A Few Thoughts About Present Strategies Hurting the Population - And Possible Antidotes

Both mainstream experts and concerned scholars have told us repeatedly that physical hunger impairs the healthy physical and intellectual development of millions of children in the so-called Third World. 

Today, as the world experiences what is perhaps the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, hunger is no longer a ‘Third World phenomenon.’ In the so-called rich and ‘developed’ countries of the world, we see hunger spreading as well. In the United States of America, famous for its lead role as a capitalist country, thirty million people go hungry, and that’s according to the official statistics. But how many are just a tiny bit above the line drawn by ‘experts’ researching the plight of the hungry? Just an inch above that invisible, very theoretical line drawn between those who starve and those who are classified as “not starving”?

In Europe, it is the same. The press which tends to play down such things has been forced by the gravity of the situation to tell us that, day by day, a considerable proportion of children in Poland and Germany arrive hungry in school. In Germany, a loaf of decent bread weighing well-nigh
2 pounds costs between 2.50 and 3.50 euros. In the capital, Berlin, about a third of the juvenile population (if not more) are expected to exist on
something like 2.50 euros a day. Everybody can figure out for himself that it is scarcely possible to fill your child’s stomach on that amount, let alone provide a healthy diet. 

The present German secretary of commerce respecively ‘economic affairs’ in the Merkel administration, Mr. Schaeuble, has declared publicly in the DIE ZEIT weekly that millions of Germans on welfare should feel the bite of hunger. They shall go hungry, he said. Obviously, he thinks this will motivate them to find a job in a crisis-stricken economy where normal jobs have been drastically  eliminated. But jobs that don’t pay starving wages are largely out of reach for the long-term unemployment and those just made “redundant” because they are over 50. The number of people pushed out of work plus the number of
people pushed into jobs that pay starving wages so low that they are
minimally supplemented by the government (“work-fare” that still does not preclude fairly empty stomachs) amounts to nine million, in
this ‘leading’ European economy. How much worse must things be in Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Southern Italy,  much of Spain, let alone in Central European  and Balkan countries recently admitted to the European Union?

For long, social scientists have suggested, in the wake of WWII, that classes don’t really exist any more and that capitalism is no longer a crisis-ridden system, although mild recessions might occur. Full employment seemed possible and ‘achievable,’ by those willing to pursue the ‘correct’ Keynesian policies. Such views among scholars defending the status-quo were perhaps inevitable at the time  and a consequence of strong economic booms that resulted in the U.S. from ‘Keynesian’ deficit spending occasioned by the Korean War and the arms race and in W.Europe above all from the need to rebuild in a modern way what had been destroyed before 1945. For about 20 or 25 years, ‘modernized,’ ‘regulated’ capitalism in which private corporations reaped extra-profits due to the strong economic role of their single most important  partner and customer, the state (as a buyer of weapon systems, a provider of traffic infastructure, educational and health infrastructure and thus, as a huge customer of private construction services, and in Europe also of pharmaceutical products) seemed to provide an answer that satisfied the population in the ‘rich world,’ up to a point. In the post-war aftermath of the New Deal (the age of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and LBJ) and in the simultaneously occurring ‘Social Democratic’ age witnessed in W. Europe when the ‘welfare state’ was still expanded while full employment seemed so near at hand, it was understandable if most social scientists, historians and politicians proclaimed that a historical tendency towards fundamental misery and destitution (described as pauperization or ‘Verelendung’ by German-speaking critics in the 19th century) was a thing of the past; supposedly, it had been overcome once and for all, in  our ‘modern industrial society’. 
It also was understandable that the bulk of the common people in the West believed them. 

But apparently, these seemingly rosy decades were just an interlude. We have seen in the 19th and early to mid-20th century and we see again, since about 1973 and increasingly since the 1990s, that the dynamics of the economic system have produced and continue produce enduring mass unemployment. And more recently, we witness exactly such growth of extreme poverty and the concomitant suffering (both cyclically and structurally), that we have seen in the past, before and up to the Great Depression. 

As far as the U.S. and Europe are concerned, we witness the reappearance of millionfold real hunger and even a rampant increase of homelessness. In a sharp, but temporary form many millions suffer the consequences of internal contradictions and irrationalities of a now global system of production and consumption in the ‘rich’ part of the world today  while the system is keeping additional millions continually enclosed in such a state in the rich West. 

