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punkofsunshine · 4 years ago

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The (Informal) Miniature Anarcho-Solarpunk Manifesto

The integration of communalism into a classless system away from the main caste-esque system of hierarchy around the world is very costly when viewed from a consumer lens, but is essential in the degradation of the overbearing hierarchy that the main populace is subjected to and thusly become numb to the pressures placed upon them from an early age, spiral into endlessly consuming for a sense of being in a world that doesn’t care if you’re alive, to them you’re just a replaceable cog in the profit machine. The goal of the communalist, socialist, solarpunk, etc. should not be to live in their own bubble, but to expand their influence exponentially through participation with the outside world, turn a commune into a city as it were. Less people in a place that has dictated control by the state and the consumers within, the less control the state and capital have over people. A migration of people increases quality of life and food consumption, luckily food growth can be optimized to accommodate many people when given according to need as opposed to given to whomever has the money to afford produce. One must also keep in mind, the debt accrued is now a community responsibility, so the members will do everything in their power to keep people functioning in the community, that must include people paying off debts. Who are you if you let a fellow worker suffer on their own? Who are you to let a human such as yourself be subjected to the violence of the state in its many forms? Pushing back against such oppression is why we ascribe to this ideology, so we can taste freedom and save the earth from ourselves.

No individual is solely responsible for the pollution and poverty. Multiple corporations and their figureheads are. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Bernard Arnault, Qin Yinglin & family, Michael Bloomberg, The Koch family, Jim Simons, Alaian & Gerard Wertheimer, Mark Zuckerburg, Amancio Ortega, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett, the Walton Family, Steve Ballmer, Carlos Slim Helu & family, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Francoise Bittencourt Meyers & family, Jack Ma, Ma Huateng, Mukesh Ambani, Mackenzie Scott, Beate Heister & Karl Albrecht Jr., David Thomson & family, Phil Knight & family, Lee Shau Kee, François Pinault & family. Sheldon Alelson, The Mars family, Elon Musk, Giovanni Ferrero, Michael Dell, Hui Ka Yan, Li Ka-Shing, He Xiangjian, Yang Huiyan & family, Joseph Safra, Dieter Schwarz, Vladimir Potanin, Tadashi Yanai & family, Vladamir Lisin, Ray Dalio, Takemitsu Takizaki, Leonid Mikhelson, etc. (Forbes) The list could go on, but I’m not about to list four-hundred people, the people have to change what the ruling class refuses to, hijacking corporate manufacturing and removing police of their power is essential. The police are targets due to the fact they protect corporate interests and stunt progressive growth, all of the people listed above refuse to let power be taken from them, there are too few people willing to make attempts to go after them because what would happen to their favourite source of consumption if that happened? What would happen to convenience? It would disappear, they don’t want to have to make things themselves, such is the first world’s entitlement. Doing without the convenience to save the environment should be a priority, things aren’t going to just get better on their own just because you installed solar panels and an eco-friendly water filtration system. The extent of the work that needs to be done is tremendous and must be organized efficiently and with regard to equivalency of power.

The world is in the process of ending due to all the turmoil we put it through, but the fact we’re more worried about comfort and convenience is very telling of what kind of culture western society has, instead of trying to fight those who destroy the environment and oppress us, we’re eager to mimic them. Why? Because they have and we have not. Such is the downfall of the consumerist mind. A majority of Americans think like consumers, not citizens, which is very telling because the anti-communist culture moted it be after the second world war. (Vox) There’s no telling where the zeitgeist is headed, but there’s political radicalization on both sides of the spectrum, sadly the other side of the spectrum is what we fought against, fascism, nazism, and authoritarianism. 2016 through 2020 were the worst years in terms of hate crimes committed on minority groups since the 60’s which is really saying something, neo-nazi groups sprung up and made themselves the focus, where there are fascists, there will always be anti-fascists or to be informal, antifa. I, the author am a background informant for the loose collective known as antifa, our job is simply to let people know where rallies are going down, we use pseudonyms and VPNs so we cannot be tracked. So why am I telling you this? Isn’t this supposed to be about what we can do to rebel against the systems that oppress us? Yes, and I’m getting there. There’s a reason I’m talking about fascism, and that is the fact fascism and capitalism are linked together.

Fascism/imperialism has been described as “capitalism in decay” by Vladimir Lenin due to the fact that neoliberalism is capitalism functioning as normal, communism post-capitalism, and fascism is capitalism going away slowly. It is an unjust and evil way of looking at the world, but once capitalists sense danger to their power, they fund fascism just so they can keep their power for longer. Anti-fascist action is also anti-capitalist action, for every nazi destroyed, we are one step closer to freedom. For every capitalist institution raided and demolished, we are one step closer to freedom. The city isn’t made of buildings that you can buy from, it’s made of the people who live there, so when the BLM protests occurred and stores were “looted” and burned, that was a form of praxis that hasn’t happened in years it was truly inspiring to see the people of Oregon (among other places) fight the police, fight back the alt-right, give capitalists the middle finger, create autonomous zones, and keep people from getting evicted during the pandemic. That is what communalism is partly about, supporting each other in the face of adversity no matter the cost of personal wellbeing, it’s the pinnacle of mutual aid.

