9 Comments

You've convinced me that a socialist revolution is the only way out of this mess, but how? It feels like the very air we breathe is saturated with stupidity, cupidity, and mendacity. Our brains are so overwhelmed, confused and distracted by media that misdirect our attention. The blowhards you aptly call the Trumpenleft are all over YouTube and almost every conversation whether in person or online devolves into a stagnant argument about who to vote for. The left in this country seems to be lightyears away from revolution.

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I guess you've given me a thinking and writing project of 2024.

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Jill is asking me to hit the streets here in Falmouth, Massachusetts to help get her on the ballot. She'll need 10,000 legal Massachusetts residents to make that happen. Am I wasting my time doing this Paul. Is this act just perpetuating a system needing revolutionary change.

Lol.

*What to do*

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Paul makes several election-related disclaimers as he asks the fundamental question: Is he/she all in on the sustainable society? No one really is pushing for the existentially required steps, so the US is - and has been for much of the past- still a morally failed state that by sheer grace has survived, but, like in the Vietnam genocide years, is now subject to revolution. We the people, with the help of our politicians and lawyers, have made revolution the only way to survive. We are called to help one another- in a mutual aid kind of way- to shake off the chains that bind us to this American death trip that glorifies the bulls of finance capitalism. Pardon my choices of words please, because I don't hold the likes of people like you in my antifa sights. I'm just echoing Paul's and Howard Zinn's "2-minutes" rant.

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Got it....thanks.

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Thank you Paul, I agree with what you are saying 100%. Most of we bourgeois Americans have become like Germans before their Nazis conquered them. We're like sheep too! Will you/we wake up enough people to change this devastating course we're on? You're right, we need millions on the street all over the country.

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Thank you, Dr. Street, for being the one, the ONE and only voice crying in the wilderness. (Dr. Richard Wolff is with you, too but he is unfortunately getting old and tired.)

Virtually no one else will address the fundamental problem of capitalism. The system where the many (the 99%) work for the few. Americans are so deeply immersed in this economic system they don't even know how to criticize it. They know nothing else just as a fish knows nothing but water.

In America you can talk about anything, anything at all. After all, it is a "free" country. But there is one thing no one ever dares talk about (except yourself) and that is the economic system that enriches the few at the expense of the many.

I'm old enough to remember when, still under the influence of FDR's anomalous "New Deal" many capitalists were pressured to pay the working class a "living wage." And a significant middle-class resulted and I was part of that. Fortunately for me.

That's all (or mostly) gone now. I barely get by. When I was laid-off from my last job. (Due to "budget cuts") I had no savings, that job paid so poorly. And I lost my apartment and was out on the street. To be "homeless" in America is to be a persona non grata. You don't exist. People look right through you. Fortunately for me I managed to hang on for a couple of year in that state until my Social Security kicked in. (And that is not a gift from capital but from FDR, Francis Perkins, Harry Hopkins and a small group of humane people FDR gathered around his administration.)

Thus I thank you for your eloquent voice. Americans need to wake up from their slumber. They have to stop with the infantile lottery ticket fantasy and demand a real living wage. The federal minimum wage isn't even a bad joke; it is simply slavery by another name.

Keep fighting the good fight. You have far more courage than I. I would hide under my bed but I don't even have a bed. Just a blanket on the floor. At least the weather is warming up.

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Thank you. I would settle for a General Strike at this point, and see where that goes.

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Worth reading: Consequences of Capitalism by Chomsky and Waterstone

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