DON’T MOAN, ORGANISE.
Democracy as Sham
What can we say?
What is our moral soil?
I hear an echo in my ears.
Joe Hill…Joe Hill….Joe…
an activist of the Wobblies* in the US at the turn into the 20th century.
He said to friends in the night before his execution by the state
for supposedly murdering a man,
“Don’t moan, organise.”
I can hear Paul Robson singing THE BALLAD OF JOE HILL
(this is how art and beauty make life better)
It’s easy to condemn all the ex-farmers,
ex-seamstresses,
ex-nurses and cooks and schoolteachers,
ex-factory workers,
ex-train drivers and ex-mechanics
who built America and voted for MAGA
and their self-consumed orange tinted Wall Street Servant.
Those ex’s have been driven to thoughtlessness,
living half-lives without the benefits of critical thinking,
poorly taught and thoroughly brainwashed
by intimidated teachers and their bureaucratic bosses,
by multi-millionaire tele-evangelists -
religious maniacs fed by wealthy reactionaries,
owners of the vast American continent
with its flat plains running from the western slopes of the Appalachia chain
to the eastern slopes of the Rockies,
where those x’s,
whose 2000 year out-of touch beliefs
are deeply a part of their Hallmark card
emotional and intellectual make-up,
in which their nostalgia is in conflict
with the scam rubbish of the internet
but who are also people left behind
by the neoliberal American political class.
Those impoverished exes,
too often tragically alcohol and drug addled,
are spoken down to,
made to feel dumb, useless, impotent
with the men’s sense of masculinity stolen from them.
from THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness. —
That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed—
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.”
It’s no wonder actors like Clint Eastwood
are popular with those boys and men.
As Clint, they are tight lipped (perhaps being inarticulate),
they are filled with fear and gladly take god’s revenge into their own hands.
Without regret, as they are god-fearing and purifying the world for him,
they murder people, cold-blooded,
they beat wives and children,
they hate difference,
thus purifying the world for him.
They are part of history.
The fantasy spewing MAGA adherents
who will outlaw teaching the exes’ kids
that America was built upon a long period of conscious-free genocide
against native Americans.
When European settlers arrived in the Americas,
historians estimate there were over 10 million Native Americans living there.
By 1900, their estimated population was under 300,000.
That it was also built on the insidious institutions of slavery.
The number of deaths attributable to the Middle Passage voyage
is estimated at up to two million;
a broader look at African deaths directly attributable
to the institution of slavery from 1500 to 1900
suggests up to four million deaths and an additional 10 million survived in the economy producing billions of hours of cheap labour.
Finally the country’s economy was built upon the continual exploitation
of women, children and men as cheap labour.
In 1970, the average CEO compensation was 11 times the average hourly worker wages. In 1980 the gap was 42 times, in 1990 CEO compensation was 85 times greater in 2000 demonstrates a pay gap of over 531 times the average hourly worker wage.
Taking a step back from these pits of horror
we can see that all of it was based on the greedy wanting increased wealth
via controlling cheap labour and stealing other’s lands.
American democracy has never lived up to the American Constitution.
All of this history lives in America’s present
with people’s fetish for guns,
antisemitism,
anti-‘popery’,
pernicious racism,
ignorance of other people,
other languages and other societies
and how Disney/Hallmark and cheap yellow journalism
turn the people against art and intellectualism.
This has made me ask questions that have been hanging around
since he with the orange hair arrived on the scene.
•How is it that a mature Democracy has no legal tools
to bar a person of low morals,
suffused in a loathing misogyny
and with hatred for anyone racially unlike himself?
• How is it that our system has no transparent way
to stop people like this from attaining or indeed even running for high office?
• How is it that we have no methods
that can fairly enquire and examine aspiring politicians
for their sanity, morality, ideology etc?
• How is it that in a supposes democratic nation
we do not have ways to stop those running for office
from normalising the lying and poisonous monologue
of the psychopath’s lusting for power
who are also too close to the yes/no buttons of atomic war?
•How is it that in the name of free expression,
free speech and so called freedom of the press
that the media is allowed to distort day-by-day reality?
The publishers express views of the rich undemocratically
as they do not inform and expose what is meaningful for us?
Mark Twain, the American novelist and humorist wrote
“if you do not read the paper in the morning
you are uninformed,
but if you do, you are misinformed.”
We know that presently there are masses of people left behind
in emotional and economic squalor
by the very people who support MAGA and its ilk.
Why?
This is what the neoliberals have been plotting since the late 1940’s
when they rose to take back from post war governments
the wealth they believed belonged to them.
They wanted and want complete ownership and control of markets
untouched by government inspections and regulations;
they want their politician puppets
to cut their personal and corporate taxes,
and they want to continue to dumb the rest of us down.
We now need to question
how democracy can be liberated from the control of the rich,
and how both neoliberal capitalism and oligarchic democracy
can be liberated for all people.
What we have is not working, and to be clear,
I am not proposing communism but some form
of social democracy in which all decisions, all programmes,
all policies are made,
in the first place,
in kindness and on the basis of all people’s needs.
The economy has to be reformed so that control of lending
is in the hands of the state representing the needs of the people;
that percentage of any ownership of any sector of the economy must be limited,
ownership must move into the hands of the people via co-ops.
And technology must be held back
until we muster the moral resources to control it.
Progress must be first seen in our common moral values and then in the economy.
What can we say?
What is our moral soil?
I hear an echo in my heart.
Joe Hill…Joe Hill….Joe…
*The word "Wobbly" is a nickname for the IWW
or’ International Workers of the World’.
It illustrates the unions efforts to combat racism.
A Chinese restaurant keeper in Vancouver in 1911 supported the union and would extend credit to members.
Unable to pronounce the letter "w", he would ask if a man was in the "I Wobble Wobble”.