ANS -- A Compound Post from FB

Here's a FB post.  Well, it's a compound post.  

--Kim

Sara Robinson

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As a refugee from one of those rural places, I'll ratify everything Solnit says here. The categories are leaky, the truth is trickier than it looks, and Democrats don't have a condescension problem with rural voters -- they have a FOX problem.

Facebook

Rebecca Solnit 

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My friend Nancy posted this and I said Please Lord, just one movie in which city folk represent decency and sanity and country folk are wacked to hell and back (besides Cold Comfort Farm, which is great, but English and from the 1930s). To which I might add the old conceit in which the city represents decadence and the countryside wholesomeness has bedeviled the English-speaking world for several centuries and is now a fixture and a curse upon American politics, the right having convinced rural people that, first, they are the wholesome Real Americans and second that we city folk despise and hate them.

Hate them for their wholesome traditional ways, rather than maybe we don't hate them or maybe we hate intolerance and racism and the repression that hides abuse of all kinds (and maybe not a few city people are refugees from those idyllic-looking rural places that want to kill queer people, unsubmissive women, immigrants, and dissenters). I will give it to Barbara Kingsolver's new book Demon Copperfield, in that it portrays a lot of violence, cruelty, trapped ness, and addiction in rural America. Aunt June who went to Knoxville is maybe the strongest moral force in the book and the most cleareyed character. Thanks to Susan for reminding me that Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is another portrait of rural America as unwholesome, and so is Jane Smiley's retelling of King Lear in A Thousand Acres. What other classics of the unwholesome countryside are there? I think Thomas Hardy straddles the divide, loving some things and recognizing the cruelty and repression of others.

I grew up in a suburban cul-de-sac, the last subdivision before the country, on the edge of dairy farms. Our street was a spur off a long street, and I and learned to ride (western, of course) at the end of the long street become dirt road dead-ending in a horse pasture. I've spent many of the best days of my life in rural and wild places, and I admire the skill and toughness of people who work the land and tend it, but it's probably assumed that since I'm urban, left, and environmental I hate rural people. And it's true that I grew up among middle-class white people who mocked and ridiculed Dolly Parton and country music and southern accents, but I haven't heard that nastiness in a long while.

I got an essay out of it years ago, titled "One Nation Under Elvis": "The story that racism belongs to poor people in the South is a little too easy, though. Just as not everybody up here, geographically and economically, is on the right side of the line, so not everyone down there is on the wrong side. But the story allows middle-class people to hate poor people in general while claiming to be on the side of truth, justice, and everything else good." In other words, a vile class war pretends to be an anti-racist war. I've met rich urban/northern racists and poor southern/rural antiracists. Categories are leaky.

To all this I'll add a few paragraphs from this great column from four years ago by Paul Waldman (but please note that just as far from all conservatives/MAGA nuts are rural, so not all rural people are conservatives/MAGA nuts). Waldman writes: In the endless search for the magic key that Democrats can use to unlock the hearts of white people who vote Republican, the hot new candidate is "respect." If only they cast off their snooty liberal elitism and show respect to people who voted for Donald Trump, Democrats can win them over and take back Congress and the White House.

The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive. It ignores decades of history and everything about our current political environment. There's almost nothing more foolish Democrats could do than follow that advice.

Before we proceed, let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that the desire for respect isn't real. As a voter says in "The Great Revolt," a new book by conservative journalist Salena Zito and Republican operative Brad Todd, "One of the things I really don't get about the Democratic Party or the news media is the lack of respect they give to people who work hard all of their lives to get themselves out of the hole."

But the mistake is to ignore where the belief in Democratic disrespect actually comes from and to assume that Democrats have it in their power to banish it.

It doesn't come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn't come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An entire industry that's devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them.

It's more than an industry, actually; it's an industry, plus a political movement. The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity. https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../why-democrats-cant.../

[I'd also add that the Democrats reliably advocate for legislation--access to healthcare, education, social services, clean water, etc.-- that would benefit anyone poor or struggling and most people who are rural (if not big farming and ranching interests), but this is often ignored by the mainstream media and the right just plies them with the red meat of ideological issues, with the help of conservative Christian churches obsessing about abortion, sexuality, "traditional families" aka patriarchal repression, and lately critical race theory, trans kids, and other us-vs.-them frames.]

p.s. Eric Michael Garcia, the author of this genius tweet, is the author of a book on autism titled We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. Link in comments.

ANS -- from HCR, November 23, 2022 (Wednesday)

Here is a story about Thanksgiving, from Heather Cox Richardson.  Our holiday is really more connected to the Civil War than to the Pilgrims.  

