Ol Gringo Rides to the Explanation

*gallop*

Social Basics

To: New York Times
Re: Obama's New 50 billion Job Stimulus


Whether Hoover/Roosevelt's WPA or Hitler's Arbeitsdeinst, everyone has understood the necessity and utility of public works projects. The defect in the Administration's policy is that it conceives of such programs as temporary, stop-gap measures. They are not; such programs are only the beginning of economic recovery and stability.

A truly social conception flows from the premise that every citizen is directly entitled to a guaranteed standard of living in terms of: education, employment, housing, health-care recreation and retirement.

This is not a question of "welfare" or "minimal scroungables". It is a question of building a society that has as its broad basis (not as its limit) a soci-economic egalitarianism that protects the integrity and develops the potential of the whole person.

National Socialism understood this from the beginning. FDRoosevelt promoted this concept at the very end in his April 1945 speech about an "economic bill of rights"

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effDfpKYcVo)

And of course, economic rights is the social premise of communism and social democracy. Everyone has understood the concpet except for the US ruling caste from and after LBJ. The neo-liberal premise, espoused by all administrations from Reagan to and including Obama, is that if we throw enough goodies at the rich enough of it will miss its mark and actually hit the poor...sometimes, maybe. I seem to recall that Eduardo Porter of this paper's editorial board once wrote an article entitled "Feeding the Rich feeds the Poor."

The time for this kind of thinking has come to an end. It is not necessary to abolish capitalism, but only to regulate so that it becomes the servant of society not its master.

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Supposing Truth out of Hysteria

To: Truthout

Re: John Pilger's Article on Propaganda

I'm not sure Bernays was the first to invent propaganda ... after all, Manifest Destiny was a propaganda as much as Cromwell's 'liberation' of Jamaica from the oh so dastardly Spanish.

Behind every 'liberation' there is a bete noire and what is really interesting is to hypothesize that perhaps the bete was blanc.

So returning to Bernay's 'magnum opus' ... suppose the 'dastardly' Germans never sank the Lusitania; suppose the Kaiser was right that it was the French and the Russians who started the Great War; suppose it was the dastardly English who inhumanely sought to starve the German civilian population in submission.

Suppose, Hitler was right that the Allies sought to impoverish Germany with chains of debt and to encircle her with meancing armies while she was prohibited from self defense. Suppose Canada and Mexico lopped off chunks of land from the United States and Canada held a 'corridor' from Montreal to New York City. Suppose as Chamberlain said and John Foster Dulles implied, a 'war party' in the U.S. and Britain in fact were the guilty parties who precipitated the World War.

Most people -- in fact 99 percent of them -- are almost congenitally incapable of asking liberating questions. Most of what people are taught as history is really hysteria -- that is, propaganda and myth which it is taboo to so much as question.

However, once you do start to question, you will never see the world in the same light again.

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