Revolutionary action is one-hundred percent essential in securing future freedoms for not only generation Y, but generation Z and subsequent generations. As a member of generation Z, I feel fear, anger, and dread when it comes to climate change and the fact our generation will have to clean up the messes of the former generations when it comes to pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, unsustainable farming practices, soil health degradation, deforestation, the melting of polar habitats, natural disasters, etc. The weight of the world falls upon our shoulders and we realize this as a truth or we reject reality and follow in our parent’s footsteps and do nothing about it, it’s up to us, the most depressed and angry generation in the U.S.’s rather short history to right the wrongs made by former generations when most of us can’t even find motivation to get out of bed in the morning. I am writing this manifesto in my bed as I have been for the past week when I remember to write it down. It’s not enough to just write a theory however, put practice in it and it becomes more than just a talking point. It becomes a movement, how far you want to take it depends on you, but I do not condone violence against any of the people in the list above for strictly legal reasons. It is not absurd to think that we don’t have a snowball's chance in hell to stop the impending climate disaster that is about to fall onto us, because that assumption is correct. The best we can do is rebuild afterwards then hope and pray the next generation continues our work to restore the planet and maybe move outside our solar system, god willing.

I’ve tried writing a short solarpunk novel, I realized that the fiction may be important for outreach, but I was trying to add personal political theory to a narrative that’s supposed to be about a character’s internal conflicts as opposed to what I’m doing now, informal political theory, which is why I’m addressing you, the reader. I’ve read and listened to political theory in the past, and it’s incredibly dry and hard to pay attention to, don’t get me wrong, it’s important when you’re a part of various movements such as eco-socialism, communalist-anarchism, and anarcho-solarpunk, but I think it’s more important to connect with a reader or listener to make sure they understand the message before saying “do some praxis.” That is the goal here, not to be the leftist, humane version Ayne Rand, but instead instill in people a hope for the future that learns to do without mass manufacturing, that learns to make their own food sustainably, that learns that we all have a right to food, clean water, housing, medical treatment, and clean air without having to pay for all of those things. I may not be a part of the bottom percentage of people, but if I were my point would still stand strong, the notion that you have to work to get basic necessities is immoral on many levels, but in “free market” economies that’s the standard and I was as blind to it as most people before I found solarpunk, it started out by liking the aesthetic, but I started thinking about what we do to our planet and realized this isn’t just a bunch of pretty pictures, this is an idea for a utopian future entrenched in equality, sustainability, environmentalism, and anti-corpocracy.

Many people say that socialism has never worked, they give reasoning such as “Income inequality expands under socialism.” Which is just capitalist projection, during the 2020 pandemic, which is still ongoing at the time or writing, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. “. . . in the months since the virus reached the United States, many of the nation’s wealthiest citizens have actually profited handsomely. Over a roughly seven-month period starting in mid-March – a week after President Donald Trump declared a national emergency – America’s 614 billionaires grew their net worth by a collective $931 billion.” (USA Today) The middle class, which skyrocketed post-feudalism/post-monarchy has been getting erased by the ruling class, which is the goal of capitalism. Capitalism is rooted in the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie and was created to have control over the masses without having a direct economic power structure overhead. Things may have gotten better for the growing middle class and the poor marginally, then the industrial revolution kicked in and everything went downhill from there. Pollution began with burning coal, the car came along, now it’s coal and oil, and so on until today where we have access to truly world-altering technologies, but what’s holding us back are the people who continue to exploit non-renewable resources for profit and solely profit. The betterment of mankind isn’t on the mind of the capitalist, they can avoid global catastrophe, they aren’t the peasants, they’re the monarchs. Why do you think billionaires fund space travel and cryogenics research? It’s not to better the rest of the world, it’s to get the hell out of dodge after global warming takes its toll and they have no more workers willing to fill their pockets by letting their labor be exploited. As I said above, it’s up to my generation to fix the mess they made. Maybe we’ll learn a lesson, or maybe we’ll die in the process, either way the situation is dire and action needs to be taken.

Who will take action? Well, if you made it this far into the manifesto without falling asleep or getting angry at the things I have to say, it’s you, me, and everyone else who cares, is tired of selling their soul, and wants freedom. Freedom, not via the dollar, but via being human. It matters not your ethnicity, skin colour, religion (or lack thereof), sexuality, gender, or anything else; you matter, the world matters, and it takes all of us to save it.

-A manifesto by Aeron Fae Greenwood

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kerahlekung · 5 years ago

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The Lazy & Choosy Malays...

The Lazy & Choosy Malays....

