This federal holiday commemorates America’s Declaration of Independence, which in our minds is part of the American Revolution. Isn’t it? So, I wonder. Should we on that day not think about how unfinished that revolution for liberty and common good is, when we are practically enslaved by money lords? And shouldn’t we, instead of playing with warlike fireworks, discuss with our friends and families how to build powerful bottom-up democracy and make possible a Good Life for All? Just a thought I shared.
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(no weekend videos post this weekend – I had no time for it; instead a little write of an important thought)
The option to think about is not merely having the ultra-rich “pay their fair share” in taxes by raising the marginal tax rate to a measly 70% or such while letting them continue to be an elevated ruling class – much like the medieval aristocrats – based on hoarded wealth. Rather we need to think about using taxes to peacefully (no guns or guillotines) dethrone the rich ruling class by simply placing a cap on wealth and income inequality. It’s just like rules in a sports game. Each football and baseball field has limits, a border, an outer line the players can’t cross to seek paths to victory elsewhere. A boxing ring has it’s border the boxers can’t cross. When they do, they lose.
That’s the principle we must apply to our steep economic pyramid that forms a dung heap society of enormous precariousness, anxiety, poverty, excessive hoarded wealth, and widespread suffering. Our current pyramid actually has standing on top of it a thin spire of the super-rich which goes miles high into sky while far below them there is a very broad base of countless people who are condemned to have more debt than assets, a negative net value, and be stuck in a poverty trap created by this system.
When someone manages to lift themselves up “by their bootstraps” it just means someone else sinks down into the poor base as long as the shape of this pyramid stays the same. We need to flatten it, lowering the top and elevating the bottom (with means like universal basic income and gradual transfer of corporate stocks into public funds (Universal Basic Dividend) securing us all from poverty), just like a sports field is properly shaped, so that there are no lords and serfs; so that people can play with merit pay and compete as they please if they want (or not if it doesn’t please them), while living in a calm, safe, and stable system that gives us a Good Life for All.
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Note: No video weekend today because I am utterly sick this weekend and had a tough week. So, here is a little article I drafted some time ago:
A weird but not uncommon mentality flaw (typically boosted and imposed by those in power) is: loving and admiring the rich, and despising the poor. This society warp has been around for some time. Even Jesus complained about it according to the Bible, making it pretty long ago by now. This is so badly wrong. We humans should always care about ALL humans (or even beyond!). And the poor are never poor by their own design but by the design from the rich. (And the rich have always (mis-)used religion to oppress the poor and protect their own selfish interests.
It’s ironic when people claim hat it is in fact very difficult for a rich person to live a virtuous life. It is actually much much easier for rich people to live virtuous lives, if they only tried. They cpulf gove away so much stolen wealth or even use it to set up stabilizing institutions. But they never do. I still have to meet one who does; hence Jesus’ promise that the rich will never go to heaven.
There is a nice comment I came across online (on dailykos, which is a platform I rarely look into because it so so DNC-allied; in other words allied with a corrupt elite; blasting Sanders in 2016 and 2020… still, sometimes (very rarely) good folks show up there). Here is the quote:
Jesus was asked by a virtuous rich man what ELSE he could do as he obeyed all the commandments. Jesus told the man the only thing the man needed to do was to sell everything he had and give it to the poor and then, “…come and follow me…” When the rich man refused to give up his riches, Jesus watched the man walk away in tears because the man was so tied to his comforts he could not give them up. Then Jesus turned to the crowd and commented, “Truly, it is harder for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle….” (Matthew 19:16-25).
Yes the next passage (Matt 19:26) is about Jesus’ apostles being astonished when he said that, and his comment that “with God all things are possible…” but again you have to understand it in the context of the times ~ and actually our times as well.
There is a mistaken belief that if you are rich than somehow God loves you more than poor people. This is something the rich hold over others’ heads with all three of these religions in spite of the very strict and quite clear mandate and morals that all say “You SHARE.”
I suspect the man referred to nowadays as Jesus having been one of history’s greatest grassroots activists for solidarity and societal justice, quickly executed by the criminal lords, and then repainted by wannabe lords (preachers / church masters) in alignment with the already existing lords into an alleged promoter for a god and angels and an afterlife. Real Christians would fight for democracy and a no rich and no poor egalitarian society. But where are they nowadays? Most supposed Christians now align themselves with the Hell on Earth power and wealth pyramid, making them Anti-Christians actually. So sad.
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Request: Please share with others. I, for example, can no longer share on Facebook, having been locked out of my account.
