My post in response to Krugman’s NYTimes article:
You suggest “smaller steps” for now.
Well, perhaps anything is better than nothing. Or perhaps not, if just “anything” is offered as the way to a solution. I have reached the conclusion that I would support a peaceful uprising to replace the current ruling oligarchy with a government that represents the people. That’s what Occupy was all about. Media and my wealthy friends kept asking to hear our specific “demands” (reformism, of course) from the “leaders” (authoritarianism, of course). If this was all that they could imagine, some folks have a lot to learn. It will be revolutionary learning, and I will work to keep it peaceful.
This part of your article was right on — ” If the rich are so much richer than the rest that they live in a different social and material universe, that fact in itself makes nonsense of any notion of equal opportunity…finally kill claims that rising inequality is all about the highly educated doing better than those with less training…In any case, however, whatever is causing the growing concentration of income at the top, the effect of that concentration is to undermine all the values that define America.”
We (Occupy, etc.) often hear “What are your “demands,” so that we can negotiate? There can be no successful negotiation between groups of vastly different power. (Does any reader seriously disagree with the preceding statement? If so, please comment/explain.) We would be happy to negotiate as equals. That is our first hope and best solution.
Power may choose to hold to its precarious privilege out of fear or ignorance. This would require increasing militarization of government (as we are now witnessing) and essentially a dictatorship in the name of “democracy” and “exceptionalism.” For any who are not familiar with the history and techniques of peaceful revolution, there is much information available. Gene Sharp and George Lakey (http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/ are good starters.
Am I naïve about ”peaceful revolution”? Perhaps, but I am a realist about revolution. Those who do not see this are naïve, and so the best outcome possible (there is always possibility) is for a peaceful revolution.
Comment by admin — September 13, 2013 @ 5:15 pm
This was my response to a question, in relation to my comments above, about how does one respond to evil and its apparent success:
How do you “negotiate” with evil? My personal sense is that no one is entirely evil. You try to find out what good things they have and work from there. That opening may, or may not, be successful. Consider also that one evil person can be separated from his/her more sane followers, who will cease to follow. Personally, I am a Gandhian, so if that does not succeed, indeed we suffer for the time. But if we believe that military “solutions” will doom the world to even more suffering and indeed eventual destruction (as I do), the power of love and sacrifice becomes the only power with even the possibility of saving the planet. As mentioned previously, Gene Sharp and George Lakey are good sources for learning about successful non-violent revolutionary techniques.
Comment by admin — September 13, 2013 @ 5:18 pm
A Highlight of today’s (10/25) event at Princeton was my questioning Paul Krugman after his lecture on economics, with about three hundred graduate alums present. I stood up and spoke thusly: “You identify yourself as ‘The Conscience of a Liberal’ and said that we have ‘gone through the looking glass’ and reached ‘the limits of intellectual analysis’ for economics and that the current system is not working. Our electoral system has become perverted and when Occupy attempted to present another model for consideration, it was shut down by the ruling powers. When will it be time to consider new economic models, and why not now?”
Ahem. In answering me, he said something about the situation being admittedly dire but not beyond reform, and spoke of Roosevelt during the depression (what I consider an inappropriate and inadequate comparison), and asked who had the “troops” to offer another version and who would decide it. At that point, I responded loudly from my seat facing him at the front of the audience, where I had purposely placed myself “THE PEOPLE.” A simply response that I could have expanded if he had wished to hear more, but the question was meaningless when done rhetorically as he had done, and I responded in kind (the speaker always gets the last word….NOT in this case).
At the end of his lecture, I was the first on the speaker’s platform as he was quickly packing up his laptop. I thanked him for listening to me and put a book in his hands, Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics, saying that the author proposed a new economic system that he might find interesting. A quick thank you, and he was heading toward the exit while others were trying to press their business cards on him as he was leaving.
Oh, and I was wearing my Occupy vest all day, along with a ‘Bring the Troops Home’ button and had other buttons on the freebee bag that we all received. The point is to make oneself distinctive and recognizable, and a number of folks spoke with me throughout the day.
Comment by admin — October 19, 2013 @ 12:46 am