If we look to the dependent economies of the poor world and how a majority of the people struggle to survive in those societies, the unability of the economic system to do away with misery and social injustice is even more apparent. Today, at least one billion human inhabitants of this planet are struggling to stay alive in abysmal and horrendous circumstances. The number of the world’s poor is even larger, by far. Hunger and destitution are common phenomena in much of the world.

If we look at the United States and Europe, it is apparent that  resurfacing mass hunger, homelessness, and destitution are (i.) in part a consequence of the business cycle which has produced, during the last few decades, more and more severe recessions or economic crises, in increasingly shorter intervals. 
And they are (ii.)  a consequence of technological innovation which increases productivity and, as such, should allow for a potential boost of production which, however, when accompanied by shrinking, steady or very slightly increased ‘demand’ of people able to pay, cannot be absorbed under market conditions. Thus, increased productivity, faced with more or less constant ‘paying’ demand,  of necessity translates into job cuts.

Another major factor is (iii.) international competition between locations producing the same goods under very different preconditions. The comparatively cheap availability of raw materials, in a given place (and/or the prevalence of comparatively cheaper wage rates, and/or comparatively cheaper taxes), under conditions of the non-regulated and non-planned exchange of goods known as free trade, favors growth of internationally competing industries in some countries and the decline of these same industries in other countries.

Political factors play a role. This is not something entirely new. In the 17th century, the quelling of the Protestant rebellion in Flanders, by Spanish authorities, drove high quality textile industry to the young Dutch Republic. 

As for international (and interregional, intra-national) competition, historic precedents that foreshadow present dynamics exist as well.
In the 18th  century, cheap low-wage competition from Germany led to a decline of linen industry in Harlem and other Dutch centers of linen industry. Widespread poverty, not only in Germany, helped demand for cheap but lousy textile products and the Dutch lost major markets, which lead to industrial decline, even before the advent of technological innovations in Britain became a factor, in the context of international competition.

The migration of New England textile industry to the Carolinas and Georgia is well-remembered in the States. In the last quarter of the 20th century, it was reduplicated by the export of car manufacturing jobs from Michigan to the U.S. South. Maximization of profits was sought when textile companies from Rhode Island and Massachusetts moved to low-wage locations in the South, but it was sought under conditions of overcapacities, of sharp competition, and concomitant pressure on prices.

The various waves of job annihilation in the U.S. that occurred when, since the early and mid-1970s, corporations were increasingly shifting production  to their own plants, to subcontractors and/or business partners in Tijuana, Mexico,  in Honduras, Brazil, South Korea, the island of Taiwan and finally also the mainland of the People’s Republic of China, are not fundamentally different from what occurred in New England before. Or in Holland. And Flanders –  that noteworthy early modern example that deserved to be named because it was, just as Lombardy, one of the most significant regions of proto-industrial production in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Times. And certainly, a hotbed of what evolved into a capitalist mode of production in Europe later on. Even at that time and stage, for political reasons and as a consequence of market forces at play, development was characterized by disruptions.

Today, in the U.S. and Europe, the phenomenon of so-called technology-driven ‘structural’ mass unemployment that is caused basically by the contradiction between the systemic capacity of technological innovation and its inability to absorb such gains in order to satisfy human needs, regardless of the ordinary and the poor man’s ability to pay, is one of the reasons why the logic of the present economic system deserves to be thoroughly analyzed and needs to be corrected. And this in favor of a more just, solidaire and participatory economy. 

But free trade and the  workings of a world market dominated by competing MNCs that are perpetually driven by the quest for maximized profits and the most rapid turnover, are another important factor that is enhancing lasting  ‘structural’ mass unemployment in the ‘rich’ world.  Occuring especially under present conditions of unequal economic power of the ‘players’ involved and under uneven conditions in different countries, the present mode of ‘free’ international exchange on the world market must also be seen as a major  cause of economic and ecological irrationalities and social injustice. It has meant extreme exploitation of the work force in so-called newly emerging countries. It has resulted in a tendency of Western and Japanese corporations to shift dangerous and extremely polluting production to the so-called Third World. And, as a result of the curtailing and/or disappearance of so-called ‘old industries’ in the ‘rich’ industrialized countries of the West, it has contributed to the relative growth of the so-called  tertiary sector that was said to compensate for the effects of de-industrialitation. 

