle interest—the sneakerheads or the CrossFit crowd—are reduced to marketable algorithms that show up in the ads you are fed and the Facebook and Instagram posts you see.

“Community” has been reduced and degraded by brand loyalty. Do you really want to be defined as living in a community of people who all shop for the same brand of clothing, eat food from the same chain store, and, are, more or less, homogenized by the same data analytics?

There might as well be a “white men in plaid shirts and jeans with scruffy beards and black-rimmed glasses” community.

Community might sometimes be these things—it’s nice to talk sneakers with someone who understands why one would enthusiastically wait in line overnight to buy a limited-edition pair—but in calling these things community, it reduces the individual and the community itself into a group of consumers who can be targeted for specific ads to make certain corporations money. Consumerism is not the primary force behind community, no matter what the MBA-wielding directors of marketing and data manipulation say.

Community at its best, I think, is a diverse place with people who might have very little in common. The people who live in your neighborhood make up your community. And real communities are formed independently of the carefully planned, gentrified residential projects, corporate-sponsored public spaces, and chain retail establishments that do more to separate rather than to unify us.

Community is comfort; it’s multigenerational; it’s multiracial and multicultural. It is a fabric, a cloth, a napkin woven out of people’s lives and connections, paths crossing or moving in the same direction together or even in opposite directions apart. It’s commitment to being present, in the moment, where you are now. It’s being a kind and decent person to your fellow humans—even when you don’t want to, or don’t agree with them about politics or language or worldview. Through better or worse, community must be counted on as a feature of life that can do everything from curbing loneliness, to satisfying hunger, to providing an unseen safety net for its inhabitants.

As Kurt Vonnegut said, “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

Community is greeting people you see, every day. It means looking your neighbors in the eye. It means seeing them—really seeing them—and their humanity. It means when they are hurting or suffering, you feel it too. You can pause for a moment, on a sidewalk or in the grocery store, to share a moment of compassion with them.

It’s life.

Often, you can spot the people who aren’t accustomed to living in a community. They walk past the same people every day, yet never look them in the eye or otherwise acknowledge their existence.

Community is not politics, or hating someone or wishing them ill for their mistakes. It’s accepting that we are all different; we all make mistakes; we are all right, and wrong. It’s figuring out how to pick up and move on from disagreement.

It means that when problems arise, solutions are found, good and bad. It means, at the end of the day, safety, because you know your neighbors and they know you. Community like this is complex. It isn’t simple. But it is natural.

Community is precious and is how people have lived for thousands of years. Of course it’s not perfect, and of course there are challenges and issues: arguments and violence, sexual abuse, domestic violence, or murder. But it’s a place where you can count on people not like you, and they can count on you. That’s what’s at the heart of a community: A willingness to be present for those in your shared world.

Everyday community activity alleviates loneliness, a chronic condition linked to everything from suicide to mental decline.That is evidence that community can—literally—save a life, though you might never know whose life you’re saving simply by being present in your community of people very different from you. The negative health effects of loneliness are comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, but you’re less likely to be lonely when you can walk around your neighborhood and see people with whom you are in a community relationship. This kind of community is not based on a unified interest or analytic (as in, “We all love Democrats/veganism/Trump/bicycling/salsa music, etc.”). Rather, it’s a “We are all here now” community.

It’s community in the lush richness of the real world, with all its problems and differences of opinion and complexities. Because at the end of the day, it’s not the differences that matter; it’s the kindness and support we can all show each other as we march through this thing called life, together. It’s easier to see someone’s humanity when you see them every day, in the real world, doing real-world things to live.

Just like you.

And that community isn’t the kind you find in the silo of website comments or a Facebook interest group. There might be very little uniting this real-world community outside of being in a certain place at a certain time.

Yet community is not a destination, nor a goal. It’s a way of being in the world, found where you are at, in the real world, with people most likely very different from you. It’s something that cannot be purchased.

If you see that, if you live in that, you’ll never be alone, and you’ll always be a part of something bigger than yourself.

Valerie Vande Panne is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. She is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in Columbia Journalism Review, In These Times, Politico, and many other publications.

MI and CA

Nestlé is trying to crush a tiny town of less than 2,000 people. All to keep sucking their most precious resource -- water.

Right now, Nestlé is pumping 250 gallons of water a minute or more than 350,000 gallons every single day from Osceola Township. Bottling it up, and selling it off for massive profit. And guess how much Nestlé pays?

Just $200 a year. Yes, you read that right.

But the community of Osceola is fighting back: it’s gearing up to appeal a court decision that outrageously let Nestlé take more water from the tiny township.

This tiny community is up against the might of Nestlé. Its legal costs are spiralling and Nestlé is still trying to bully it into backing down.