From Facebook

--Kim

Heather Cox Richardson 

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November 23, 2022 (Wednesday)

The past week has brought seven mass shootings in the United States. Twenty-two people have been killed and 44 wounded. I'll have more to say later about our epidemic of gun violence, but tonight, on the night before Thanksgiving, when I traditionally post the story of the holiday's history, I simply want to acknowledge the terrible sorrow behind tomorrow's newly empty chairs.

Thanksgiving itself came from a time of violence: the Civil War.

The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers' attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.

In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women's magazine Godey's Lady's Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slaveholding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.

And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.

Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that "all men are created equal," but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.

In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders' rebellion.

The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.

New York governor Edwin Morgan's widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year "is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones." But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because "the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value."

The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant's army. The military tide was turning.

President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.

In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation.

They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming.

And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, "with a large increase of freedom," would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans "in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands" to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.

The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. "Moreover," Lincoln wrote, "He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions."

In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front to create a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.

And they won.

My best to you all for Thanksgiving 2022.

ANS -- a cartoon

I found this cartoon on FaceBook. Does it remind you of someone?  Actually, it's from Brazil.  

--Kim

ANS -- Why Our Civilization Needs a New Deal

Here's a follow-up article from umair haque.  With a solution.  read it.  

Find it here: 

--Kim

umair haque

Nov 11

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12 min read

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Why Our Civilization Needs a New Deal

What the Democrats — And Every Sane Political Party — Should Do Next

Image Credit: UN

It's a remarkable moment for America. Trumpism's spell appears to be broken — because Americans are outgrowing it. It's xenophobia, hate, spite, violence — these don't have the same thrilling allure they once did. And that's no small thing — because in this world, where authoritarianism and fascism are spreading, a global populist stretching from India to Sweden — outgrowing demagoguery is a singular accomplishment for a nation.

But America's hardly out of the deep, dark woods either, yet. Celebrate, applaud. And then reflect. On a simple enough question. What should the Democrats do now?

If you don't like the phrase "the Democrats," fair enough — I'm hardly a card-carrying member or President of the Fan Club. Substitute something like this: if you're lucky enough to outgrow demagoguery — then what? What should you do next? After all, that's just the first step in turning a society around — or navigating the civilizational scale challenges of the 21st century. So: what's the next step back to sanity after you put the demagogue's demon back in it's box?

Something very much like this.

The Democrats would have won a landslide if they'd made a stronger pitch to Americans about the economy. That's not "my opinion," really — it's a fact. Voters' number one priority was the economy, and they turned back to an old myth that by now's spread across much of the world. That myth goes like this: conservatives are better at the economy.

Think about how our politics really works for a moment. It's built on a set of myths that have been drilled into the populace over time, by jackhammers pounding away at their skulls. Those myths are things people simple come to assume. They go like this. Conservatives are naturally better at some things: national security, the economy, growth, inflation, immigration, foreign policy, crime. Liberals, on the other hand, are better at others: maybe science, or setting up schools, the environment, justice, managing public institutions.

This set of assumptions has spread from America to Britain and now beyond it. It's shaping European politics, too, now, driving the spread of the far right in Sweden and Italy and France. It's true across generations, too — even young people tend to be taken in by it. So what's the problem with all that?

Well, everything. I'm going to make a point, but it's not about partisan politics — rather, it's just about truth.

There are three mega-problems lurking in that set of assumptions that people make, which is what politics really boils down to. One, the set of stuff liberals are assumed to better at's much smaller. Two, the issues they're assumed to better at managing are less bread-and-butter, not so close to home, not so existential and basic and fundamental, but more rarefied, less populist, hence the accusation of "liberal elites." But it's the third problem that's the really Big One. None of the above is true.

It's a simple fact of the modern world that everyone should know by now. This list, which is a set of assumptions that's drilled into people practically from the day they're born, by everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Elon Musk — wait, are they actually the same person in two bodies?— is flat out wrong. It's false. Nobody's naturally "better" at some issues. Rather, different ages call for different responses — and some responses are dead ends in history, like fascism.

That's abstract, so let me explain. Are conservatives really "better at the economy"? LOL, if you read me and any other good economist under the sun, we'll all point to the same example. The example of what happened to Britain. Two decades ago, perhaps the highest living standards in the world — today, a failing state, global laughingstock, and pariah, with an imploded economy, a cratered currency, and zero economic future. What happened? Brits voted not just conservative, but in a death spiral of increasingly extreme conservatism for three times as long as Trump was in power. By the time conservatives are out of power in Britain, they'll have held the reins for fifteen long years. That's a lifetime in modern politics — and it's also the closest thing the world's seen to a natural experiment in quite a while. What happens if you vote conservative, then more conservative, then finally ultra mega fanatically conservative, for people who are so far right wing that even the markets run away screaming, and dumping your currency?

