- Rebuilding Our Crumbling Infrastructure
- Reversing Climate Change
- Creating Worker Co-ops
- Growing the Trade Union Movement
- Raising the Minimum Wage
- Pay Equity for Women Workers
- Trade Policies that Benefit American Workers
- Making College Affordable for All
- Taking on Wall Street
- Health Care as a Right for All
- Protecting the Most Vulnerable Americans
- Real Tax Reform
July 11, 2015
Bernie Sanders' 12 point agenda
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7 comments:
I like to see him add to that:
Turning the Department of War into a Department of Defense.
Putting our spy agencies under civilian control.
Ending the war of drugs.
The first two sound rather contradictory. Our 'crumbling infrastructure' mainly consists of highways and bridges. If we want to reverse climate change, it seems that rebuilding interstate highways and many of the car bridges is going the wrong way. Thus, this list seems like just PR hit points that do well with polling. Instead, we need to replace much of our old infrastructure with a new infrastructure of high-speed inter-city trains and extensive subways within cities that let people move around easily without a car. And of course, we need to reverse urban sprawl and move into denser areas in the cities. Rebuilding the highways that were built to kinda-sorta make urban sprawl work is not the answer.
Is anyone else excited to see a self-described socialist within striking distance of winning Iowa and New Hampshire in the Democratic primary? Is this the strongest socialist run since Eugene Debs?
Strengthening labor unions does nothing to provide jobs, and jobs continue and will continue to disappear. Bringing manufacturing back is good, but the job creation is temporary, because no one with more than one brain cell will invest in a factory which cannot be manned by robots.
Unions do nothing to provide jobs, seriously?
We've read your commentary on these blogs for many years, often to great amusement, but this...
Are you at all familiar with any of the writings of the late Hanna Arendt?
The Hanna Arendt Center does much to promote her legacy:
http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/
from said site:
"Sixty years ago Hannah Arendt argued that the advent of automation was one of the two great events threatening the modern age. Against the Marxist hope that machines will free us from the need to labor so that we can pursue hobbies and nurture the soul, Arendt worried that freedom from labor would be soul crushing. We are a jobholding culture in which people find meaning in their employment. Without work, she argued, people will have little to nourish their sense of self. Most people will fall back on consumption, which requires them to labor to earn money to consume more, in a cycle of soul-crushing monotony."
Linked also from their site is this article published in the Atlantic which addresses the various dilemma now facing us in a robotic 'world without work'. It is very worth a perusal:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/
The last point about factories and robots is why capitalism is evil and should be abolished. Capitalism is the evil philosophy that says you can condemn people to poverty and homelessness just because you can build a robot cheaper. Someday we'll look back and everyone will realize that this is all just a justification for treating people in an extremely evil fashion and wrecking thousands if not millions of lives just so a very small minority can live in luxury. Amongst all this debate about flags, remember that a southern slave plantation was the capitalists idea of utopia. We seem willing to jettison the flags of that era, but not the evil philosophy that was the root of the evil.
Thanks, 7:58.
South Carolina, perhaps because it was heavily Catholic, was the southern state which had the largest abolitionist movement before the civil war. Of course the abolitionist publishers were beaten and their presses broken up by hired thugs and the movement was suppressed. So much for "the cause" of southern democracy and freedom even for whites.
Most plantation slaves were mortgaged to the hilt, and so northern banks had a huge investment in slavery. Thomas Jefferson was a slave holder, not slave owner. He could not free any, because he was in debt himself. He is castigated for options he did not have. Also, his nephew is a much more likely father of his credited black descendants, as more sophisticated DNA testing will no doubt prove eventually.
Industrial slavery was the coming thing, and it was by far the worst. Slavery was not dying out. Next was migrant slavery. It beggars the imagination.
And of course Hannah Arendt was completely right. Marx addressed the lowering of wages in mature industries, but did not deal with disappearing work. I don't think that he never imagined it, but in 1846 it was not a pressing problem. We have to change the values of which HA wrote, and that has to start very soon, and no one is leading, including Bernie Sanders. The way to start is to show the inevitable horrendous consequences of sticking to these values.
In scifi and elsewhere there has always been a concern with robots taking over because they become smarter. This in spite of the reality that slaves were kept as ignorant as possible so that they would have nothing but work in their world.
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