Both socio-economic developments – the growth of the number of ‘service sector jobs’ and the disappearance of many ‘industrial jobs’ in the U.S. and Euope – have been and still are a steady and lasting experience since the mid-1970s. As many ‘tertiary’ jobs don’t pay well and because the characteristic ‘rationalization’  processes (processes that made human work more stressful, intense, demanding and overly exhausting but also more gainful for employers) which contributed to the shrinking of the industrial labor force have spread to the tertiary sector as well, the promise of the so-called elites to replace industrial jobs by tertiary jobs has turned out to be rather misleading. New non-industrial jobs replacing old industrial ones have been fewer in numbers than those that disappeared and, as mentioned, they have often been low-wage jobs that hardly could replace the relatively better paid industrial jobs that were eliminated at the same time. Combined, technological innovation at home and increased exportation of jobs to low-wage work-places abroad have led to marginalization and impoverishment of tens of millions in the United States. The picture in Europe is very similar. 

The experts at the service of the status-quo cooly speak of an ‘underclass’ today. In France they speak of precarité  and in Germany, the term ‘prekariat’ has been coined: it sounds like ‘proletariat’ but the ideological accent is quite a different one. If the latter, in the past, embodied hope for thinkers on the left and for many proletarians as well, the term ‘prekariat’ is meant to indicate hopelessness. And indeed,
a study undertaken in Germany fairly recently showed that in this society which largely excludes working class children (and especially, the bulk of working class kids with an immigration backgound) from high school, the majority of these excluded kids professed a feeling of hopelessness and lack of trust in their future, at a very early age. These kids studied in order to assess the actual degree of hopelessness were just nine years old.

It is clear that today, those pushed out of the productive process are just discarded and that the classe politique and the truly (if not extremely) well-off are intent to simply forget them. What is happening to millions of people, after decades of mass unemployment in Europe, is what happened to Black workers in Los Angeles and Chicago when they were pushed out of industrial jobs again, after WWII,  then again  in the wake of the Korea boom, and finally the rest of them with the sagging Vietnam war boom.

It’s actually since the mid-1970s, when the war in Vietnam was terminated and left the U.S. with stagflation (and what were considered, at the time, huge deficits),  that two tendencies could be observed. Real wages were pushed down; mass unemployment truly set in. As inflation was exported thanks to the dubious ability of the U.S. government to print dollar bills and have them accepted by the rest of the world  as the global ‘reserve currency’, the world experienced a global downturn. Mainstream economists have tried to explain it by an oil price shock, but actually the actual oil price increase was a reaction to the depreciating dollar. Paul Mattick, at the time, analyzed very soberly the relationship between the costly war in Vietnam, a war economy, and inflationary pressure. It was then, with the capitalist crisis becoming deeper than anyone had expected, both among private capitalists, government officials, and their experts, that Black American workers who constituted   that considerable segment of the U.S. population which had been the last, more or less, to enter the industrial labor force, during the Golden Twenties and even more massively, during WWII, were compelled to learn that they were not protected by implicitly racist, Anglo labor leaders and that they could not count much on the solidarity of Anglo work-mates fearing for their jobs. 
So Black Americans indeed were the first to be squeezed out of  industrial, therefore, comparatively well-paying jobs by capital, just as they had been the last to be absorbed by the sector.
‘Color’ was an important factor. Left to themselves, unable to find decent jobs, exposed to the harshness of urban life and to destitution experienced under big city conditions, they formed the beginnings of what is today called, by American professors, journalists, and politicians, the new ‘underclass.’ It brought about the break-up of families, the deterioration of neighborhoods, petty-crime, finally (as a consequence of the Vietnam-war related increase of drug consumption in the U.S.), the well-known rather high rates of drug-addiction and rampant drug-dealing in slums. 

