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Zombie Politics & Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism

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America is no longer recognizable as a democracy

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As the social state is crippled, hollowed out, and robbed of its potential and its capacities as a real democracy, what takes its place?   The punishing state takes its place.   The authoritarian state.   And eventually the fascist state.

Governance has been ceded to corporations that are basically about benefiting the rich, the ultra-rich, and allowing the state to exercise its power in limited but (for most people) in enormously destructive ways.   Those ways are about militarizing the culture, criminalizing a wide swathe of social behavior, and keeping people in check.   What does it mean when you turn on the television in the United States and you see young kids, peaceful protestors, sitting down with their hands locked while a cop nonchalantly walks back and forth while repeatedly spraying them with pepper spray, as if there's something normal about that.   This is how we now solve problems?   This is how we teach dissenting and protesting students a lesson?

There are two main questions here:   What is it in a culture that would allow the public to believe that with almost any problem that arises, force is the first way to address it?   And why is the state no longer in the service of democracy?

George Monbiot, who writes for "The Guardian," recently wrote, "It's business that really rules us.   So I don't blame people for giving up on politics.   When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political funding system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians of the main parties stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of the system that might inspire us to participate?"

So the real question is, why aren't we more outraged?   Why aren't we in the streets?   We have an economic system that in fact has caused a crisis in democracy.   What we haven't addressed, as a society, is the underlying roots of that crisis.  

We have a cultural apparatus, a culture, an educational system, and a mode of politics in which people have now gone through this extended crisis for so long that it's becoming normalized -- to the point that it's no longer possible to imagine life beyond capitalism.   It's now easier to imagine the death of the planet than it is to imagine the death of capitalism.  

As Paul Krugman recently pointed out, "Despite the lingering effects of the financial crisis, America is a much richer country than it was 40 years ago. But the inflation-adjusted wages of nonsupervisory workers in retail trade -- who weren't particularly well paid to begin with -- have fallen almost 30 percent since 1973!

Financial triumph (i.e. winning at capitalism) is not most people's top priority.   When you read all the surveys about what's important to people's lives, for the very large majority there are more important things than trying to become a millionaire.   They want a decent education for their kids, they we want good health care.   They want equality of opportunity in our country.   They want to be able to control the political process so that we're not simply nameless, invisible, and disposable commodities.   They want women to have the right to some control over their own reproductive rights.   A majority are now even talking about gay rights being a legitimate pursuit of justice.

Ultimately what we need are organizations and strategies that will allow us to start a viable third party that can take on both wings of the BigMoney Party, i.e. the Democrats and the Republicans.   We need to start a party that is not part of the BigMoney establishment;   we need to rebuild and recreate a sense of where American politics can go.

The Democratic Party has failed us, and for all of its occasional discourse about helping the poor and addressing inequality, it always ends up on the side of banksters and finance capital

What we now have is a political system that is completely corrupt.   Elections are bought by big money.   The political process is no longer in the hands of the people.   It's in the hands of the top one percent.   So we have to ask ourselves what kind of new culture needs to be put in place in which education becomes central to politics, in which politics can be used to help people to be able to see things differently, to get beyond this system that is so closed, so corrupt, and now even so powerfully normalized.

Since the 1970s right-wingers have created a massive cultural apparatus, a slew of anti-public intellectuals.   They've invaded the universities with think tanks.   They've spawned huge foundations.   They have all kinds of money.   And the war they wage is primarily a war on the mind.   It is a war on the possibility of alternative visions.   And the left -- progressives and liberals -- have nothing like that.   Too often we seem to believe that all you have to do is tell the truth.   Unfortunately that's not enough.

" The Violence of Organized Forgetting,"

By and large, we Americans systematically forget the past.   Too many of us have either forgotten or never learned about all those struggles that together offer a very different story about the United States than what is taught in school.   We now have people controlling schools who are deleting those histories and making sure they don't appear.  

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Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've (more...)
 

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