Van Jones: We must challenge directly the flaws and limitations of cheap patriotism.

[kpete]

The 99 Percent for the 100 Percent: The Case for Deep Patriotism
Van Jones April 2, 2012

...................

Cheap Patriotism

We must challenge directly the flaws and limitations of cheap patriotism. Left unchallenged, this shrunken, negative and limited version of American values is perhaps the most dangerous ideology in the country.

Please note: the real fight is not between “liberals versus conservatives.” I purposely do not call the advocates of cheap patriotism “conservative.” After all, conservatives conserve things; they don’t smash things. These cheap patriots have taken a wrecking ball—painted it red, white and blue—and now are trying to smash down every institution that made America great. Our parents and grandparents fought for certain protections—for laborers, for the environment, to restrict corporations—because they saw the devastation that occurs without those safety measures. The cheap patriots want to destroy their achievements. They want to smash down the safety net, public schools, worker’s rights, civil rights, women’s rights—even the scientific method and rational discourse. They want to flush down the toilet all of the wisdom of the last century—and yet they still be called “conservatives.” I don’t think we should pay them that compliment.

They insist that the government is trying to take over the economy. In fact, the very opposite thing is happening: the corporations are trying to take over our government. And the ultra-libertarian ideology of the Tea Party offers us no defenses against that outcome. In other words, the real threat to our liberty is gathering around conference tables in the boardrooms of global corporations. A purely negative, “don’t tread on me” version of economic liberty—the unrestrained free market, at all costs—actually makes it harder for the country to defend itself from corporate domination.

Their agenda would essentially hand the United States over to global corporations to do with us as they will, in the name of the free market. Their version of liberty creates a society in which the market is free—and the people are not. Their version of liberty actually ensures and guarantees domination. Not domination on the part of the government, but an equally pernicious form of domination on the part of corporations that will quickly wind up owning the government.

the rest:
http://www.thenation.com/article/167172/99-percent-100-percent-case-deep-patriotism

[freshwest]

1. Plus a million.

[Hell Hath No Fury]

2. I really really really like this guy -

More like him, please.

[freshwest]

6. He also contributes to YES! the online magazine:

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/9-strategies-to-end-corporate-rule/now-lets-occupy-the-ballot

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/new-livelihoods/want-jobs-rebuild-the-dream

[JDPriestly]

8. Looks like an interesting magazine.

Might make a nice gift.

[freshwest]

9. Lots of solutions there. Korten founded it and supports OWS. Check him out, if you haven't already.

[Typical NYC Lib]

10. Korten?

I guess I'm just dumb, I haven't heard of him. Who is he?

[freshwest]

11. David Korten is an activist, here's a little about him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Corporations_Rule_the_World

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/405806.The_Great_Turning

A quick video: Capitalism's Threat to Democracy:

Another: From PLUTOCRACY to DEEP DEMOCRACY

There is a religious, sort of utopian thread to this video, but he gives the moral basis for ending wars, etc.:

Here are his remarks on OWS with Thom Hartmann:

More than you wanted, but I became a fan of his work when I stumbled on it a few years ago. His ideas are being implemented by some in my region.

[freshwest]

12. One last, don't know if you like these kind of discussions:

[Sarah Ibarruri]

3. "...we go ballistic when anyone tries to rig the game..." Republicans love rigging the game.

"Within limits, Americans like the risks and rewards but we go ballistic when anyone tries to rig the game. If some of today’s super-wealthy outrage us—it is not because of their material success. It is because of their moral failings."

Great article.

Thank you.

[bemildred]

4. +1

Last edited Tue Apr 3, 2012, 12:29 PM - Edit history (1)

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
--Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)

'My country right or wrong' is like saying 'my mother drunk or sober'.
-- G. K. Chesterton

And she also includes, in an appendix, her letter to a school district board in San Antonio after it banned her novel "The Handmaid's Tale" (a decision since reversed) for its strong sexual content. "I would like to thank those who have dedicated themselves so energetically to the banning of my novel," she begins. "It's encouraging to know that the written word is still taken so seriously."

“Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the ease with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed(!), the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and military governments, as well as to the most free and the most popular.”
– David Hume “Of the First Principles of Government” 1758

“Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down … Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. It's one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.”
-- H. L. Mencken

“Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, as if it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbors pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately on the need or desire he has for it, – and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist's sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbor poor.”
– John Ruskin “Unto the Last”

"and what is the truth of language, Nietzsche once said, but a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are."
-- Edward W. Said "Orientalism"

"Such euphemisms illustrate one major function of language, which is to keep reality at bay."
– John Carey "Eyewitness to History" Introduction

Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will’s impulse at the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly. ... Nature is still there however. She contrasts her calm skies and her reasons with the madness of men. Until the atom too catches fire and history ends in the triumph of reason and the agony of the species. But the Greeks never said that the limit could not be overstepped. They said it existed and that whoever dared to exceed it was mercilessly struck down. Nothing in present history can contradict them.
A. Camus ‘Helen’s Exile’

Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed. Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve. Violence and war will produce a peace and an social organization having the potentialities for more violence and war.
- A.Huxley Eyeless in Gaza

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfils our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous. Sweet and decorous to murder, lie, torture, for the sake of the fatherland.
Eyeless in Gaza -- Aldous Huxley 1936

"All truth is simple." Is that not doubly a lie? -- FW Nietzsche

“The globe is obviously an animated being. Is it alive? That is the question. Between animation and life there exists a subtle difference: the personality, the enormous I. Who would dare affirm it? Who would deny it?”
-- Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea (in translation) B.3, Ch. III, “The Sea and the Wind”

"A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense."
Jonathan Lethem "The Ecstasy of Influence" Harper's Feb. 2007

"The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others."
Wm Hazlitt – On the Pleasure of Hating

Friends may come and go; but enemies accumulate. - Thomas Jones

[freshwest]

5. Thanks for that great series of quotes. I'll bump this thread here!

[bemildred]

7. My pleasure. nt