Why This Is The Most Interesting Time In American History!
by: Dave Belden on September 10th, 2010 | 5 Comments »
I have been editing and posting transcripts of speeches from the June Network of Spiritual Progressives conference to our website and I am blown away by how good some of them are. Like this:
In theory, if you want the outcomes – equality, environmental change, community stability – you can rig the incentives and the regulatory structure to get the corporations to do that for you. The problem in actual practice is they’re too powerful. We know that. “Well,” he said, “well if you can’t get that, then how are you going to get what you’re talking about?” That’s a really good question, so I want to address it and then we can debate it.
If I didn’t think there was a possibility that was different from “The pendulum will swing and we’ll elect a few more Democrats” – I come out of liberalism, I worked in the House and the Senate, I know that world – if I didn’t think there was another possibility, then I wouldn’t be here.
What I think is really interesting, and why I think this is the most interesting period in American history bar none – including the Revolution, including the Civil War, including the Depression, including the Civil Rights and Feminist eras – is that what’s happened is that the solution that we used to have available to manage the system through traditional means is faltering, and there is no easy answer that way. And unlike [what] the Marxists [believe] – this is where it gets really interesting – it is not collapsing. It is not reforming and it is not collapsing.
That means we may have a long time period [for] the kind of things that David [Korten] and I are talking about, the evolutionary reconstruction. You know why things are happening in Cleveland that are new? Because there is a hell of a lot of pain and it is not being solved, but it is not collapsing. That may be the only way to achieve a democratic revolution. The slow reconstruction from the bottom up, out of failure but not collapse, because if it collapses, it is going to be taken over by the Right, not the Left.
I want to just sharpen this. I’m suggesting to you that this is a very unusual period of history. I call it “stalemate and decay.” You can see that negatively, you can see all the pain. But that means the possibility of reconstruction may be implicit, and that means us getting busy. That’s why I think there is a possibility of laying groundwork. When the next banking crisis comes, there’s another possibility it’s going to occur. When the pain levels increase and the cost-levels out of this crazy health care system occur, there’s another possibility.
There are going to be possibilities that are really interesting that are not collapse possibilities. So institutional reconstruction may be possible only out of this environment of stalemate and decay. That’s debatable, obviously. That’s why I say I am cautiously optimistic. Here’s the nasty part. You want to play this game? The chips are decades of your life. Don’t play unless you want to play the long-term game. That’s what this is about: laying groundwork and building.
Wow. That’s from a workshop on Economic Transformation of American Society: New Directions. The speaker is Gar Alperovitz, historian, activist and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, author of America Beyond Capitalism, Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty and Our Democracy, and, with Lew Daly, Unjust Deserts , which he and Daly summarized in Tikkun here. See garalperovitz.com.
Yes, we do live in an interesting time but we also live in a depressing time. The reasons for such a depressing time are the rampant witnessing of hatred, corruption, and lies in our daily lives. Americans cheating Americans with no end in site.
Reminds me of the pop music from back in my childhood days of the Great Depression. “Pennies from Heaven,” “Look For the Silver Lining,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing,” “Sunnyside of the Street,” etc. As we have now repeated the days of prohibition (although our devil’s brew has changed) and the economic failures, I trust we will not try to cure it with another world war. If we have learned only that much, we are “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
Rex, unfortunately we are trying to cure it with world war. We just don’t call it a world war because it is mostly the US. But this, I believe today, is the real reason for the times being so depressing. It is not the economy; it is that our government, in our names, is killing so many innocent people with whom we (the people) have much more in common than we share with those who promulgate war for the profits it brings. We are depressed because of the slaughter of the innocent all over the world, and we have so far been unable to rein in the military industrial complex. Fortunately, the times are interesting, and there is hope, but we cannot stand aside any longer.
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
Well, I guess we could say that we are living in interesting times. From my perspective, however, I think we’re living in perilous times.
We will explode if we don’t take of the humongous class differences that have arisen. We can take back our country through strengthening the Middle Class. Two simple things to start with if allowed to do their jobs right. Elizabeth Warren in the Consumer Financial Protections Bureau. Banks get their money at less than 1% interest, and charge many people 25% or more. Imagine if the % will be lowered to 12%?
Second, follow North Dakota. That state barely has unemployment, and is flourishing economically. What’s the secret? a state bank geared to help the people of North Dakota not to enrich bankers. BTW, this is exactly how South Korea and China amongst others has used as the basis for their economic take-off. Today, the Bank of China is the highest priced stock in the world.