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(Note: the Video Weekends are currently stalled because of my relocation — in the worst case this blog may pause for some weeks while I lack both time and Internet access)
WARNING: This can be painful. It might help young (even so-called ‘middle-aged’) people finally grow up inside. But it tends to come with pain. Unlike my fellow human beings, I got to this stage of revelation in my infancy, a condition that always made my fellow humans strike me as some kind of dim-witted semi-sentient alien creatures on whose planet I had unfortunately been dropped somehow. When you get to this stage of awareness (and there is one realization-stage even beyond that *sigh*, one that this frankly imperfectly insightful man in the shared video below has not yet reached) it becomes impossible to glorify or even accept commonly promoted goals and deifications of “meritocratic” competition, rich ruling classes, allegedly “free” markets, oh-so-successful big business “thought leaders”, warmongering jingoism, and similar blind idiocies. It is our lives that really count, both our own and all the other lives in the world, lives infinitesimally short and usually very painful at least towards their ends (if not throughout as they are increasingly becoming to more and more of us human beings despite human domination). To not prepare for the end phase (or ideally even consider preventing it, which would be our ultimate ascension) — not just for oneself but for all of us — and to even artificially make life terrible at younger stages through things like exploitation, abuse, solidarity replaced with excessive competition, and the artificially created poverty; is just utterly insane.
It’s also a main reason why so many people seek refuge in religions who promise eternal lives of some kind or another — but without any evidence. Without any evidence whatsoever. How is that different from putting blinders on? (and may I remind you that Buddha, Jesus, and at least partially Muhammad, as far as I have seen, fought for social justice, solidarity, and compassion?)
Well, below is this video you have been warned about. I can easily imagine folks managing not to really get its message (thanks to their blinders and inner mental walls), but if you do, if you try hard enough, you may come to view our world through new eyes and grasp the insanity of our established and institutionalized cultures and customs, and the huge looming vacuum of stuff we should do, should have done, but haven’t. I am reluctant to share it because of the potential pain and the potential mind-blocks raised against grasping the understanding that takes the blinders off. Still… if one person does have the click happen in his or her brain, it may lead to some reasonable actions. So, with hesitance, here it is:
A 97-Year-Old Philosopher Faces His Own Death ~ The Atlantic (Jan 14, 2020)
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To make it short but precise and easy to read, I split this article into a sequence of short pieces describing how things work and what happened and how the stock market could be repaired to work for all of us rather than constantly rob most of us:
1. Stock Market
Capitalism was accepted as an improvement from feudalism. Big things would no longer depend on stiff lords born at the top society’s hierarchy but could instead be started by anyone, if it could be financed. However, people born rich might not finance it. Big money lenders might neither. Nor governments if they even had money to spend. Stock markets were invented as a kind of crowd funding in a capitalist market, not as free benign donations but potentially profitable investments by which investors could own a share of the business they co-founded. Theoretically making us all profit earning members of the economy if we could all manage to buy shares. In reality, however, only rich and well off people can, while the rest of us must toil and struggle to survive in underpaid labor, with neither time nor money to dive into the stock market which soon became a kind of casino for the upper class, the shares of companies usually called stocks rather than casino chips.
For others short on time, here is another weekly share of cool videos dealing with our issues. Main theme: Now, after another pointless election switching back and forth between two corrupt parties, how can we make real change happen, aiming at a good life for us all.
Stars and channels: Movement for a People’s Party (esp. Nick Brana), The Jimmy Dore Show (also Nick Brana), Second Thought, Chris Hedges (UNM, Goethe), Second Thought, Richard Wolff (Democracy At Work AND other channels), Paul Morrin, The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow, AJ+, Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Thom Hartmann Program, The Real News Network.
Topics:
TRUMP LOST! Now What? (Answer: Build a People’s Movement & Party)
Skewed American Work/Life Balance
Chris Hedges on Our Destructive Culture Made for Profit
If you lack time to discover many top level meaningful videos about major events, problems, and solutions, here is a weekly share for you to check and share onward. Major issues: Corona Crisis; Evictions; Affordable Housing; Liberty, Democracy, and Free Press; Workplace Tyranny; UBI to deal with an Unreliable Economy; and the growing People’s Party for highly needed change.
Stars and channels: Noam Chomsky, Nick Brana, Richard Wolff,
Topics:
Corona Crisis Evictions
Affordable Housing
Giving Up Liberty by Giving Up Free Press and Investigative Journalism
System Involved in Keeping us Physically and Mentally Healthy
Julian Assange’s Judge is a Deep State Mafia Monster
Oligarchic Dictatorship Eliminating Journalism
The Legal System Abuse & Banning of Journalism
Marianne Williamson and Jimmy Dore Discussing the People, System, and Mentality
A Good Noam Chomsky Conversation from 2015
Economic Update: More Years of Labor Crisis
Robert Reich: UBI Required by Our Unreliable Economy
Justice Mentality (and Placating Religions)
Noam Chomsky on Workplace Tyranny (short but sharp comment)
A Worker-Friendly CEO & the Concept of an Economy & Mindset that Works for us All (incl. UBI)
People’s Party: Good Questions Answers from Nick Brana (National Call)
Best subscribe and share with others, so the efforts I make can serve enough people. (I lack time for social media) Thanks. 🙂
1. Corona Crisis Evictions
Sad sample of police earning generous salaries (from our taxes) evicting corona-crisis-empoverished people from their homes during a pandemic (not just harming victims but boosting the pandemic wave that way even more). (Unfortunately, the rest of the video loses quality. If only Jimmy would use the f-word less (like not calling the victims fucking people) and would learn proper English grammar (“should have done” not “should have did”)).
