"I'll take the Liberty; but Hold the Fraternity and Equality" says Mr. Big Con.
We must reclaim the word "freedom". Bill Moyers preaches this again and again. At the Media Reform Conference last January he reiterated it again. He recommended that we read John Schwartz’ book "Freedom Reclaimed". He spoke of the camaraderie of the media reform movement that put aside the self-righteousness of their individual sects and came together to work towards a common goal. He was talking about fraternity (and sorority). Fraternity is the opposite of"Personal responsibility" which is code for "I got mine. Good luck getting yours". Fraternity makes clear that with freedom comes "shared responsibility".
In Naomi Klein’s "The Shock Doctrine", she paints by numbers a picture of the theft of the word "freedom" by followers of the Chicago economist, Milton Friedman from its original meaning that our Foundsers had in mind. Originally, it was the "freedom" that Tom Paine preached to the French and in their revolution they came up with the cry, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". In other words, without the equality and fraternity part, you’ve got the same old feudalism flim flam from which our founders and the French were revolting.
So who would be our strongest advocate for Liberty with Fraternity and Equality?
Who is the strongest most courageous advocate for debunking the bipartisan flim flam put up by the feudalists?
Jesse Jackson smelled a rat in 1984 and scared the crap out of the "Old Order" of clubby conservatives and liberals. The Old Order saw the world divided among winners and losers. The liberals were kindly and believed in redistributing some of the wealth of the winners to the losers. They went up the elevator first and assured everybody below that they would be back for them. In the meantime, they would send down a bucket now and then. This went on for years. Lately, they’ve sent down a deck of cards and a plasma TV to keep people occupied.
But Jesse wasn’t buying that whole gussied up plantation structure that Reagan was putting in place with the help of "bi-partisanship". He saw that the system was rigged like a slot machine in a casino. And he made a big splash again in 1988 while pushing deals like single payer health care. The dinosaurs roared and bellowed and put their heads together to save their fiefdoms from the unwashed masses. By taking that path though, they unknowingly were lumbering closer and closer to the tar pits.
Do you want to keep this republic? Or are you happy to let it pass into history? Feudalism or Freedom?
Or are you content to give half your crops to the lord of the manor and hope he protects you from the marauders? Do you hope that when the old lord dies that he’s replaced by a kinder and gentler lord or lady? Do you hope to make a splash with the new lord or lady and so work within the castle walls so you too can "fart in the general direction" of the folks beyond the moat?
I heard Tom Hayden on the Thom Hartmann Show say that United States politics is composed of two groups; social movements and Machiavellis. As Social movements grow, they become the majority and are moderate but always have aradical element. For example, the majority of Americans want to stop the Iraq war and the more radical part of the anti-war movement want to "end war for all times". The Machiavellians have their Baker/Hamiltons who want to control the financial, government, religious,etc. institutions but will advocate for a pull back from Iraq in order to diffuse the anti-war and anti-globalist movements. The Machiavellians also have the radical Dick Cheneys and Joe Liebermans who want to start WW III.
Haydn felt that FDR and JFK were kindly Machiavellians who, once in office, used their powers for good. Movements like the Socialists and the Civil Rights movements pushed these men towards the light. Thom Hartmann says daily that he hopes and prays that if we get a market liberal like Hillary or Obama as president that, like FDR and JFK, we as a power populist progressive movement can push them to the left and towards a more Keynesian approach to using government to solve problems and away from Friedmanomics or its lighter version, Rubonomics.
But like Hartmann, I’d prefer to put a power populist in right at the start. Our movement is not as organized as those prior movements, so we should not fool around. We should put in John Edwards.
Edwards is one of those "winners". But unlike other "winners", he’s not content to send the elevator back down. He’s riding it back down and is determined to fix the whole system either by building enough elevators to get us all to a reasonable level or, by golly, having us all stop and reconsider building that whole big tower up to heaven in the first place. Maybe we can make do with what’s around us? You know, come up with something sustainable and just. We could change the whole story. We could make a "Great Turning".
Taking Back Our Identity. Rewarding work over wealth.
Edwards like many many people believed in the system we have working now. But he saw it first hand and he is repelled by it more and more each day. It's a journey more and more people are taking as they get good information. He says now that we must "cast away the established ways of Washington and replace them with the timeless values of the American people." And "we must think as big as the challenges we face". Edwards original call in 2003 to honor work over wealth was the single most idea that propelled me towards him as a candidate. He was redeeming the word "work". He re-installed it with virtue. He showed how work is inclusive. The more hands the faster the work gets done. The world belongs to people who love work and not to the players in the casinos with their rigged games. It's time for work to take its dominant place. There was a time 50 years ago when we did reward work over wealth just as we had during WWII. And it's time has come again. "Attention must be paid", said Linda Loman of her salesman husband. Dignity, respect, justice begins when a person is rewarded for a good day's work and is honored for it.
