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#16 Loren Bliss; I can't really agree with your charge that patriarchy has been the sole cause of all the problems we have today. When the women's movement mounted yet another attempt to rise to prominence in the late 1960s, a well known male member of Congress in that era stated that he had no doubt that the rise of women in positions of political power would cure many of the system's ongoing inequities. He continued with a warning that within twenty or so years, those same women would adapt to the realities of our political and economic system and become just as corrupt and greedy as their male counterparts. Loss of all integrity and ethical standards is inevitable when anyone is given full unfettered access to the candy store !
Just about all the nonsense is due to the traitors in our elected government. Since they are traitors I would suggest any means legal to be rid of them. Tar, feathers, and rails comes to mind.
ChicagoMatt, your anti-contraception buddies at a GOP company in DC brutally fired me BECAUSE MY MOM DID NOT USE contraception! -- she disfigured my face instead as her abstinence excuse, and you defend such criminality as religious "tolerance!" Because i'm old and disfigured by your womb-trafficking thugs, I can't get another job somewhere else! Why don't you stop using religion to justify Nazism?
Alice, thanks for your insight and kind words!
Would you be ok with the employer choosing it for their not-yet-18-year-old children? And, if you think, "no, we should let that child make that decision on their own, once they are 18", then would you also apply that logic to other decisions parents make for their children, like vaccinations?
Atheism/secularism is a philosophy (there is no room for God in modern society), which the government seems hell-bent on forcing on people. Saying to people that they MUST pay for something that they are opposed to is intolerant of that person's faith. It's no different than forcing a Jew to pay for pork for someone else, or a Hindu to pay for beef for someone else, or even forcing a Muslim woman to take her headscarf off in public.
For all of their talk of tolerance, Progressives are awfully intolerant of anyone who sees things differently than them. At some point, don't you just want to say, "hey, man... if they think birth control is immoral, that's cool. Live and let live. Their employees can just buy it on their own, or find another job."
Let's stop calling reich-wingers "conservatives." The term conservative has a positive ring to many people but the Republican Party no longer advocates for conservative principles in the historic sense. Drop the term "conservative" --- substitute "right-wing" on all occasions except where they, by happenstance, support a position supportive of the common good.
Hi Thom, love your work, been listening to you for years. I am a scientist in Australia, and I ask you to check the definition of pollutant. We should not call CO2 a pollutant or we just give our enemies stones to throw at us.
kind regards
Mark, your distrust of government is understandable. But where's a realistic alternative? Until or unless someone comes up with a better idea, I'll stick with representative democracy.
By the way, nice to see ya again ole buddy.
Matt, as is commonly the case, your assertion rests on certain presumptions I don't accept or that are simply without foundation. Laws that require religious institutions to pay for birth control are an outlawing of discrimination. A legitimate function of government is to protect people's rights, not to enforce any religious philosophy or intolerance.
I, anyway, would not have problem with requiring an employer's employee insurance plan covering gay conversion therapy as long as the employee freely chooses it and isn't required by the employer to undergo it. That's, of course, as long as gay conversion therapy is still legal - as in many places it no longer is and, hopefully, will soon be banned everywhere.
Loren Bliss and Alice, I think you're wrong on a couple of points. First Loren, I think you have some things in reverse order. Everything is about economics and level of technology and it isn't patriarchal religion that created patriarchal society but vice versa.
When I was studying anthropology in the U.S. 35 years ago there was no concealment at all of the fact that ALL human cultures came from egalitarian, communal direct democracies without hierarchy or even formal authority. The most conservative anthropologist acknowledged it - even if they considered capitalism an improvement or an evolutionary advance. I don't know how it is in the field today.
Cultures that are preagricultural are egalitarian and close to nature and the earth and their animistic, highly woman influenced religions reflect that.