Eviction Crisis While Dems & Republicans Do Political Theater! ~ The Jimmy Dore Show (Sep 5, 2020)
David Graeber — from the Occupy Wall Street movement, reputed to have coined and promoted the statement “We are the 99%”, and shared here on Beanstock’s World a bunch of times with his astounding insights — has died 10 days ago at age 59. Yes, only 59(!) from “internal bleeding”. Lethal internal bleeding at such a young age and without a bullet or knife stab or such smells to me a lot like COVID-19, to be honest. Oddly, an issues not mentioned anywhere on the main media (not even on Wikipedia). Here, btw, is an article digging into the broad spectrum of coronavirus symptoms: The Great Invader: How COVID Attacks Every Organ
Neat videos: First, a great video on what human life is meant to be (egalitarian and natural!). Next, billionaires are systemically evil. And lots more on: the money aristocracy, awareness, state coups, “Dem” debates, “Dem” candidates (Bernie vs Warren, Tulsi vs DNC, Biden BS), billionaires vs free speech, separating anger from action to make change, our political choice between fascism and a better world, and, and, and, incl. some humor. 🙂
Stars & channels: Christopher Ryan, Jimmy Dore, The Grayzone, The Real News Network, Democracy Now!, Abby Martin (Empire Files), The Michael Brooks Show, Hard Lens Media, Krystal Ball (The Hill), Secular Talk, Yanis Varoufakis, NonCompete, and a bunch more…
There is a reason why in my critique of our abusive current system and promotion of a Good Life for All (incl. No Rich and No Poor but universal prosperity) system I regularly point at how our ancestors lived before resources-hoarding from agriculture and abusive large-population hierarchies ruined human life having us all born into a man-made hell to fizzle out our lives in:
How We Are Being “Civilized To Death” w/Christopher Ryan ~ The Jimmy Dore Show
Comments:
As far as our rapidly changing world goes, let’s not forget that those of us who grew up in the fifties, sixties, or possibly even seventies, grew up with the expectation of picking a profession, contributing to society in this profession throughout our working lives (stable working lives!!!), enjoy hobbies, maybe build or buy a home, and then retire in comfort for the last slice of our lives. But job security went away, retirement security went away. Even healthcare and education did. All was taken by the super rich to make themselves even richer. People like me have been crushed out of their jobs AND PROFESSIONS over and over and over again, losing all our lives savings every time, and seeing ahead of us a bleak future of a last phase of life in utter poverty and helplessness.
As far as trying to return to where we came from goes, there isn’t only hunting and fishing (and other hobbies) that resemble H&G life, there are also other popular activities: parties, sports, and VACATIONS… socializing with other people, traveling around to see nature or villages or town and ruins never seen before. Vacations that aren’t staycations (that poor people like me are often limited to, if in fact we aren’t busy hunting for a new job) do indeed resemble the roaming H&G life! Travel-vacations are such a high mark in people’s lives and so incredibly relaxing and recharging for some reason, aren’t they?
Our great ape relatives: Chimps resemble capitalism or (with the lack of hoardable resources) a simpler form of unequal authoritarianism. Bonobos (an evolutionary recent split from chimps) resemble the “Love not War” Hippie movement or communes that was perhaps sparked to no small extent by the development of birth control. We humans seem to have both instinctual MOs built in.
And kudos for bringing up the vastly important topic so generally avoided: our dying phase that our greed-driven capitalist society is not at all prepared to handle with any form of dignity. An issue we must discuss because it is critical and can also help us tie ourselves together and dismiss the silly distractions with which we are lambasted daily by the establishment.
In a recent video, Kim Iversen takes up the simple fact I have been writing about for years that immigrants and migrants without official papers permitting their entry and/or stay in this country can be easily prevented from coming and staying by enforcing the law that forbids employers to employ them. Going beyond my peaceful prevention recommendation, she actually takes it to the next level of making the enforcement more drastic and quick and thorough to solve the undocumented immigrant “problem” (that we DON’T HAVE, it’s a red herring people, a drop in the bucket compared to the problems caused by the plutocracy!). She then gets into some of the ripples of the ripple effect this would have. Interesting to mull over and think beyond to get a better idea of the bigger picture:
Beanstock's World 