The Hidden Message Behind

Mahathir’s Latest Blog Article...

Silly Mahathir has spoken again. The 94-year-old Prime Minister of Malaysia has again mocked and insulted his own community – ethnic Malays – for being lazy (*yawn*). Yes, it’s quite silly repeating the mantra again and again about a disease which he knew how to cure but refuses to prescribe. If he cures the disease, the Malays will be too smart for him to control. Sharing some of his historical observations, Mr. Mahathir wrote on his blog that when the British colonist opened rubber estates and tin mines, no Malay was interested to work there. The local Malays had chosen instead to continue being rice farmers and fishermen, while a small number worked in the civil service as clerks. They were proud of earning a fixed salary and pension. The premier said that the Malays looked down on jobs in the mining and plantation sectors as it required hard labour and were considered dangerous, dirty and difficult. As a result, the British had no choice but to bring in workers from China and India. The Malays were relief and happy that the 3Ds jobs – dangerous, dirty and difficult – were undertaken by foreigners. The hiring of Chinese and Hindus saw a sudden booming of business in the cities. Mahathir recalled – “Due to their attitude, there were not many Malays living in the city. At that time the cities were developed and filled with Chinese grocery shops and all kinds of handyman. There was no Malay working as hard labour, let alone Malay businessmen. There were only a few Indian restaurants and spice shops.” PM Mahathir’s remark is an indirect confession that without the Chinese and Indians, Malaysia’s landscape today might be very different. The country might look like the state of Kelantan at worst, or Brunei at best. But we know oil-rich Brunei has only 500,000 mouths to feed while Malaysia has more than 16-million Malays. So it’s an overstatement to say Malaysia could be like Brunei. Despite being called a “coolie”, the ethnic Chinese were willing to take on 3Ds jobs. Even Chinese women worked as maids or nannies in the households of Malay nobles during the British era, says Mahathir. In his message to fellow Malays, the world’s oldest prime minister said the Chinese would normally migrate to any country if they find opportunities to make a living.

Chinese Women Work in Tin Mine - Malaya

He also revealed that in his younger days in Alor Star during the British rule, there was a desire to see Malays doing business and thus Pekan Rabu was built to enable villagers to sell some bananas, other fruits and baskets made by them. However, Mahathir said – “Their business did not become big. They traded part time. They did not have the desire to expand their business, just to eke out a living, that’s it.” Mahathir slammed the Malays for not only being choosy in their jobs, but also not bothered at all by the wealth and progress made by the foreigners. He wrote – “Their belief was that their state remains under their ownership. That was what I saw … but their thinking was wrong. Because they were not willing to work hard, to do business seriously, they remained poor.” “The gap between them and other races that worked hard and did business became wider. What happened was the rich became richer and the poor Malays became poorer. By right the Malays should realise what is happening to them. Unfortunately, they have not realised. Even until now Malays have not woken up. They still refuse to work,” – complained Mahathir. “The Malays are still willing to surrender all work to foreigners. And foreigners have flooded our country. Seven million foreigners are still here. They work. What will happen to the Malays? Obviously, what had happened to the Malays and the country in the past will continue to happen,” – Mahathir continued his lengthy lecture on his blog. The premier said – “There are some who claim that Malays are the master. What master? Poor people, people who lack capability, people who depend on the sympathy of other people. Is that master? Our fate is in our own hands. Getting angry with other people will not solve our problems. Our number is said to have increased, but a big number of poor people cannot compete with a small number of rich people.” So, what are the messages that Mahathir wanted to send across with his latest babbling and bitching, besides his penchant for mocking the Malays as being lazy, depend on crutches, “syiok sendiri” (self-absorbed), inferior, dishonest, untrustworthy, corrupt and whatnot? Actually, this is not the first time he wanted the Malays to wake up from their slumber land.

The long and short message was to tell the Malay folks to forget about boycotting non-Muslim products, at least for now, because it would fail. That was why the old man said it’s useless to get angry with other people, presumably the minorities Chinese and Hindus, to the extent of starting a boycott campaign on non-Muslim products. Why? Mahathir’s lecture reveals the basic foundation as to how his community can become a force to be reckoned with. If the Malays were not willing to work in 3Ds jobs like those in mining, plantation or construction sector, exactly how can they succeed in more complicated jobs like running a business? Can they work 7 days a week for 12 hours a day like the Chinese-owned grocery stores? Some might argue why didn’t Mahathir tell the ethnic Chinese to work in such hard laboured industry too, and only discriminate against the ethnic Malay? Actually, as highlighted by Mahathir, the first generation of Chinese coming to what was known as Malaya back then had done precisely that, and they’ve now moved into the next phase of business. Today, you don’t see Chinese men working as coolies in mining or construction sites, or Chinese women working as maids in Najib Razak’s house anymore. They had gone past that stage. Now, they would hire foreign labours to do the 3Ds jobs that their ancestors once did. They would also pay the Filipinos or Indonesians as maids to do house chores and take care of their kids. That’s exactly why Mahathir was incredibly concerned because the 7-million foreigners – Indonesians, Bangladeshi, Burmese, Pakistanis, etc. – are repeating the history of the Chinese immigrants during the British era. If you care to look around, the Burmese is learning – even taking over – some of Chinese businesses at food stalls and grocery stores. Yes, as the Malays still scream of “ketuanan Melayu”, the ideology of Malay supremacy espoused by the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), even their hardworking “brothers” from Indonesia are snatching jobs opportunity which the Malays considered as low-class. Heck, some Bangladeshi and Pakistanis have actually graduated to selling IT gadgets or repairing computers.