With the domestication of plants and animals the principle of domestication was soon applied to other people and people began to enslave other people and keep them for use and consumption. Patriarchy developed in tandem with private property and patriarchal religion came as a result of that. Essentially, the priesthood is brought out to bless whatever system is in place at any time but the real action is always in the political-economic arena around the means of production.
The solution to capitalism would, I think, be democracy but not bourgeois democracy that glosses over differences in political power between socioeconomic classes but in social democracy or non hierarchical, libertarian socialism or anarcho communism.
Marx's solution was the abolition of private property by the state which would take away the need for the state (we all know from reading Engels that the state was invented to enforce private property rights - and many, today, still think that the only legitimate function of the state). With the abolition of private property community would be strengthened and greed obsolete thus there would be ever less need for the police, prisons and the courts and the state would, over time, atrophy from disuse and "wither away" and we live, thereafter, in stateless, propertyless, hierarchyless "pure communism".
I don't know how much I trust representative democracy or ANY state anymore - certainly not the nominally Leninist dictatorships, simply because the dictator ostensibly pledges allegiance to Marxism nor the bourgeois state of representative democracy where, as in the case of TPP, virtually the whole body of the representative legislature can be simply bribed to vote away ANY semblance of democracy and choose for their constituents deliverance into feudalism.
Reply to #5: Your turn, ScaryMary!
I view this Republican “war on women” to be one of the basic ingredients of fascism, an ideology and power structure taking patriarchy to the extreme. In such an environment, women are controlled in a variety of ways. For starters, they are kept at the mercy of their own bodies so that their natural reproductive powers become a handicap and a burden. They are stifled by misogynistic religion and cultural traditions designed to keep women down. They are paid less for the same work, denied voting rights in more extreme cases, along with property rights and so on, all tried-and-true methods by which women are kept “in their place” as second class citizens and thus, denied opportunities to develop as human beings to their fullest potential.
In such an environment, it comes as no surprise that the workplace is so insufferably toxic as you have described.
It sounds as though you have suffered horribly from abuse with lasting consequences, punished for not living your life by men’s rules. “Forced birth” just goes with the territory. This is the very foundation of gender-based oppression. Of course I have no way of knowing the specifics, Mary, but that is the impression your post leaves me with. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I like the term “looksists”. Works for me!
Reply to #11: employer-based health insurance is bullshit, Matt. Of course if she can afford it, a woman can always pay for birth control out of pocket, to keep her private life private, beyond the grasp of an overreaching boss. Aside from that, comparing birth control to gay-conversion “therapy” is simply ridiculous. Birth control is voluntary while gay-conversion “therapy” is not. Frankly, it offends me that you would frame all this as something employers are “paying for”. What they’re paying for is the employee’s labor; therefore the insurance and what that insurance provides are earned benefits owed to employees. But like I say, employment-based health insurance is bullshit. Single payer would eliminate this issue entirely, keeping such matters where they belong: between a woman, her husband (if she has one) and her doctor.
By that same logic, an employer could argue that he shouldn't have to "pay for" an overweight employee's doughnuts! Gimmie a break.
I don’t know about the rest of you but I get mighty weary of these arguments over a woman’s privacy, freedom and fundamental right to control her own body. It's very difficult for me to remain civil with conservative men who seem hellbent on challenging our right to live as autonomous adults, with the same freedoms they so pompously take for granted. This is why I tend to ignore Matt's posts most of the time. Comparing gay conversion "therapy" (which is actually a form of abuse, not "therapy") to something like birth control is so stupid, so patently lame, I'd rather not even dignify it with a rebuttal.
A dreamer, indeed, and I can empathize. But today, the motto of liberals (as defined by media) is: "Stand in Solidarity to protect the advantages of the bourgeoisie, the middle class!" When was the last time you heard a "bold progressive" call for restoring basic food and shelter for our poor? Right.
We're stuck with capitalism. From FDR to Reagan, we had taken measures that, to some degree, protected the people from full corporate power, but with Reagan, we changed our minds. From Reagan's deregulation mania to Clinton wiping out basic poverty relief, we became everything we once abhorred. I don't have the solution, and it wouldn't much matter, anyway.