Today, deteriorating neighborhoods in Europe’s large and mid-sized cities see the same developments. In a way, though in a new, modern or, as some will say, post-modern garb, the old misery of Manchester slums, as witnessed and described by critics in the mid-19 th century, is becoming very visible once again. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in the once prosperous West profiting from neo-colonial grabbing, from its ability to engage in international diplomatic and military arms-twistung, from the huge capitalist fortunes ammassed here by its financial institutions and the big corporations generally, from its questionable, productive as well as destructive ‘technological superiority and the dominance exerted in international markets, a very visible urban decline and largely invisible social disintegration set in.  And soon, it was not only in US inner cities from South Los Angeles to the Bronx, and in places hard-hit by de-industrialization affecting ‘Anglos’ finally (from Kansas City and St. Louis to Cleveland, or Buffalo and Detroit) that the most blatant features of this development could be observed. It took a little longer in Europe, it is true. But today, what once were, for the short time of 20 or 30 years, model countries of  20th century ‘social democratic’ or ‘Rhenanian’ capitalism, are disintegrating in a way that is reminnding critics very much of what has happened and is continuing to happen in U.S: society.  Society is said to be polarized; we hear that the rich get richer and the poor poorer.  But the rich that get richer are a phantom that is hardly visible. Corporations ammass wealth, don’t know what to do with it, invest in production abroad or in currency speculation, in options and futures, especially in commodity markets, and of course in property. The people at large are squeezed. Some more, some less; some still hold out, but fearing to lose soon; others in fast vertical decline. Who is profiting? A few major shareholders. A few industrial, financial or trading dynasties (the latter typically represented by the owners of Walmart or Aldi). And yes, a few top politicians at their service. At the service of the ‘common good,’ thus, big business, they will say, ommitting the word ‘big.’ They defend what they do by  saying there is ‘no alternative’ to what they do. Thus, no alternative to decline? To rotting infrastructure?  To social nemesis? It is apparent that entire regions are in sharp decline. And, paralleling U.S. developments, in Europe the banlieues of Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, the run-down inner city quarters of Berlin, public housing ghettos of Malmö or cities in the Ruhr district, the forgotten places of South Wales, of the French Departement du Nord, of the Borinage have become gloomy places of despair and depression. Left to themselves, to a large degree,  by governments that appropriate inadequate funds and turn a blind eye to staggering and still increasing problems.

It seems that the so-called Third World is coming home to the ‘rich countries’ of the North. And it’s no longer “just Roms (or travelers)” and blue collar immigrants who are hit, in Europe.  Just like in North America, where it’s no longer “just Native Americans” or  “welfare cheating, drug dealing” Black Americans, or “illegal immigrants; wetbacks from across the Rio Grande,”  or what other stereotypes targeting the worst-hit, most deprived segments of the population we may encounter, No, today, it is the core of the working class that is hit. In America, and in Europe. Sure, it’s not happening entirely regardless of ethnic and cultural background, but still across the board. 

And those who are squeezed out, into the sharp and painful and often long-lasting misery that reminds us of the darkest years of the Great Depression and the shocking conditions of 19th industrial towns in Europe and the U.S., are only the tip of an iceberg. Psychic stress, physical exhaustion, the anxiety of being the next in line to lose a job, are more widespread and this with more devastating consequences than ever, even if we look as far back as May, 1945. 

Much of it is resulting from intensification of the work process, unrelenting efforts to increase productivity and enhance a climate of sharp competition as well as mutual distrust. A trend that is fanned by many employers and that not all working people will remain immune to. In some respects, anxiety, coldness, a feeling of being ‘hunted’ and encircled by frightful circumstances, a sense of being close to collapse, are typical psychological and physiological facets of  a sharp capitalist crisis. The political and economic conditions that emerged are exactly what has been conducive to a socio-economic development that has made life harsher and more difficult to cope with for those still turning up in the factories and offices, each morning, for those who drive the rigs on the interstate, and for those who welcome you in thrift stores and malls where you hurriedly check for bargains. 

But the opposite is also true: Anger increases, and with the pain felt, observation quite often gets sharper. At least as long as misery and destitution have not lead to psychic depression and/or to alcoholism (and other forms of drug addiction). So there are those who become more critical, and more ready to fight back.

Both those who are resigned to a bad status-quo and those who are awaking and looking, perhaps vainly still, for alternatives, feel the pinch of stressful working conditions. Many today have two or more badly paid jobs, and the number of regular jobs is in decline. Yes, many people 
are exhausted  by the work load they cope with and feel that they have no energies left to reflect things, or truly seek change. But isn’t it remarkable that, during the last U.S. presidential election campaign, about one half  of  the voters (if not of the adult population) were cheered up by words and that means, sentiments, that said, “Yes, we can” and that spelled out a longing for emancipative self-activity and for “change”?