Foreign Workers in Malaysia

As the Chinese business owners fast climb up the value chain from their original role in managing, replicating and innovating business, cheap foreign workers were imported to do all the heavy lifting and dirty tasks. As described by Mahathir, the Malays are still proud – even desperate – of working in the civil service where they can earn a fixed salary and pension. Everything is interrelated. If you don’t work hard, you don’t appreciate hard-earned money. And when you don’t value hard-earned money, you will tend to dishonour business agreement. And when you lack honesty, you can’t expect suppliers to give you credit terms simply because you’re untrustworthy. Trade credit is vital to ease cash flow, which can help improve a small business’s profitability. Most Malays would complain that they lack capital to start a business. So the government gives them easy loans. However, the same group of Malay businessmen would more often than not use the easy money to buy a new car, get a nice office, renovate own house – even marry a new wife – before their business could even make any profit. To them, style (“gaya”) must come first. Worse, when they earned some profits, they refused to pay their creditors or suppliers. They would celebrate with a bigger car and a nicer office or sexier furniture. They buy more debts and liabilities. Naturally, their credit terms would be terminated and any new product purchases have to be paid upfront. Their business would eventually go bust because they can’t roll over their business. More importantly, not only certain groups of Malays are filled with anger and envy towards the Chinese for their successes, they also feel jealous of fellow Malays’ achievement in business. Spiteful jealousy exists within the Malay community for as long as one can remember, as admitted by former Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi in 2015. Instead of helping each other to build a formidable network of supply chain and ecosystem like the ethnic Chinese, most short-sighted Malays would rather destroy fellow Malay business rivals – cutting off the nose to spite the face. Lack of competition breeds complacency and inefficiency. More players will create awareness of new products and increase consumers’ consumption.

Boycott Non-Muslim Products but...

So when Mahathir said the Malay community is a big number of poor people, but cannot compete with a small number of rich people, he was saying the majority ethnic Malays have chosen the easy way out to become consumers while the hardworking minority Chinese become the producers and suppliers. There’s one thing that the premier didn’t tell the Malays. The Chinese can certainly profit from poor Malays. But they can profit even more if the Malays are rich or business-savvy. How? The current Chinese-Malay situation is like the relationship between China and Malaysia. But a very rich and business-savvy Malay community will create a relationship like China-US (before the trade war started). Hence, it’s not true that the minority Chinese hate to see the Malays become successful. When the Malays become rich, they create a huge pool of customers with incredible buying power. Can you imagine the type of economic impact when 16-million rich Malays like the American consumers splash money for products at Chinese shops? Do you think the Malays will still shout about boycotting non-Muslim products when they’re as rich as the Americans or Singaporeans? They would have created their own ecosystem by then. But first, the Malays need to get out of the cocoon of demanding handouts from the government and start working hard like a coolie. There’s no shortcut to success except hard work. Dr. Mahathir’s prescription to fix the Malay’s laziness is not to help them at all. But that would mean a political suicide for the old man. After 62 years, the Malays are too addicted to special rights, privileges and handouts. That’s why the premier can only moan, whine and bitch about Malays being lazy and choosy of jobs. He can never give the medicine to cure the disease. However, get ready for any new surprise from the cunning old fox. His grumbling drama could be his evil plan to justify giving more handouts or crutches to the Malays to win their support. There could be a plan to introduce a newer NEP (New Economic Policy), the discrimination and racist policy which officially ended in 1991 but restructured as NDP (national development policy). - FT

Tak bekerja...