Greed defines us. This is the generation that demanded, "No crumbs for the poor!" During similar times when the rich took power over the country, the "masses" ultimately united to push back -- middle class and poor. That can't happen this time. While we were redistributing several trillion taxpayer dollars upward, to corporations/the rich, the middle class demanded that not a penny trickle down to the desperately poor. We shrug our shoulders over the trillions of dollars lost to ongoing war(s), and demand the end to food stamps for the elderly poor, disabled and working poor.
Actually, we first learned about corporations beginning to effectively intrude and take control of the private lives of workers back in the 1980s. Since then, we have implemented a full range of policies whereby our survival is dependent on selling our souls to our employers. Do what they say, or lose your job -- and we all know how the poor are treated today!
Loren Bliss and Aliceinwonderland ~ Thank you both for your responses. They were most provocative. It would appear that the underlying problem is greed. You have both given me much food for thought. For that I am grateful. Have a great evening.
Marc...I pretry much agree with Alice on this matter, though she and I differ on two points:
(1)-I believe worker co-ops are a superb idea, but they are only truly viable once capitalism has been eliminated. Otherwise the co-ops will be compelled by market forces to become nothing more than another subset of capitalism (and therefore in their own ways ultimately no less malignant than the present-day corporations).
(2)-I question whether our species can ever again be immunized against greed and selfishness. This was the original core purpose of the variously named Soviet state security apparatus -- Cheka, GPU, NKVD, MVD etc. and finally KGB. Their failures are proven by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which fell not to conquest but to the greed and selfishness evoked by capitalist propaganda and the corruption subsequently metastasized throught the Soviet system. China likewise, though there the greed and selfishness remained within what the Soviets called the nomenklatura, the Communist Party's Ruling Class, with the result the entire Chinese revolution was (apparently) co-opted.
It is something of an aside, but if you replace the serpent and the apple of the Garden of Eden tale with a burning bush or a fiery wheel or a voice from the heavens, the subsequent loss of paradise is a perfect metaphor for what happened when our species began adopting patriarchy.
Marc, I can’t speak for Loren but from where I sit, I think what’s key here is a society & culture that discourages greed. A truly representative government, designed to put people and the environment first, is the means by which this can be created and maintained. The necessity of The Commons (free education and healthcare, fire departments, postal service, non-corporate media not beholden to commercial interests, public-owned utilities and so forth) should be a given. And from that government: regulation, regulation and more regulation, putting strict, unwavering limits on corporate power AND on banks. I would like to see total elimination of the profit motive so that all corporate entities remain sustainable but not profitable. No extremes of wealth or poverty need exist or be allowed to exist. Since corporations are authoritarian by design, keeping them on a short leash is imperative. Or maybe the corporate model should be eliminated and replaced with worker-owned cooperatives.
I'd like to see a world where all militaries, along with all war-making infrastructure and production. are ultimately phased out.
All fossil fuel companies should get wiped off the map. That shit needs to stay in the ground. There are energy alternatives already in existence and utilizing them should be a #1 priority.
I think every citizen should be entitled — yes, ENTITLED — to a basic minimum income, so that no one is deprived of the necessities of life for any reason. This would strip business owners and employers of their tyrannical power over the people they hire. If unemployment means only the loss of certain luxuries and non-essentials, rather than the threat of homelessness (a virtual death sentence), it would be a lot easier to say “Take this job and shove it!” to an overreaching or abusive employer. When one's very life depends on one's value to the business class, it's an environment where fascism can take hold.
That said, I’m sure that I or our comrades here could come up with many more ideas along these lines. However I believe it is critically important to create the kind of society where psychopathy and greed are thwarted at every turn. Environments where these undesirable, destructive traits can thrive are a cultural phenomenon; they are toxic and an impediment to civilization.
