Truthful News Weekend 2024-04-20 *** – (9 videos plus comments)

Posted on by Dirk Droll

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Summary: Several very good insight videos found, mostly late in the week. The top videos: big problems in America, and tips how to make great changes (especially build a big strong movement).

Stars and channels: Democracy At Work (Harriet Fraad & Richard Wolff), Second Thought (JT Chapman), Sabby Sabs, DW News, Low Income Relief

Topics:

  1. UN Unhappiness Report on USA (and more US infos!) ***
  2. Ask Prof Wolff – April 8, 2024 (good insights!) **
  3. Things We Must Do to Fix Our Human World **/***
  4. Economic Update: 2024-04-15
  5. Multipolar World, China’s Support of People, Movement Needed in US
  6. Kindergarten in the Retirement Home (short)
  7. Growing Fake News: Israel-Iran Example
  8. ACP Ending Soon: Things We Can Do *
  9. Finding Cheaper Foods

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1. UN Unhappiness Report on USA (and more US infos!) ***

I highly suggest listening to this episode! An amazing countries-research made by the UN showed the USA being horrible. Harriet Fraad then gives further details on our problems and needs, and at the end of the video that finally Americans are uniting (mostly in unions) to fight back for decent lives. Her conclusion: “We need a union for all of us that will change the US and bring our happiness back, our life satisfaction, and rescue us from falling further.”

Capitalism Hits Home: The United Nation World Happiness Report ~ Democracy At Work (Harriet Fraad – Apr 19, 2024)

I wrote down the major details mentioned in this episode, a long list:

  • People have to feel safe to feel happy. We have to feel not attacked, feel connected versus lonely, have incomes to cover our basic needs, not be hit with big corruption. When made so unhappy, do we even wish to live long anymore? Do we still trust in our future? When the UN checked many countries, the USA people turned out very unhappy nowadays. The USA is not the pride and dream country anymore, and having high violence it is the singular one among the developed nations. Most of us no longer perceive our government as benevolent and trustworthy. Needed is a goal of government for personal happiness and social connection – but this is mostly not believed here anymore as existing while still at least partly believed (and partly true) in other countries.
  • In our country healthcare workers are turned into low income servers for the profiteering rich (away from actual health help), hospitals controlled by big profiteering corporations (away from affordable and decent healthcare).
  • Most women nowadays have to work for income besides raising children, and most of them are no longer married. Childcare has become a huge problem. One in four of our children (supposedly) go hungry, also no maternity-leave given in the US (nearly the only country on Earth this way, the only big country this way).
  • More homeless people now in the USA than in its entire history.
  • Also very few positive social connections.
  • Our wealth definitely isn’t going for the people who take care of us (instead it goes to rich money lords). In contrast, Scandinavian countries give plenty of free help for its people (including seniors!) and focuses on a much more fair wealth distribution.
  • Private money here is terribly allowed in elections, making our rich robber billionaires take over our government(s). (less officially allowed in Europe, but I – on Beanstock’s World – may add that in Germany elected politicians can get “side employment” from rich gangsters; so not perfect elsewhere either)
  • Capitalist corruption has our infrastructure much reduced, accidents also no longer properly avoided by corporations (examples given: ships, Boeing planes).
  • Constant mass murders by men who most seriously were hurt by outsourcing of strong union jobs and other unemployments and their demotion in the families.
  • Addiction, suicide, and overdoses are increasing.
  • Lots of capitalist corruption.
  • We need personal happiness and social connection! We always must assess policies if they establish happiness or human misery.

Comments from listeners:

  • If people/the workers aren’t treated like human beings, how can they be expected to act? Having to urinate in a bottle doesn’t sound like a humane solution for what all people must do multiple times a day. We see the lashing out of violence and anger every day.
  • America has long since passed the golden age of capitalism. Welcome to the American Nightmare.
  • People must take back what was taken. The people united will never be defeated!
  • The U.S. is a corrupt autocratic plutocracy of the ultra rich 1% & their corporations.
  • Good topic Harriet. The only countervailing force that has effectively reigned in power and privilege and redistributed national wealth among the working class has been through solidarity, organized labor and militant unionization. Our permanent war economy serves the interests of oligarchical predatory capitalism, not democracy. What exploited citizens everywhere are contending with is the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. We can have democracy or the great concentration of wealth in the hands of a few but we can’t have both. This international conflagration will require the most massive organizational shift in the struggle between labor and capital since the New Deal, the French or Bolshevic revolution. If the working class can’t or won’t unite human civilization will be subjected to a boot stomping on our faces in perpetuity.
  • No matter how life sucks in the States, Americans won’t resort to communism over capitalism because they don’t know what communism is and they can’t be bothered to learn.