1. Semasa saya berumur belasan tahun, saya dapat perhatikan keadaan di Alor Star. Masa itu Negeri-Negeri Melayu sedang dijajah oleh British. Negeri-Negeri Melayu terima baik penjajahan British. 2. Yang tidak dapat dinafi ialah British membawa sistem Pemerintahan yang lebih baik danNegeri-Negeri mengalami sedikit sebanyak pembangunan. 3. British membuka ladang-ladang getah dan lombong bijih timah. Yang anehnya tidak ada orang Melayu yang bekerja dalam ladang dan lombong ini. Pekerja terdiri dari orang India dan Cina. Perniagaan kedai runcit dan aneka jenis tukang-tukang semuanya terdiri dari orang Cina. 4. Dimanakah orang Melayu? Mereka bekerja dalam sawah padi mereka, dan ada sedikit yang menjadi nelayan. Sebilangan kecil dari mereka bekerja dengan Kerajaan sebagai kerani. Lebih kecil lagi ialah bilangan merekayang memegang jawatan tinggi dalam Kerajaan. Mereka ini semua berbangga kerana dibayar gaji tetap dan pencen. 5. Yang tidak terdapat ialah orang Melayu yang berniaga atau bekerja sebagai buruh kasar. Orang Melayu pandang hina bidang-bidang ini. 6. Oleh kerana sikap ini tidak terdapat ramai orang Melayu yang tinggal di bandar-bandar. Pada masa itu pun bandar-bandar didiri dan dipenuhi dengan kedai Cina. Tidak ada kedai Melayu. Ada beberapa buah kedai makan dan rempah cabai orang India. 7. Raja-Raja Melayu tidak iktiraf orang Cina dan India sebagai rakyat. Kepercayaan mereka ialah orang ini, akan kembali ke Negara masing-masing apabila khidmat mereka tidak diperlu lagi.

Dah lah tulisan Dr.M siap dgn tajuk "TAK BEKERJA", tapi yg terrasa ialah Melayu yg BEKERJA.

8. Orang Cina biasanya berhijrah ke Negara lain jika mereka nampak peluang mencari makan. Mereka berhijrah ke Amerika dan Australia dan ke Negara-Negara jajahan British. Melihat kestabilan pemerintahan British dan peluang kerja, mereka datang dengan ramai ke Negeri-Negeri Melayu. Mereka sanggup bekerja keras. Dikenali sebagai kuli mereka sanggup buat kerja kotor, kerja berat dan merbahaya. Mereka sanggup menarik “langca”, dan apa sahaja yang memberi pendapatan kepada mereka. Ramaiperempuan Cina yang menjadi “amah” di rumah pembesar Melayu, menjaga anak dan membersih rumah. 9. Orang Melayu berasa senang kerana kerja berat, kotor dan berbahaya serta perniagaan dilakukan oleh orang asing. Jika mereka lihat kekayaan dan kemajuan orang asing ini, mereka tidak berasa khuatir sedikit pun. Kepercayaan mereka ialah Negeri mereka kekal sebagai milik mereka. Itu yang saya lihat. Semasa saya muda di zaman British timbul keinginan melihat orang Melayu berniaga juga. Di Alor Star dibina Pekan Rabu, pekan sari dimana orang kampung boleh menjual sedikit sebanyak pisang dan buah-buahan bakul dan raga anyaman mereka. Perniagaan mereka tidak menjadibesar. Mereka berniaga secara sambilan. Mereka tidak berniat pun untuk membesar perniagaan. Setakat kais pagi makan pagi, kais petang makan petang, itu sahaja. 10. Tetapi anggapan mereka meleset. Kerana mereka tidak sanggup bekerja kuat, tidak sanggup berniaga secara serius mereka terus miskin. Jarak antara mereka dengan kaum lain yang bekerja kuat dan berniaga menjadi semakin luas. Yang berlaku ialah yang sudah kaya menjadi lebih kaya dan orang Melayu yang miskin menjadi lebih miskin. Ini sudah ditakdir. Tak perlu buat apa-apa. 11. Sepatutnya orang Melayu sedar terhadap apa yang berlaku kepada mereka. Malangnya mereka tidak sedar. Sehingga sekarang pun orang Melayu masih tidak sedar. Mereka masih enggan bekerja. Orang Melayu masih rela serah segala kerja kepada orang asing. Dan orang asing pun membanjiri Negara kita. Tujuh juta orang asing masih berada di sini sekarang ini. Mereka bekerja. Apakah akan terjadi kepada orang Melayu. Tentulah apa yang sudah jadi dahulu kepada Negara dan orang Melayu, yang akan terus jadi. Ada yang dakwa orang Melayu adalah Tuan. Tuan apa? Orang miskin, orang yang tidak ada kebolehan, orang yang bergantung kepada belas kasihan orang lain, Tuankah. 12. Nasib kita di tangan kita. Memarahi orang lain tak akan menyelesai masalah kita. Bilangan kita dikatakan bertambah. Tetapi jumlah besar orang yang miskin tidak dapat bersaing dengan jumlah kecil orang yang kaya. - chedet Melayu malas? Aku buat empat kerja tau!

Camna Melayu nak maju...