If all that makes me a dreamer like John Lennon, then so be it. I can think of worse things to be. - AIW
Conceptually, just as capitalism is the direct descendant of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam)...
Just as fascism and Nazism are the (sole and historically inevitable) descendants of capitalism...
So are all these malignancies the direct descendants of patriarchy, which appeared on this planet only about 5,000 years ago.
Before patriarchy's sudden and mysterious onset, we humans regarded motherhood as our species' most important individual and collective function.
Mothers were thus properly recognized as our most important individuals.
Indeed the original creation story went something like "In the beginning was the Mother, and She gave birth..."
Human societies were therefore matrilinear, matrifocal and (most likely) matriarchal.
Though it is a truth maliciously concealed by U.S. archaeologists and anthropologists, their counterparts elsewhere freely acknowledge the socioeconomic systems of these early societies were definitively communistic: from each according to ability, to each according to need.
The people of these societies were also earth-respecting in a reflexive, bow-to-the-five-directions manner most of us today cannot imagine, much less to make our own.
Then cometh patriarchy. Its advocates as described in the Old Testament of the Bible were variously a "fiery wheel" or a "burning bush" or some creature from the sky who met Moses atop Mount Ararat and handed him a set of tablets inscribed with "divine" mandates that must be obeyed lest we all be nuked like Sodom and Gomorrah.
Here in this demonstration of force is obviously is the origin of the Christian and Islamic practice of "conversion" at swordspoint and by the burning-stake or impalement.
Significantly -- apart from the fact these primitive technologies of oppression have been replaced by total surveillance, electric-shock torture, drones, napalm and Willie Peter-- capitalism, fascism and Nazism employ patriarchy's traditional missionary practices even today.
Point being, what ScaryMary and stecoop01 are telling us about the "Christian agenda" is not only absolutely true but absolutely in keeping with the patriarchal legacy as manifest not just in all Abrahamic religion but in its capitalist, fascist and Nazi descendants.
Yet above all else, the core purpose of patriarchy was -- and remains -- upending the natural order, seen everywhere in Nature, in which the female is the epicenter of society.
Which leads us to the core patriarchal principle: that it's virtuous to murder the macrocosm of Mother Earth and despise her microcosmic form Woman because, as it says in a favorite Bible-thump hymn, "thar's a better land a-waitin in the sky Lord in the sky."
Patriarchy and its descendants are therefore expressions of a kill-the-planet death cult, a truth at last made undeniable by capitalism.
Wnich in turn -- though I do not believe in exterrestrial visitations -- makes me wonder just what coackroach universe those fiery wheels came from and whether their sowing of the deadly poison seeds of patriarchy was the ultimate (original) form of the smallpox-infested blankets my European ancestors gave my First Nations ancestors.
That's right: trash the planet enough -- as we are in fact doing -- it becomes cockroach heaven, perfect even for such highly-advanced intergalactic cockroaches (we hope) don't exist.
(Aside to ScaryMary: I have my own scars -- the reason "family" for me is a synonym for hatefulness, brutality and betrayal. But at least I am fortunate in the sense those scars are only on my psyche and hence remain hidden...unless I dare reveal them, a calculated risk I almost invariably regret having taken.)
As I have said so many times before, the one flaw in Mr. Hartmann's otherwise excellent reporting is his failure to recognize that capitalism is in fact the societal equivalent of cancer.
This means -- exactly as the last 70 years of history prove beyond rational argument -- capitalism is a malignancy. And like all other malignancies, it cannot be rendered benign.
A second, equally important lesson is that no matter how strict the regulatory restrictions by which we attempt to neutralize capitalism's deadly toxicity, it will always revert to its original malignant form. This means it will eventually kill its host.
Hence -- since we the people are capitalism's host -- it is literally our species' terminal illness. Either we find a cure -- which seems increasingly impossible -- or we perish.
But the ultimate lesson of this most dreadful epoch is that democracy -- which we fervently believed was the one sure antidote for the toxins of tyranny -- has turned out to be no cure at all.