Barrett Keizer said, in his 2006 February essay for Harper's called "Crap Shoot: Everyone Loses When Politics is a Game":
"The player, the wise guy, prides himself on his cleverness, but he always perishes from being less clever than he thinks. He perishes because he only knows the relentless, mindless momentum of the game; he knows nothing of the sanctifying rhythms of work and rest."
"Sanctity". Wow, that reminds me that Jesus was blue collar. He was a carpenter. God worked his butt off and then rested. Those are the natural rhythms of the universe. And those rhythms are sacred. You cannot have one without the other.
Jefferson said that our nation's argument would always be between the aristocrats and the democrats whether you call them Whigs or Tories or Federalists or Democrats. The nature of man would divide into two parties; those who "feared and distrusted the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. And those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depository of the public interests."
Promises have been broken and liberty has been stolen by those who don't believe in inclusiveness because they are fearful and hollow. It’s time to "kindly" ask those who would serve up liberty without fraternity or equality to step to the back of the bus. Our time is now. The time to have a labor party is now. The time to reward work and to have the right amount of rest is now. We have found our movement. Now it's time to pick the person that's going to ride this white horse. It has to be somebody that identifies, loves and trusts the people as much as Jefferson believed we should. It has to be somebody who never condescends and who not only sees the power of work, but loves work and honors it each and every day. For my money, that is John Edwards.
FOOTNOTE: The Big Bunk of Bi-Partisanship
For a further look at the "kinder" Machiavellian, Lee Hamilton, Robert Parry has done the most exhaustive work of the crimes of Bush Senior. Parry contends that Democratic enablers like Hamilton have done irreparable damage to justice. And Bill Clinton's attempt at a deal, at so-called bi-partisanship was as bad an idea as earlier ones during the Reagan administration. As we have seen, the same cast of characters, if not jailed, come back to haunt us.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/...
Hamilton, with his no-nonsense butch haircut and home-spun eloquence, was a candidate for one of Washington's highest unofficial honors, the title of Wise Man. Indeed, Hamilton's passion for bipartisanship had made him the Democrat that the Republicans most wanted to run an investigation into Republican wrongdoing.
When Hamilton was chosen in late 1991 to chair the October Surprise Task Force, Republicans hailed his selection. Hamilton then selected investigators who weren't inclined to press too hard, even as Hamilton's GOP counterpart, Rep. Henry Hyde, staffed his side with tough-minded partisans.
At one point, in a gesture of bipartisanship, Hamilton even granted Republicans veto power over the choice of a Democratic staff investigator. Hyde exercised this extraordinary offer by blocking the appointment of House International Affairs Committee chief counsel Spencer Oliver because Oliver suspected the October Surprise allegations might just be true.
Debunking Bias
So, as the investigation proceeded in 1992, there was a powerful inclination inside the Task Force to dismiss the allegations that had dribbled out over the years, depicting a kind of a prequel to the Iran-Contra scandal, which broke in 1986 with disclosures of other secret arms-for-hostages deals between the Reagan administration and Iran's radical Islamic government.
Despite exposure of the lies that had surrounded the Iran-Contra Affair, Hamilton's Task Force didn't want to believe that George H.W. Bush and other Republicans had begun those contacts six years earlier by undercutting President Jimmy Carter's negotiations to free 52 Americans held hostage in Iran in 1980.
By the early 1990s, the climate in Washington also was extremely hostile to the 1980 October Surprise allegations. They had been denounced by Republicans and attacked by influential journals, such as the neoconservative New Republic. The very idea that then-President Bush would exploit the national humiliation of that earlier hostage crisis for political gain was unthinkable to many Washington insiders.
Plus, in December 1992, after Clinton had defeated George Bush Sr., the Democrats saw little reason to pursue divisive allegations dating back a dozen years that also would tarnish the legacy of the well-liked Ronald Reagan. It was feared, too, that exposing these old crimes might engender more partisan bitterness and poison the political climate as a new President, Bill Clinton, was taking office.
At that naïve moment - 14 years ago - Democrats felt it made sense to bargain away a few seemingly unimportant historical facts for a chance at better cooperation with Republicans on domestic issues that Clinton held dear, like the budget and health care.