Ada melayu tu meniaga workshop... lepas tu mai satu melayu hantar repair keta.. mintak tolong murah sikit.. takkan melayu tak blh tolong melayu kan.. lepas tu melayu tadi pun rekemen la melayu lain.. situ murah.. so ramai lah melayu p repair situ sebab blh dpt harga adik beradik.. adik beradik nye pasal.. melayu pomen tadi pun repair murah2.. bila keta siap.. melayu adik beradik tadi mintak hutang pulak.. tapi melayu pomen kena bayar cash kat cina sparepart pasai bukan rega adik beradik, sebab melayu pomen tu bukan adik beradik cina tuu.... lama kelamaan.. melayu pomen tu terpaksa tutup kedai.. hutang tak blh cover.. sebab repair kebajikan sesama melayu... bila da tutup.. melayu yg kerap repair disitu pun berkata “ niee laaa melayu meniaga.. suka hati meniaga suka hati tutup .. camana melayu nak maju?? .masibaiiiiiii.sesetengah je mcm tu. X semua pon. Ada yg steady - Zaman Atan#kisahBENAR

Morgan Freeman meets father of killed pizza delivery driver, Salahuddin Jitmoud.

The father forgave his son's killer..

Selamat Pengantin Baru. Lama bersemburit, baru kini jadi realiti.. Dari ‘Penyatuan Ummah’ jadi ‘Penyatuan Nasional’

cheers.

Sumber asal: The Lazy & Choosy Malays... Baca selebihnya di The Lazy & Choosy Malays...

#Blogger

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sataniccapitalist · 8 years ago

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Finally, the Class War Is Out in the Open; or Why Trump Won the Election

APRIL 30, 2017

I was in Germany in November at the time of the American presidential election, and wrote the following essay on Nov. 9, the day after. I subsequently gave it as a lecture at the University of Mainz, but was unable to post or publish it because of lecture commitments I had made in Mexico for the spring of 2017. Those commitments have now come and gone, and so I'm free to post it at this time. Most of you will not find any surprises here, because we have been discussing these issues since Trump's victory. Nevertheless, I thought I would take the liberty of posting it; reviewing these things may possibly be of interest, even at this late date. Or at least, I hope so. Here goes:

A few months ago, I read in some online newspaper that the six richest people in the world owned as much as the bottom 50 percent, or 3.7 billion people. This is so bizarre a statistic that one would have to call it surreal. One wonders how we got to this state of affairs. As in the case of so many things, the United States is at the cutting edge of this development. Just for starters, most of those six individuals are Americans. But of course it goes deeper than this. The world economic system is fundamentally an American one, and is sometimes known as neoliberalism or globalization—fancy words for imperialism, in fact. And imperialism is a system in which the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class gets slowly squeezed into oblivion.

American capitalism, of course, has been going on now for more than 400 years, as I describe it in my book

Why America Failed

. And yet one thing that can be said about social inequality in America is that it was relatively stable from 1776 down to about 1976, i.e. a period of 200 years. It existed, but for the most part it wasn’t harsh or extreme, save during the Gilded Age and the Depression, and it enabled Americans to believe that they were living in a classless society, or even that they were all middle class. As for the Depression, America pulled out of it due to the dramatic industrial development required by World War II, but Franklin Roosevelt was well aware that the nation needed something more viable than a war economy in order to sustain itself. And so in the summer of 1944, a conference on postwar financial arrangements was convened in a small town in New Hampshire called Bretton Woods, and the economic plan that was devised at that conference came to be known as the Bretton Woods Accords. The guiding light was the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, possibly the greatest economist who ever lived.

The Bretton Woods Accords put forward two key concepts. One, that the US dollar would be the international standard of exchange. All other currencies would be pegged to the dollar in value, and could always be traded in for dollars. Two, that the US Government would guarantee the value of the dollar, i.e. back the dollar, by means of gold bars kept in a vault in Fort Knox, Kentucky. The paper dollar, in other words, could be trusted completely. All of this was implemented as soon as the War was over, and it led to a remarkable period of prosperity, worldwide, for the next twenty-five years.

For a variety of reasons, Richard Nixon—not one of my favorite people—decided to repeal Bretton Woods, which he did in 1971. What this did was usher in a dramatic age of finance capitalism. Just to be clear, capitalism comes in three flavors. There is mercantile or commercial capital, in which wealth is derived from trade, and which flourished during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Then there is industrial capital, in which wealth is derived from manufactures, and which characterized the modern era, that is the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. And finally there is finance capital, in which wealth is not derived from trade or manufactures, but simply from currency speculation. This is what the repeal of Bretton Woods allowed, because with the removal of the gold standard, the currencies of the world had no intrinsic (dollar) value; they just floated against one another in a market place of constantly fluctuating exchange rates. Casino capitalism, we might also call it. Those who were rich could make huge amounts of money by speculating on currency rates, because they had large amounts of money to begin with. The rest of us—the so-called 99 percent—didn’t have the luxury of this, and were largely tied to a paycheck, if indeed we even had a job.