2. Ask Prof Wolff – April 8, 2024 (good insights!) **

A lot of details in ~50 minutes. If you lack time for this, you can read here my written summary of this episode’s elements:

  • (1) Marx having researched Shakespeare’s works to figure out if capitalism had begun to crumble away like feudalism had been in Shakespeare’s life, this then possibly pointing when and how socialism could start just like capitalism had replaced feudalism.
  • (2) Interesting distinction between ESOPs (owned by the workers) and COOPs (run by the workers). (ESOP = “Employee Stock Ownership Plan”, COOP = “cooperative, co-operative, co-op, or coop, and work cooperatives”) — Conclusion: Workers who may invest into the company they work in can lack the management skills how to run the company, how to perform the CEO, CFO, CIO roles (managers), thus only resulting in an ESOP. And co-ops are not necessarily always owned by the workers that run it.
  • (3) Companies building up buyer-demands and raising prices for highest possible profits for the rich owners. As he concluded: “profiting a few at the expense of the many”.
  • (4) The poverty and overwork by which so many of us are hit doesn’t let us figure out (and run) a life we would like. Thus our common individualism talks are only talks.
  • (5) Collective solidarity (often referred only to socialism) also appears a little in capitalist societies. Individualism gets run not only in capitalism but also in socialism where solidarity is super important. So not either-or; just different degrees and ways.
  • (6) The reason capitalism took over the whole Earth (with extreme colonialism from it) comes from capitalism’s whole structure being competitive struggle.
  • (7) Capitalism has nothing to do with races or ethnicity. It spread global. (e.g.: China competing with the US)
  • (8) Positive attributes of capitalism: Like any system, capitalism has its positives and negatives. Considered positive: push for technological growth.
  • (9) The US, huge top after WW2, has been shrinking, especially in the last two decades. Not the top anymore. And for an improving Earth we should switch into not wanting a country to be a ‘top dog’.

Ask Prof Wolff – April 8, 2024 ~ Democracy At Work (Apr 8, 2024)

Side Note: In games the term “co-op” refers to any game where two or more human players team up for a common goal. Meanwhile “multiplayer” refers to the game mode where players play together, either working together or against each other (traditionally mostly the latter I think).

3. Things We Must Do to Fix Our Human World **/***

JT Chapman finally made an episode focusing on this, and it is very worth to listen to. If your time is short, start near the end at 11:32 where the good tips are given: Instead of waiting for special leaders, we all need to move forward, unite with others, share insights and begin actions together (“Agitate, Educate, and Organize”). There is no single savior. We are all responsible (and by standing up and uniting we actually bring back the healthy humanity we have lost). By beginning here and there and then joining, we can do what we must do, namely mass mobilization and political organization. And when JT Chapman mentions the aim for a single banner, let me here on Beanstock’s World add that I think our most uniting and advancing single banner is Love for All and insisting on a Good Life for All.

“Yeah Capitalism Is Bad…But What Can We Do?” ~ Second Thought (Apr 19, 2024)

Comments from listeners:

  • This is your best video yet. I know things are horrible but this gives me a lot of hope.
  • Workers of all countries unite!!
  • Normalize your local co-ops and labor unions. Workers make the world run, workers should run the world.🇺🇸☭🇨🇦
  • Human nature is malleable, not fixed. Humans can be indoctrinated to believe in horrific ideas and to commit atrocities— or they can be taught to be empathetic, kind, cooperative, and to strive for improvement in all things (including themselves).
  • “To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism, is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough.” – Andrew Collier
  • Many people might just want to hang on to whatever job they have got …BUT…. if you really want a better world then it has to be made financially worthwhile for people to SHARE the jobs we would agree we NEED to have done and work much less. At least 70% of jobs have no real value and that’s really the problem. Too many people work FOR money but not because they are doing something we NEED.
  • I always say “If greed is human nature then we would have been extinct 40,000 years ago.

Another comment especially useful for the propagandized Americans:

  • Socialism isn’t an alternative to capitalism. The idea was never about replacing one with the other, to make a functionality change. Capitalism is a step in human history that had (very tiny few) merits, one being productivity making us leave the scarcity paradigm behind. But at what cost? A structure hand made to benefit one class above the other, that is flawed on its root, that needs to produce war, crisis, concentration of wealth, corruption to kill competition, exploit more and more to simply exist. So communism is the scientific study of this step in human history, and socialism is a transitionary step to OVERCOME capitalism and take a new step further. It was never about being an alternative, an option, a model. Socialism never failed. Socialism never failed. Socialism was DEFEATED. It was militarily, politically and socially defeated thanks to: the death and murder of socialist leaderships, economic embargoes, counter intelligence manipulating inner people in strategic places, consorting with local bourgeoisie, and tons and tons of anticommunism propaganda. They only needed to pervert a very few and brainwash the masses. — So we need to abandon this false idea that socialism failed. The worst socialism is better than the best capitalism, for the basis of the working class. capitalism works? yeah, for sure. but to whom?