Everything blows up.

Again, not my opinion. It is a fact. One glance at Britain alone should teach everyone thoughtful something. The set of myths that are modern politics are just that — myths.

Now let's come back to what the Democrats — and every sane political party, really, across the world — should do. They have to dispel these foolish myths. You see, America rejected Trumpism. The day will come, too, when Britain rejects xenophobia and hate, when Sweden and Italy and France weary of it, too. But then what? Then they have to do the hard work of undoing these myths, so they can do the harder work of creating a future worth inhabiting.

What does that really mean though? Something like this.

The Democrats (or, "every sane political party in the world") will have to point out that this set of myths isn't true. You know how America finally began talking about Trumpist Big Lies as Big Lies — and by doing so, American culture really changed? It became credible, only, really for fanatics and lunatics to go on believing in them, and thus Americans rejected Trumpism. So job one is teaching people that the future is going to need to be very different.

From what? From what they've been taught to erroneously believe. Here, let me finally put all that in Plain English, because I know it's getting complicated, so let's simplify it, and then it'll all make way more sense.

The Democrats ("every sane political party left in the world") have to get out there, now, and begin saying things like this. Hold on, I'm going to write a speech. Feel free to use it.

"So you're concerned about the economy? You want to know why prices are rising, and don't stop? OK, let's talk turkey. Time for some tough truths.

Those guys over there? The ones blaming it all on scapegoats? They say that in every country now, and all of them are dead wrong. In Britain, they blamed it on Europeans, then refugees, now Albanians. In Europe, they blame it on Africans. In India, on Muslims. In America, they blamed Jews and women and gay people. For what? For taking 'your' jobs and futures and livelihoods.

Those guys didn't take your jobs. You want to know who did? Well, number one, the guys that you think are better at managing the economy. It's conservatives who pushed to basically shut manufacturing in the West and who oppose investment in building things, from factories to roads to machines. But you want to know who's taking your future?

The same thing that's taking all of our futures. The planet is boiling.

I know you don't think this affects you very much, but it does. Prices rising? For so long? They used to blame it on Covid, but it clearly can't be that anymore. So what is it? The planet can't supply us with the same stuff at the same levels of abundance anymore. That level of plenitude is over.

You know it's over, because you can see it all around you. The Mississippi's running dry, and so did the Rhone. Australia burns in one season, Asia floods in another, California and the Pacific Northwest burn in another, and the ice sheets collapse in the next. On and on it goes, and it's getting worse by the year.

What does all that do? It hits you right in the pocketbook. Crops fail. Water supplies go dry. Electricity prices shoot up. Oil and gas get more expensive, not just because of random war, but warlords will try to monopolize resources when they know the world is running short of them. Today it's Putin — tomorrow, who? What's made of oil and gas? Everything from plastic, which is most of the stuff in your house, to steel, iron, glass, cement, and fertilizer. What does all that amount to?

The planet boiling equals inflation, forever. Climate change is the biggest inflationary shock in human history. And this is just the front of the shockwave, the smoke clouds billowing from the lava, which is about to come pouring down the hillside. And we're standing in the way.

What happens as a result of mega-scale climate impact driven inflation? Well, central banks, seeing prices skyrocket, respond by raising rates. So you get hit by a Big Crunch. Now your groceries cost eye-wateringly more, because guess what, growing all that stuff on a boiling, drowning, burning planet is much, much harder — and then you go home, and look at your credit card bills, car payments, mortgage statement, rent, and that's when you really wince in pain.

Want all that to stop? Of course you do. Then you have to get real. You can't just blame it all on scapegoats, who have nothing to do with it, and if they did, well, wouldn't countries like Britain be in fine shape? What does some poor refugee have to do with any of this? Nothing. And you have to wise up and get it. We are in a much bigger mess than that.

If you really want the economic pain to stop, then we can't do it the old way. It's not going to work like that. Our civilization is running short of all its basics — all of them, from water to energy to timber to food — and it's not going to stop. It's only going to keep on accelerating.

And if you get me so far, then the solution — the old one — is actually making the problem worse. The problem: climate-driven inflation. The old solution: raise rates and tamp down demand. But the problem isn't too much demand — see anybody with too much money, apart from creepy weirdos who buy global comms platforms to sway elections and then run them into the ground? The problem is too little supply. There's only way to fix that problem, and it's investing. Big time.

We need a New Deal for all of us. Not some kind of Marxist-Leninist — or Ayn Randist — utopian fantasyland. A New Deal for our Civilization.