Today, it is apparent that you cannot wait for big daddy to solve your problems.  Neither can I. No presidential candidate, no major political party in the U.S. or Europe, no  figure of  a ‘leader’ constructed by PR and the media,  no right-wing populist Fuehrer can do what we must do when we say “Yes, we can”. Most importantly, no one can absolve us from the responsibility to answer a key question: Yes, we can… DO WHAT? Take what action, ourselves? With what basic goal or goals in mind? So many of us responded positively when told that CHANGE is the word of the day. But have we debated and then, reflected and debated again, which CHANGE is necessary? Yes, we can… take ACTION. But: Changing which irational condition or conditions? Doing away with what sort of injustice?

Today, even highly paid bankers and financial analysts who sold their soul, believing in the crap they did and the lies they told, have ended up homeless and out of work, all of a sudden. Others may feel they are on the verge of being sacked. Maybe they can move in with a friend or relative for a time; maybe not. Those who thought they had “made it,”  start to realize that life is insecure, very insecure under capitalism. For average blue and white collar worker, this feeling is nothing new. It is the old sword of Damocles, the threat that one must go hungry perhaps when a job is lost almost for good and when the period during which one can depend on UI benefits or a welfare check has elapsed.  It’s the old Great Depression threat of hunger, homelessness and long-term misery that hangs above the heads of every one, blue collar and white collar workers, alike. They may suppress that knowledge inside themselves, but it is there, inescapably, whether they want it or not. It is a “disciplining” factor, vey welcome indeed, from the point of view of those who own the factories, the banks, the trading corporations, the media, and in effect
everything that we the rest depend on indirectly, in order to earn a wage or salary and pay our bills.

Yes, once – in the few good decades after WWII – many of us  thought that classes and class antagonisms don’t exist anymore, that the “hard-working” guy or gal which represented the typical image we had with respect to ourselves,  “had made it”: that things would only get better, unendingly. And so, many of us believed that, after all, they were exactly what the media and blind sociologists told them: a ‘middle class’. The only class (except for “bums,”  “Black welfare cheaters,”  “hippies,” and “drunk Indians”)  that “still existed” in this “best of all worlds.” What a false dream! What an illusion, but how deceitfully encouraged by the media and the “world of fashions”!

Of course, the concept of a “conned and prejudiced silent majority” is an ahistorical abstraction. People in touch with reality always had an inkling that after all, they were workers. They knew about difficulties to get trade unions recognized in a company. And they senses the difference between “those up there” and “us”. Do not even the infotaining media tell us that  80 or 90 per cent of the U.S. population distrust “politicians in Washington” and probably as many, “Wall Street bankers”?

And thus the picture we, the people, offered was never free of contradictions. So many of us might resent “radicals,” and vote for Bushists, Neo Cons, Tea Party Republicans, or “centrist” Democrats.  And yet, isn’t there something deeply radical, a feeling that we have grievances and are perpetually conned, alive in most of us, regardless of for whom we vote? Isn’t the “we  versus. they, up there divide” a hurt, a burning wound alive in us? Yes, and what about that longing for justice and normal decency and human warmth –  isn’t at least a small remnant, a tiny trace of it, still felt inside almost each one of us? And this regardless of all sarcasm and offensively brandished cynicism?

Undoubtedly, America today is a split society, in many ways. And so is Europe. But the perceived divide,  the 50/50 split between Republicans and Democrats in the U.S., and something of the sort, in Europe (the old ideological opposition between Conservatives and right-wing populists on the one hand, social democrats and ecologists and a few new and old leftists on the other), is not the real divide. The real divide is the divide between a few immense profiteurs who are not just defending the status-quo but eagerly enlarging their slice and the concomitant power they exercise over others. And, on the other hand, there is the broad majority: “we, the people”, women and men who long for decency, for a certain measure of security in life, for a correction of what is unjust and unfair and irrational in society, for a sane answer to environmental destruction, annihilation of normal jobs, the disappearing future and hopelessness of the young, the abandonment and loneliness and pauperization of many among the aged.

This does not mean that we are saints, unblemished, without fault, or not involved in irrational patterns, including patterns that hurt our neighbors or the ecology.

Even racism and xenophobia flourish among our sort.
But by very few of us, I think, are such feelings embraced wholeheartedly and with a good conscience. Much of it is a reaction to the competition for jobs, housing, so-called social transfers or entitlements that the mighty few force upon us, or at least try to force upon us.