4. Economic Update: 2024-04-15

First half: 1.) US War-Industry (a.k.a. Military-Industrial Complex) getting huge profits from American people’s taxes while gifting war weapons to Ukraine and Israel to stay in war. 2.) From China come the cheapest imports of Electric Vehicles except into the US where import-tariff gets used to protect American rich owner’s large corporations from Chinese competition. 3.) At 12:12 an imaginable strategy for getting unions created via threatening a switch into co-op if employers skip away, plus a phenomenal outcome of a union vote. Second half: An interview about new union developments with a little mentioned hope for going further up in our societal development.

Economic Update: A Sea Change In US Labor’s Militancy ~ Democracy At Work (Apr 15, 2024)

5. Multipolar World, China’s Support of People, Movement Needed in US

I found this video getting kind of interesting at 6:13 where I make the sharing start here. Issues: China presented as a monster by our US politicians who lose their unlimited power over the entire Earth. But not only China growths out of America’s colonialism, and it does a lot more good things for its people than our country does for us (although left out scary things the Chinese government does to control its people, and which are beginning to happen in the US, too, *sigh*). Most of this coming soon after 6:13. At the end (38:17) a good remark is made that in the USA we need to form an organization that unites together all the specialized organizations for a better country/world/lives, so we then can finally make big positive changes by having enough of us pushing for the needed changes.

Why Is China THRIVING? w/Dr. Ken Hammond ~ Sabby Sabs (Apr 19, 2024)

6. Kindergarten in the Retirement Home (short)

Now experimented in the UK. The video is done rather stupidly, giving little details and starting them after half its duration. Anyway, it is good – and in this case finally attempted – to let the seniors and young children come together again like in ancient proper humanity tribes, or to some extent when families still developed well and stayed together rather than getting split up by our wage slavery system nowadays. After the tiny intro at the start you can for time save jump to where the tiny details finally appear (2:36).

British care home welcomes pensioners, children | Focus on Europe ~ DW News (Apr 14, 2024)

Comments from viewers:

  • Oh, such a beautiful story. The kids give life, joy, and a new beginning for the elderly.
  • This is basically what Italian grandparents and grandchildren experience everyday in Italy… Nowadays grandparents are the welfare of Italian family…while parents are at work the children learn most stuff from school and them. This is a help create bond between generations and pass old knowledge to young.
  • Before industrialization and in most cultures, seniors were/are important for the community, including child care.
  • Can someone please explain to me why childcare services and pet care services are not at senior living communities??
    • Expense. It’s cheaper to just shove old people in a room and have a nurse stop by once an hour. A care home that isn’t awful is the exception not the rule. In the US we treat the elderly and sick terribly.
    • Skilled nursing care (Nursing home care) averages about $6K month. That can blow through most people’s savings and pensions very quickly. — Me adding: *Ponder*, didn’t I hear $8,000-12,000 per month recently?
  • In India even till last 10 years it was pretty common to live in joint households with your Dada Dadi(elders). As we blindly follow western culture from which we can learn a lot we lost the beautiful family setup to just individual greed… Bring Back the 90s!
    • Nowadays young people have to relocate to big cities to find a decent-paying job. And in big cities the cost of living is too high for an extended family to be in one big apartment. — Me adding: And with the constant worker layoffs and crumblings of (usually small) companies since the 90s or so, we have to relocate again every few years (often every year as a teacher until one gives up that career!).

Another comment hint:

  • Each group mutually benefits the others. I have previously read about experiments in other countries where college students are domiciled with elderly residents with great success. — Note from me: That would be great for me!

7. Growing Fake News: Israel-Iran Example

A 4 minutes short fact check from Germany.

Fact check: Iran vs. Israel fakes | DW News ~ (Apr 16, 2024)

8. ACP Ending Soon: Things We Can Do *

ACP Ending Soon: What You Must Do NOW To Get a New Discount ~ Low Income Relief (Apr 20, 2024)

9. Finding Cheaper Foods

EBT Cheat Sheet: 7 Insider Tips to Shop Smarter ~ Low Income Relief 9Apr 16, 2024)

Honorable Mentions:

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And don’t forget to regularly look into The Revolution Continues for good reads.

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