The effect of the repeal began to be noticed by 1973, and the gap between rich and poor began to widen noticeably thereafter. Ronald Reagan did his best to make it worse. His so-called “trickle down theory,” by which the wealth of the rich would supposedly spill over into the wallets of the poor and the middle class, was a farce. In a word, nothing trickled down. The rich decided to hang onto their wealth, rather than spread it around. What a surprise! And so today, in China as well as the United States, the top 1 percent own 47 percent of the wealth. In Mexico, thirty-four families are super-rich, while half the country wallows in poverty. And as I mentioned earlier, a handful of Americans own as much as the bottom 3.7 billion of the world’s population. As President Coolidge astutely remarked nearly 100 years ago, “The business of America is business.” John Maynard Keynes’ warning, that the economy was there to serve civilization rather than the reverse, was completely ignored.

“Reaganomics,” as it was called, got further entrenched with the fall of the Soviet Union. This event was taken, in the United States, as definitive proof that what was called the “Washington Consensus”—a neoliberal, globalized economy—was not merely the wave of the future, but indeed the

only

wave of the future. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a very famous, and very stupid, book declaring that we were now living in a unipolar world; that America, in short, was the end of history. It’s actually a very old idea, going back to 1630, that America would be the model for the rest of the world—“a city upon a hill.” American politicians love to quote that line. Meanwhile, the light of that city was getting dimmer for most of the American population.

And yet, in the face of all this, Americans continued to believe that they were living in a classless society, or that everyone was middle class. You wonder how stupid a nation can be, really; other nations are hardly so deluded. The author John Steinbeck famously remarked that socialism was never able to take root in America because the poor saw themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” As I argue in

Why America Failed

, everyone in the US is a hustler; everyone is just waiting for their ship to come in.

In any case, Bush Sr. continued the pattern, as did Bill Clinton. The passage of NAFTA benefited the US at the expense of the so-called Third World, with economic bailouts from the IMF tied to austerity measures that sent peasants in Chiapas, for example, into starvation—and rebellion. The rise of Subcomandante Marcos, and the Zapatistas, was to be expected. But the machinery rolled on. Bush Jr. correctly referred to the super-rich as “my base,” and the Obama presidency, despite a lot of flowery language, was a continuation of Bush Jr. After the crash of 2008, Obama didn’t bail out the poor or create jobs; not at all. He bailed out his rich banker friends to the tune of $19 trillion dollars, while the middle class lost their jobs and their homes and lined up at soup kitchens for the first time in their lives. Tent cities for them, and the working class, blossomed across the country, and Obama did nothing. As for Hillary—and this is a crucial point—what she was essentially promising was an extension of the neoliberal regime that had been in place since her husband took office in 1993. When Trump pointed at her, during the presidential debates, and said to the audience: “If you want a continuation of the last eight years, vote for her,” the people whom globalization had destroyed heard him loud and clear.

Trump seemed clumsy and boorish during the debates; in fact, he knew what he was doing. “What does Hillary have to show for thirty years of political involvement?” he cried. “Everything she is telling you is words, just words. She has nothing to offer you.” He was right, and millions of Americans knew it. Her slogans, like “Stronger Together,” were meaningless. He was speaking about reality, while she was reading from a script. She also

looked

as though she were programmed. Unfortunately for her, she tended to smile a lot, and it was so forced that she occasionally came across as insane.

In any case, things had changed since she was First Lady. After twenty-five years of neoliberal economics, the white working class understood that politics as usual had nothing to offer them; that Hillary was just a variation on the Obama regime, which had hurt them badly. There was now a realization that their ship would never come in, that they would never be able to participate in the American Dream; that they were

permanently

embarrassed

non

-millionaires. They had a deep, and justifiable, resentment against Washington, Wall Street, the

New York Times

, and all such establishment symbols, and their desire was to say to that establishment, and to the American intellectual elite—pardon my French—go fuck yourselves. Precisely by being vulgar and blunt, and not coming across as a smooth operator like Obama, Trump was winning a large part of America over to his side. Even his body language said “fuck you.”

Trump’s authenticity was also noticeable in his adoption of a declinist position, the first presidential candidate in American history to do this in a serious way. After all, if your campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again,” you are saying that the country is in decline, and that’s exactly what Trump was saying. Our airports resemble those of Third World countries, our roads and bridges are falling apart, our inner cities are filled with crime, our educational system is a joke—and so on. All of this is absolutely true, while Hillary could only come up with a feeble, and hollow, rejoinder: “When was America not great?” Give me a break.

