Quote of the Day -- Humanist Edition

From The Word Lady @TheRealRynnstar Dec 12, 2020 "Forever wondering if I’m truly far left or if I’m just an empathetic person living in a late capitalist hellscape where I get called a commie for saying "hey maybe poor people don’t deserve to starve.'"

Sunday Reflections

God love 'em.

Or something.

Quote of the Day -- On Jesus

“Let’s remember, Jesus was a Jewish man of color, born homeless to an unwed teenager, who spent his formative years as an illegal immigrant before returning to his home country to hang out with twelve men, prostitutes, and socially untouchable tax collectors while he taught a radical social doctrine of equality, love, and forgiveness that included paying taxes, free healthcare, and the sharing of resources within a community.”

--Quote from FB friend Diana Pleasant-Hughes' page

If Someone Like Trump Can Do It, This Guy Should, Too

It would be fantastic if Democrats would start running candidates like this guy and end up winning.


Links:

Meet Randy Bryce: The 'Iron Stache' coming for Paul Ryan's

Randy Bryce for Congress 2018

Democratic union ironworker Randy Bryce running 

against Ryan

Randy Bryce for Congress - Home | Facebook

Some Takeaways On the World's Happiest Nations Report

The world's happiest nations were announced today by the by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations.

World's happiest countries named

Takeaways?

--The US isn't the happiest

--The US isn't in the top 3

--The US isn't in the top 5

--The US isn't even in the top 10

--The US is in the 13th position

Here's what I love.

The top ten "happiest nations"?

Socialist.

All Socialist.

Every one.

Here's another kicker. Another takeaway. Frankly, it's one more slam on us, the US.

Israel ranks higher in happiness than the US.

Israel.

Surrounded by their enemies. Set upon and attacked, not infrequently, by Palestinians yet they have a higher happiness rating than we do here in the United States.


So, America.  Could we learn some things here?

Please?

Soon as possible?

Here's one:  The lady was right.

We are #Strongertogether.

Links:

World Happiness Report Update 2016

World Happiness Report - Wikipedia

America Has the Worst Vacation Policies 

Of Any Developed Country

Once again, U.S. has most expensive, least effective health care

Americans are much, much more likely to be killed by guns than  people in other countries

Americans are paying more for slower Internet 

Way to go, America

Check out the latest ranking of all the nations of the world and who does--and who doesn't--come in at the top. This is precisely what Republican and Right Wing policies and legislators and government and governments get us.

In a global ranking of 'best countries,' the United States drops to No. 7

The top 6 nations? 

Socialist. 

 All Socialist. 

This is what working together gets them. 

A little from the article.

A new ranking of the world's “best countries” is out — and the results don’t look good for America.

Switzerland takes top nation honors, according to the second annual “Best Countries” ranking from U.S. News & World Report, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and global brand consultants BAV Consulting. Just behind the Swiss are Canada and Britain, second and third, respectively.

The United States ends up in the seventh spot, just edging out Australia but also lagging Germany, Japan and Sweden.

Get that. Our neighbors to the North, the Canadians, are number two in the world. I expect most Americans would no way expect that.

Not only are we ranked in the 7th spot but we dropped 3 spots from the previous list. We are only seen as the “most powerful.” Given the absolutely foolish and fiscally irresponsible amount we spend on military and what we call defense, we ought to be most powerful.

Bet better, America. You're falling behind. And it's not because you're not spending boodles of money. It's just that you're foolishly spending far too much of it on what we consider "defense" and health care.

Link:

US Falls in US News Best Countries Rankings

This Is It. Final Day

It's like he didn't even try...

What Democratic Socialism Is -- And Isn't

For all the uninformed out there and/or the Right Wingers and/or Republicans and/or just outright fearful people---

Another Historical Presidential Election

Just think of it.

Our last President, meaning our current one, the first black President of the United States.

Fantastic.

I wish I'd had the presence of mind a friend of mine had when he was first elected. He and his wife knew they wanted to be on hand for the acceptance speech in Chicago that November.

Now?

Now we're on the cusp of electing either the first woman President or the first Jewish, Democratic Socialist.

And some people say our best days are behind us. 

Bah.

Karl Marx --- And the Wall Street Journal?

There is what I think to be a pretty good, if brief and fairly light article in none other than Right Wing-owned, Rupert Murdoch's own Wall Street Journal, describing where America and Americans are today, financially and socially:

The Middle-Class Squeeze

Seeing it, I was pretty stunned.

It recognizes that America's middle class is struggling, shrinking, in fact, along with what got us here, where it stands in history and what we should maybe do to correct our financial, national problems. It begins with this sub-line heading:

Over the past few decades, the Western World has increasingly become a society of "have lesses," if not yet of "have nots." 

They already had me right there, just with that opening, recognizing that the middle-, lower- and working-classes were being crushed with our economic system in that business-supporting rag. But then they go on to outdo themselves:

If Western countries want to disprove the dire forecasts of Karl Marx, we must think creatively about how to make the middle class more prosperous and secure.