As “Whites,” no matter how racist the social environment and upbringing we look back to, most of us today, even the racist-minded, could still befriend the Afro-American mate working next to us.  And don’t we feel sorry for the genocide perpetrated in America, with regard to Native Americans? Or sorry and perhaps ashamed when we think of the genocide committed by the willing helpers of the fascist Nazi regime? If we talk about the average gal or guy that we are, it does not make sense to paint a completely bleak or glorious picture.  There always was more grey than just a black and white in that picture. And that’s true of native-born and immigrant people, Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and agnostics. Of you and me. Of ordinary Republican and Democratic voters. Or those voting the Conservative, the Liberal or the Labour ticket in Britain. Of Conservatives respectively Christian Democrats, and of Social Democrats, Greens, and Leftists on the Continent.

But what then unites us?
The ability to think.
The ability to overcome mere selfishness, self-interested grabbing.
The innate sense of justice.
The concern for identifiable problems that we can only close our eyes to if  we are overwhelmed by exhaustion, surrendering to apathy, or if a lot of ill will comes into play.

We will perhaps customarily offer our engrained “right” or “left” or “green” answers to problems once we debate together.

Okay, that’s a fair beginning – as long as we don’t take them for the unrevocable and absolute truth and listen to the arguments of others.
We can think, after all. We can all learn, and the problems at hand are much too large, too deep, too prolongued, too apparently unsolved and too unsolvable by the old failed remedies – so a search, an openess, an ongoing process of active critical involvement is necessary.

The main problem, our problem, the failure of all of us is that we always had that feeling, that more or less acute sense that this and that and also that other thing was wrong. And yet, we never started to debate that. And to think, and come forward with suggestions, as to the way we wanted to move. We left it to others. Experts. Paid by governments and corporations. Government people, politicians who govern us and get their campaigns financed by corporations. And, yes, we left it to corporations and their stewards, too.  General Electric when they tackle a problem like the lack of decently paying jobs in the U.S. by announcing they are about to invest 3 billion dollars abroad, because US labor is “too unqualified and too expensive.” Monsanto, when they tackle the problem of preserving durable grains that will help mankind weather the storm of climate change, by reducing biodiversity, producing and marketing standardized seeds that need lots of herbicides and uniform climatic conditions. Soros and others, when they speculate in the ethanol market, accelerating deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia. BP, when they poison the Gulf of Mexico. Companies involved in “industrially” carried out efforts of  fishing oceans empty. Utilities operating nuclear power plants while they dilute nuclear wastes, or have the mafia drop them into the wide blue sea.

Perhaps a one-sided view. My view, I know. But the fact that problems – many others (unmentioned here), too –  DO exist and that we let others worry about them and make the decision, remains.

Will we open our eyes?
Will we act, like responsible adults?
Will we care for our neighbor, also the impoverished, colonially and neo-colonially exploited neighbors in the world’s South?
Will we care for the future of our children, of all children?
Today, in a world of spreading insecurity and million-fold hunger, even in rich countries, it is not easy to be courageous. 

The super-rich and the mighty and their politicians that we vote for, every four (and in some countries, perhaps five) years are sensing the
danger that tomorrow we might turn out to be very much awake. 

They are preparing themselves for it.
Their politicians built prisons, demantle civil rights, increase observation and surveillance of dissidents. They denounce critics as trouble-makers. 

The economic conditions, deteriorating as they are (even where, on first sight, the economy seems to be “booming” again), are not exactly making life easy for us.

Politically fostered paranoia and hysteria abound.  We are subject to campaigns orchestrated by corporations and  politicians. Aren’t we exposed each day to the onslaught of xenophobia fanned by the media, with respect to, especially, “illegal immigrants”?  And aren’t we, at the same time, sipping the air that is full of that strange (and strangely anti-religious, anti-Islamic) “fear of terrorism” that has replaced fear of the Soviet “empire of evil” in Western societies?

So brace yourself for the storm, the storm of facile lies and abundant ill-will, and become sober, again, citizen!

It’s up to you to reject what the few in power think will make you afraid and ready to submit cowardly to their selfish rule.

Democracy, real democracy, is something very different from what our rulers tell us. It is about your, your involvement, your ability to shape the world you live in, making it more humane, more of a human universe.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Check...:http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/17/democracy_uprising_in_the_usa_noam
 

Check: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/17/democracy_uprising_in_the_usa_noam