Capitalism 4.0

"In a potted history that is admirably broad in its reach but annoyingly corny in its nomenclature, Mr Kaletsky describes capitalism’s evolution over the past 200 years, particularly the changing role of government. The managed economies of Capitalism 2.0 were based on a fundamental faith in governments’ ability to solve economic problems. Version 3.0, after the 1970s, romanticised markets and distrusted government. Within each of these broad categories, Mr Kaletsky describes the mini-shifts, Capitalism 2.1, 2.2, etc." http://www.economist.com/node/16536988

Achieving our Country by Richard Rorty

"The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time". This is great little book that every American should have read in high school (takes some mental maturity), by one of Americas greatest philosophers--and essential for understanding Obama's pragmatism and philosophy of hope." Is there any doubt American (and the world) has fallen into (or been driven by) corporate feudalism?

 

The quote above is from Walt Whitman, who understood "God" as the historical-poetic process, and America as "the greatest poem."

 John Dewey's principle problem of (for) America was "institutionalized selfishness"--boy did he nail it!

"Who would be the greatest poet must attract his own land, body and soul to himself and hang on its neck with incomparable love and plunge his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits." W. Whitman 26

‎"The Right thinks that our country already has a moral identity, and hopes to keep that identity intact. It fears economic and political change, and therefore easily becomes the pawn of the rich and powerful--the people whose selfish interests are served by forestalling such change." R. Rorty

‎"A more highly socialized democracy is the only practical substitute on the part of convinced democrats for an excessively individualized democracy". p48 Herbert Crowly's "The Promise of American Life". (46)

"To step into the world that some of these leftists inhabit [I'm thinking of Chris Hedges], is to move out of a world in which the citizens of the world can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce." Richard Rorty in "Achieving our Country".96

 

"The abstract best should not be the enemy of the better" R. Rorty 105

"...literature will not succeed in resisting philosophy [the endless analysis of platonic universals] unless literary critics think of it as having nothing to do with eternity, knowledge, or stability [fundamentalisms] and everything to do with futurity and hope--with taking the world by the throat and insisting that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined." 138

 

 

 

Appropriate for OWS, and from Marx before Marxism and dogma: "Every individual must admit to himself that he has no precise idea about what ought to happen. However, this very defect turns to the advantage of the new movement, for it means that we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old"..."The philosopher's role was like that of a priest: 'What the world needed above all is a confession, and nothing more than that. To obtain forgiveness for its sins, mankind need only to declare them for what they are."

Empire of Liberty by Gordon Wood 2009

"Many of the Revolutionary leaders were proto-Unitarians, denying miracles and the divinity of Jesus.  Even puritanical John Adams thought that the argument for Christ's divinity was an 'awful blashphemy' in this new enlightened age." 577

According to Jefferson, who expressed a hatred of organized religion unequaled among the Founders, "The Trinity was nothing but 'Abracadabra' and 'hocus-pocus...so incomprehensible to the human mind that no candid man can say he has any idea of it'"

Off Center: The Prepublcian Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy by Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson

An old lawyers adage: "If the facts are against you, argue the law; if the law is  against you argue the facts; if both the facts and the law are against you, change the subject." 100

the passive-aggressive strategy: do nothing when a major issue needs addressing.

The Paronoid Style of American Politics by Richard Hofstadter

"Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds.  Today this fact is most evident on the extreme right wing, which has shown, particularly in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.  Behind such movements there is a style of mind that has a long and varied history.  I call it the paranoid style..." 3

"The sins of these enemies of Christ, and Christians, are of numbers and degrees which mock account and description.  All that the malice and atheism of the Dragon, the cruelty and rapacity of the Beast, and the fraud and deceit of the false Prophet, can generate, or accomplish, swell the list.  No personal or national interest of man has been uninvaded; no impious sentiment, or action, against God has been spared...Shall we, my brethren, become partakers of these sins?  Shall we introduce them into our government, our schools, our families?  Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire, the dragons of Marat; or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminate? (Jedidiah Morse, 1789)

The basic elements of contemporary right wing thought: first: "...conspiracy,  running over more than a decade, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt's New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism....many would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of "The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income tax amendment to the constitution in 1913."
Second: "top government officialdom has been infiltrated by Communists [or socialists]" and third: "the country is infused with a network of communist agents [socialists, liberals], just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media are engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans." 26-27

Economics for the Rest of US: Debunking the Science that makes life dismal by Moshe Adler

..according to conventional economic theory, what's good for the rich and powerful is good for "the economy." XV