We're living at the end of the Industrial Age — only we're not acting like it. We're at the limits of what the planet can supply us with now, and yet we haven't pioneered making any of the following in post-industrial ways: food, water, energy, cement, glass, steel, fertilizer.

We have a civilization-sized problem, in other words. We don't know how to make this stuff without killing the planet, but killing the planet is taking our economies with it. Catch-22. Either we have way, way less of this stuff, every year, at increasingly exorbitant prices, and soaring interest rates — and that lack of supply comes, by the way, with fewer and fewer jobs every year, too.

Or we learn how to make it all over again. Post-industrially. In ways that don't kill the planet, and burn the house down from inside. Think about this — really think about it. We don't know how to make the basics we all depend on, rely on, need — a single one of them — at even a national scale, let alone a civilizational one, post-industrially. Not a single one.

Sound like a big problem? It is. That's why we're in an economic mess — because we're at the end of an economic era, and we haven't laid the groundwork for a newer, better one yet. Hence, it's chaos out there. As economic ages end, this is what happens: there's less and less to go around, because the old ways don't work anymore. Prices rise, interest rates soar, and it's a vicious cycle into oblivion, unless.

Unless you invest in reinventing your economies. In our case, that means learning to make these basics that we all need, rely on, depend on, post-industrially. That doesn't mean "not in factories" — sure, in factories, which create tons of good, decent, highly skilled lifetime-sized jobs. But it does mean without carbon, with way less water and energy, without destroying ecosystems, not to mention democracies, meaning without creating the inequalities that leave us unable to invest in that stuff in the first place.

The first set of countries to do all that? They'll be the great powers of the future. Why? Well, imagine you're the first country that can really sell the world any facet of a post-industrial economy. Clean energy? It's super cheap. So is closed loop manufacturing, or production without wasting huge amounts of water and electricity. The first nation to really offer the world any of this stuff — being able to make the basics we all need, and are now going into short supply — is going to have the world beating down their door. Who wouldn't an agricultural system that doesn't need dirty, expensive fossil fuel? Or endless cheap energy? Or factories that can make stuff out of the same old stuff, over and over again? The first countries to get there are going to get rich.

They're going to be exporting the post-industrial economy to every corner of the globe — from India to China and beyond. And as they become powerhouse exporters, a wave of jobs of the future is going to be created. Towns and cities will come back to life again — ones that got hit hardest by offshoring and globalization. The upside is historic and tremendous, because….

This is the beginning, most likely, of the Great Climate Depression — one which history will remember as the Greater Depression. How long can a civilization accustomed to easy, cheap plenitude really survive on a dying planet? The Great Climate Depression, though, could be followed by the Big Post-Industrial Bang. A new era where growth soars into hyperdrive — only this time, it's OK to grow, because it doesn't kill the planet, and take democracy with it, because now that growth is made of stuff that's good for us, the planet, life on it, and the future gets better again.

Now we know how to make all those basics we rely and depend on — food, water, energy, medicine, steel, glass, iron, cement, right down to household goods like plastics — in ways that are almost purely beneficial, and not harmful. When we get there? Growth will roar, because everyone wants that stuff, the whole world, needs it, and it'll create whole new industries, sectors, and wave after wave of jobs, too.

Let me flip that around, too, though.

Only a civilization that can produce its basics in better ways can keep growing now. We have no choice. It's either slowing growth, forever — if we cling to the dying embers of the industrial economy — or it's a Big Bang of growth, if we reinvent the economy so we can really have abundance again, this time, even better.

That's a New Deal for Civilization. It's not going to be easy, and it's not going to be cheap, either. Here, let me blow your mind for a second. When was the last time we did something like this? Well, America's New Deal built the Hoover Dam. Today, the Hoover Dam makes more in a year from electricity than it cost to build it back then. That's what investment does. It returns stuff to us. Not just money — but what money represents. In this case, electricity, cities, people living their lives and going about their business and reaching their potential.

We need a New Deal that invests in every single basic our civilization needs. Making it post-industrially. At a civilizational scale. That's the only way out of this mess. The only one. The planet's not magically going to fix itself. If we keep on making and consuming the old way, we kill the planet, while prices skyrocket and interest soar, because scarcity goes into overdrive, and growth declines, and goes negative, into the future, more or less forever. If we blame scapegoats while all the above happens, then we only make things worse, by giving power to demagogues with no solutions. Concerned about the economy? Good, you should be. There's only way out, and that's reinventing it.

The choice is up to you, I guess. But before you make it — remind me, how much more did you pay for groceries today?"

See where I'm going with that? That's the kind of thing that the next step's made of. Outgrowing the fascists and lunatics is a wonderful accomplishment. But the future is bigger yet than that. It's a step — but only the first one. On the road back to civilization.

Umair
November 2022