In fact it is the antihesis of a cure. It is via what we call "democracy" -- verbal shorthand for presumably representative government elected by presumably universal suffrage -- that capitalism has conquered the world.
It turned the United States into its puppet realm at least 120 years ago.
Since then it has triumphed even in the two nations wherein it was thought to be permanently defeated: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China. Though capitalism's co-opting of Communism in the latter may be a colossal deception facilitated by the principles of Sun Tzu, as I said here on 18 March 2015: http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2015/03/lessons-china-about-fighting-oligarchs
What then empowers capitalism's success?
What is the essence of its deadly seductiveness?
Capitalism's core dynamic is the transformation of the Absolute Evil of total moral imbecility -- the mindset of a serial killer -- into apparent goodness.
Stripped of its camouflage, capitalism is the vileness and venom of infinite greed and infinite selfishness hidden by the perfume of false abundance and cloaked in the brightly compelling fashions of ecocidal acquisitiveness.
It is, in fact, the secular proof of a core Christian dogma I as a pagan agnostic instinctively reject -- original sin, the notion we are a species accursed and damned.
But if indeed we are not accursed and damned, why is there still such a thing as capitalism, and why is it thriving?
Deleted here and included elsewhere.
To answer your questions in post 1, Alice, the employers probably know if you're on birth control if you're using employer-based insurance to pay for it.
And Hobby Lobby never said their employees couldn't be on birth control. They only said that they (the employers) shouldn't be forced to provide it via government-mandated employer-based health insurance.
Think of something that you find morally wrong or repulsive. (Gay conversion therapy, perhaps?) Now imagine if you were forced to provide that to people who work for you. Would you fire the people who work for you, rather than be forced to subsidize something you hated so much?
But, before it got to that point, wouldn't you sue for a change in the law?
Loren Bliss and Aliceinwonderland ~ Unfortunately, I agree with you both. However, even under a democratic socialistic structure, Fascism could still rear its ugly head. Do either of you have any suggestions on how to keep "the means of production" in check? Personally, I think it is the lure of easy money obtained from fossil fuels that is perverting every aspect of our economy and body politic. Please, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
To Alice re: Thom. Undoubtedly you're correct, as you have far more extensive contact with Mr. Hartmann's work than I do. (Apart from a weather-forecast receiver, I no longer even have a working radio -- a deficiency I keep forgetting to remedy.)
And I apologize to Mr. Hartmann if my criticism is therefore too harsh. He is, as I cannot fail to acknowledge, a superb reporter.
But that does not lessen my exasperation that those who obviously know the whole story -- not just Mr. Hartmann but for example Messers. Krugman and Reich -- steadfastly cling to the nonsensical belief capitalism can be reformed...or at least dare not say otherwise lest they be silenced.
Meanwhile, our circumstances have become undeniable. Either we eliminate capitalism, or it eliminates us.
Yes Multi national Corps - Wall St Banks own - run America . They disrespect American families. They write our laws they ' bribe' our so called Representives . They sneak, lie, buy elections, misinform voters ( with Fox Rush & Drudge's help ) I fear its too late for many of us. I'm a 72 year old widow ( caretaker ) on low income due to my husbands hard won pension being slashed when his plant closed down. He worked 10 hr days.. all the way up to Plant Supt .. Still got screwed. I worked too What difference did it make that we saved and worked ? None
Reply to #4- Loren, I hope you will forgive me for defending Thom yet again… BUT I have heard him make reference to “cancer-stage capitalism” more times than I can count.
That said, I’m not sure Thom’s quite as convinced as you or I that capitalism is bad news, and that it needs to go bye-bye. He may still be clinging to the hope, or assumption, that capitalism can be regulated and kept in its place. My problem with that line of reasoning is that politicians cannot be counted on to do the regulating with the consistency and strict standards this would necessitate. Therefore my position is that it should be scrapped altogether.
It's back to the drawing board for humanity, or perish!