Let me return a moment to the matter of the resentment of the American intellectual elite, the so-called liberal or professional class, which includes much of the Democratic Party. This is a largely untold story, and yet I regard it an absolutely crucial factor in the election of Trump. The same year that Nixon repealed Bretton Woods, 1971, a prominent Washington Democrat by the name of Fred Dutton published a manifesto called

Changing Sources of Power

. What he said in that document was that it was time for the Democratic Party to forget about the working class. This is not your voting base, he declared; the people you want to court are the white-collar workers, the college-educated, the hip technologically oriented, and so on. Forget about economic issues, he went on; it’s much more a question of lifestyle than anything else. This was the key ideology in the rise of the so-called New Democrats, who in effect repudiated their traditional base and indeed, the whole of Roosevelt’s New Deal, which had historically provided a safety net for that base. Bill Clinton was part of that wave, and during his presidency we saw not only a widening gap between rich and poor, but NAFTA, the abolition of welfare, and the so-called “Three Strikes” law, which put huge numbers of black men into prison for as much as twenty years for minor crimes, thereby destroying their families’ ability to survive. Hillary was also part of that wave, and as Trump and his supporters understood, she was going to court the chic and the hip, not the folks that neoliberalism had ground into the dirt. As it turned out, 53 percent of white women voted for Trump; they were not taken in by Hillary’s gender politics. (For more on this see Nicholas Lemann, “Can We Have a ‘Party of the People’?”

New York Review of Books

, 13 October 2016, pp. 48-50)

Which brings me to the final point. If the liberal class abandoned their traditional working-class base; if they had stopped, from the early 1970s, fighting for the New Deal ideology; then what ideology did they adopt? This is the saddest, and most ridiculous, chapter in the history of the left in the US: they became preoccupied with language, with political correctness—the sorts of things that not only could do nothing to improve the condition of the working class, but which were actually offensive to that class. God forbid one should say “girls” instead of “women,” or “blacks” instead of “African Americans,” or tell an ethnic joke. Left-wing projects now consisted in rewriting the works of great authors like Mark Twain, so that their nineteenth-century texts might not give offense to contemporary ears. The children of the rich, at elite universities, had to be protected from any kind of direct language. When some students at Bowdoin College in Maine, in 2016, decided to hold a Mexican theme party, complete with tequila and mariachi music, the rest of the campus was in an uproar, calling this “cultural appropriation.” Apparently, only Mexicans are allowed to drink tequila, in the politically correct world. Personally, I regarded this party as a

tribute

to Mexican culture; what does “appropriation” mean, anyway? In 2015 I published a cultural history of Japan, called

Neurotic Beauty

. Am I not allowed to do this, because I’m not Japanese? Should Octavio Paz have never written about India? All of this is quite ridiculous, and amounted to a callous neglect of the working class on the part of people who had traditionally fought for that class, for its survival. So while the working class and the middle class found itself confronted with real problems—no job, no home, no money, and no meaning in their lives—the chic liberal elite was preoccupied with who has the legal right to use transgender bathrooms. Well, I’d be angry too.

Just as a side note: In 1979, Christopher Lasch wrote a book called

The Culture of Narcissism

, in which he argued that during the sixties, we discovered that we were powerless to change the things that really mattered, namely the relations of class and power. As a result, in the seventies we decided to pour our energies into the things that didn’t matter at all, and political correctness is a good example of this. It’s not really politics, in other words; it’s a substitute for politics, and thus a waste of everyone’s time.

In any case, Hillary never understood this. She attacked Trump in the debates for being politically incorrect, when it was precisely that incorrectness that was the source of his appeal. She called his followers—many millions of Americans—“a basket of deplorables.” They didn’t appreciate being looked down upon, especially since the liberal elite had gotten wealthy at their expense. In her pathetic concession speech, on November 9, she still kept appealing to “Diversity,” to “Stronger Together,” and said how she hoped she would be an inspiration to little girls—apparently, in her politically correct world, little boys don’t count. The only one thing she got right in that speech was her observation that the nation was deeply polarized—“we didn’t realize how deeply,” she added. No kidding. The “deplorables” proved to be not so deplorable after all. They knew who their friends were, and they knew she wasn’t one of them.

There is a lot more to be said on the subject of Trump, of course. His belligerent stance toward Mexico, for example, or China. His appeal to nativist sentiments, to bigotry, racism, and anti-Semitism. And while I respect the rage of his followers in terms of their desire to strike back at the economic forces that had destroyed them, I have to admit they aren’t my folks, so to speak. These are people who live in rural areas, go to Little League baseball games, join the Rotary Club and the Elks and the Kiwanis, dislike outsiders, hold church picnics, and reject any form of government support as “socialism,” even though they desperately need that support. We are still a nation of cowboys, and Trump is the biggest cowboy of all. By 2004 I saw that I simply didn’t fit into America, whether it was the cowboys or their opposite, the Harvard intellectual elite; and by 2006 I had moved south of the border. The last eleven years have been the happiest of my life, and I have Mexico to thank for it.

In conclusion, let me say that the American press has persistently labeled Trump as an anomaly, a kind of quirk or historical accident. He isn’t. He represents the constituency I just described, and they comprise a very large part of the nation. He is also the ultimate hustler, whose life is about money, and in that sense as well he is America writ large. The comedian George Carlin used to say, “Where do you think our leaders come from? Mars?” In the last analysis, we got Trump because we

are

Trump. Above all else, that is how he came into power.

http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/2017/04/finally-class-war-is-out-in-open-or-why.html

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