Zinn on the movement and new parties

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Howard Zinn Pt5 : In the next ten years conditions for new parties may develop

Transcript (no longer works)

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Zinn: Send a message to Obama + A reinvigorated labor movement needed for social upheaval

Zinn on class in America (updated)

6 thoughts on “Zinn on the movement and new parties

  1. Pingback: Zinn on investigating 9/11 « Dandelion Salad

  2. Paulist militia NWO Jones conspiracy gun-nuts ? Kucinich pacifist vegans? That’ a hoot! Alex Jones has been exposing corruption on both sides of the false left/right paradigm for years.

    Still don’t believe in a New World Order? Try googling the term in see all the hudreds of mainstream news articles talking about it or listen to politicians like Gordon Brown mention it in their speeches. Quit engaging in congnitive dissonance and see what’s right in front of you. People like Ron Paul, Alex Jones and Dennis Kucinch are waking people up. Sorry if their belief in the Constitution warps your sense of what America is supposed to be.

    Last time I checked, there was a Second Amendment and it wasn’t for hunting. It was for protection against a tyrannical govenment which has been getting more tyrannical every election. Instead of demonizing Ron, Alex and Dennis like the so-called “liberals” and “conservatives”, you should be thanking them for raising awareness and getting people more politically involved. The only reason why they’re being attacked is because they could actually bring about real change in this country-change for the better which is what the powers that be do not want.

    • Glen Beck is Main Stream News? More like the vast ultra-right wing conspiracy.

      I voted for Kucinich. He likes Paul. I don’t much, aside from his anti-war position. Jones isn’t evil, just paranoid, imo.

      But gun-nuts like guns only because they like to kill things, not because they could possibly prevail against the Guard or even the FBI (Waco, Ruby Ridge, hello!).

      Say, ever seen a FEMA camp? Post tha pics (and cc Glen Beck, he’ll probably publish them on the ‘MSM’).

    • “false left/right paradigm”

      There’s nothing false about it, as long as it’s limited to one issue (e.g., economics), and not used to mean a conflation of all the issues (which shuts out anyone who doesn’t fit within two narrowly defined groups).

      Left/right economics means collectivist/individualist economics; since you can’t have either one without its opposite (both in practice and by definition — you can’t even make *sense* of one without the other), common sense tells us that a mixed economy is best. The only people claiming that the distinction is false are the elites on the Right — the “Haves” — who don’t want the “grubby commoners” on the Left — the “Have-Nots” — to take stock of their situation.

      “belief in the Constitution warps your sense of what America is supposed to be.”

      America is “supposed to be” whatever the living say it should be — not what the dead “founders” and “framers” thought it should be.

      “The earth belongs to the living.” –Jefferson

      The constitution is a conservative document by definition, as all governing charters are. It was designed to limit the power of the people over their own lives, and to protect the opulent minority against the dispossessed majority. Remember: we’re not all conservatives, and we don’t all want to be governed. Remember also: opulence is not inherently admirable, sometimes it is unjust and unworthy of defense.

      • Let me clarify the false left/right paradigm for you. We essentially have either a Democrat (left) or a Republican (right) in office. Both parties, while having some surface differences, have the same policies. These surface differences ( such as pro-choice/pro-life) do not effect the continuing major policies that advance the elite’s agenda. So we may think we’re changing things by voting out the Republican and bringing in the Democrat, we’re doing no such thing. I’d strongly recommend reading Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope for a better understanding of the false left/right paradigm. This quote sums it up best:

        “The chief problem of American political life for along time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international…(therefore) argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers…Instead the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.” (Tragedy and Hope: 1247-1248)

        I hate to say it, but unless we change the Constitution, that’s exactly how things are supposed to be. These “dead men” while definitely flawed, were also brilliant. It’s the rule of law and if you don’t have a rule of law, you have anarchy. If we do not like the Constitution, there’s ways to change that (calling a Constitutionaly Convention is one of those avenues we can take, which many states have already started to do). The Constitution was not created “to limit the power of the people over their own lives”, but to limit the power of government in their lives. It clearly defined the federal govenment’s powers and those not clearly defined were to be left to the states.

        You are right about one thing: the Constitution was created to “protect the opulent minority against the dispossessed majority” which sadly, it has failed to do because of the special interests in this country. I think that is something we should all be concerned about whether you’re a conservative (which I am not) or a liberal (which I am not as well).

  3. It’s a beautiful vision, one which ‘progressives’ have been waiting for a long time.

    Who is gonna run in such a party, Nader when he’s 92? A coalition of Paulist militia NWO Jones conspiracy gun-nuts and Kucinich pacifist vegans?

    The ‘conservatives’ hold sway here, they created through some intoxicating elixir of televangelism, patriotic aggressive militaristic hostility, a genuine hatred of all things ‘liberal’ rational or not, and an incomprehensible nostalgia for reagan.

    Hard as the progressives fight for a party that makes sense, it seems it can’t happen, the switch was made, there is an addiction to a dark ideology here that is too entrenched to fix. The population will likely ride this down to its complete demise.

    Does demise inspire enlightened government? Doubtful. We may need to come to terms with the fact that the US culture is simply a sick society, one which is armed to the teeth, and dangerous to the world whether militaristically, or as we see, economically.

    It had huge gifts to offer, once, like Jazz, Jimi Hendrix, Abstract Expressionism, Alexander Calder, Buckminster Fuller, PCs and the internet. Its great political contributions were inspired not by some grand vision of society, but by the profound inequities bred into its beginnings: The Bill of Rights, Dr. King, Susan B. Anthony, some would say Lincoln.

    But those progressive political, cultural and innovative days are behind us. All we seem able to export now is economic collapse, militaristic terror, FOX Noise, consumerism and John Hagee.

    Let us recognize the hopelessness of our political plight, and use whatever ridiculous approximation of progressivism the darkest decades of ‘conservatives’ may have inspired, to de-militarize, withdraw forces behind our borders, close down our bases, and acknowledge humbly the end of our empire as we nurse self inflicted wounds born of our arrogance.

    If we can emerge from the disaster of the raygun era as an inconsequential, responsible republic with enough maturity to control our pollution, limit our consumption and offer people health care like any normal nation, that would be the best outcome, but it’s hardly a political ideal requiring the impossible party of progressives that apparently can never grow in this land deranged, daft ideologues.

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