They had me at "Karl Marx."

Some of the article:

In the U.S. and Britain, the percentage of citizens owning stocks or houses is well down from the late 1980s. In Britain, the average age for buying a first home is now 31 (and many more people than before depend on “the bank of Mom and Dad” to help them do so). In the mid-’80s, it was 27. My own children, who started work in London in the last two years, earn a little less, in real terms, than I did when I began in 1979, yet house prices are 15 times higher. We have become a society of “have lesses,” if not yet of “have nots.”

In a few lines of work, earnings have shot forward. In 1982, only seven U.K. financial executives were receiving six-figure salaries. Today, tens of thousands are (an enormous increase, even allowing for inflation). The situation is very different for the middle-ranking civil servant, attorney, doctor, teacher or small-business owner. Many middle-class families now depend absolutely on the income of both parents in a way that was unusual even as late as the 1980s...

The author asks an important question, an extremely important one;

What is the use of capitalism if its rewards go to the few and its risks are dumped on the many?

And here is where the under-rated, discounted and even disregarded, if brilliant Karl Marx comes in:

Where might one find a useful analysis of what is happening today in the market democracies of the West? How about this: “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.”

Or this: “Modern bourgeois society…is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the power of the nether world which he has called up by his spells.” 

Or this: “The productive forces no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property: on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions…[and] they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.”

The celebrated bearded communists had argued that capitalism would reduce all of society to only two classes: the prosperous bourgeoisie, who owned the capital, and the impoverished proletariat, who contributed their labor.

Who, today, is able to say this isn't precisely what's happening and what's been happening here in America? Who can honestly deny this? It's incontrovertible.

Is that not what's been happening in the last at least 30 years? I can't count the number of articles and news segments pointing out how the "people at the top", the "1%", with hedge fund managers as the best example, have been getting many more millions upon millions of dollars and wealth and riches while, again, the middle-, lower- and working classes have seen their costs escalate but wages stagnate---shrink, in fact.

And here is where the article and the Pope's visit, this week, to our shores coincidentally converge:

The relationship between money and morality, on which the middle-class order depends, has been seriously compromised over the past decade.

I'm not advocating Communism here by any means. While I think Karl Marx was correct in his writing, I also know Mr. Marx didn't take into account the human factors, especially the factor of just sheer greed, let alone the love of power. Communism would only work in a perfect world. Would that we were so lucky.

But the fact is, what we have going on in America now and what we've had doing on financially, fiscally and economically is precisely what Karl Marx and Friederich Engels described in their famous-through-the-ages "The Communist Manifesto."

The author of the article ends it very well and correctly:

...Marx did have an insight about the disproportionate power of the ownership of capital. The owner of capital decides where money goes, whereas the people who sell only their labor lack that power. This makes it hard for society to be shaped in their interests. In recent years, that disproportion has reached destructive levels, so if we don’t want to be a Marxist society, we need to put it right.

What we need to do as a nation, through our government is get our government back for the people. We have to end the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling and end campaign contributions--both--so we can then begin to put back into place the simplest of rules to keep corporations and the already-wealthy, and the greedy and power-hungry among them, from crushing these 3 classes (middle, lower and working) with rules and government that only works for them.

We have to get the government back for the people.

Links:  Believe it or not: Karl Marx is making a comeback

Marx Was Right: Five Ways Karl Marx Predicted 2014

Socialism or America's Capitalism?

In the ever-raging and ongoing battle of what's better? Capitalism or Socialism, I offer you today the Legatum Prosperity Index of world nations for 2015.

Britain leapfrogs Germany in list of world's 

most prosperous

Note two things, ladies and gentlemen.

The US is not "NUMBER ONE!"

And the top nine nations are Socialist.


Huh.

Republicans vs. Everyone Else

Yesterday's Zippy the Pinhead

Socialism?

This, then, is "Socialism" if Bernie Sanders is Socialist.

Could We Not Demonize True Socialism?

Please?

socialism

[ ˈsōSHəˌlizəm ]

NOUN

noun: socialism

a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

 

 

Libertarian vs Socialist

I saw this earlier and loved it. Naturally, there's at least a bit of truth to it or it wouldn't work.

I ask you, which would you prefer?

We all work together vs. "every man--and woman--for themselves"?

On Germany and Their Nasty, Ugly Socialism

There is a fantastic article and interview out just now at Alternet:

Why Germany Has It So Much Better Than the U.S

It's all based on author Thomas Geohegan's new book Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?  Renowned fellow author Terrence McNally interviews him.

Just a bit, here, to make point:

December 9, 2014/  The European Union, 27 member nations with a half billion people, has become the largest, wealthiest trading bloc in the world, producing nearly a third of the world's economy -- nearly as large as the US and China combined. Europe has more Fortune 500 companies than either the US, China or Japan.

European nations spend far less than the United States for universal healthcare rated by the World Health Organization as the best in the world, even as U.S. health care is ranked 37th. Europe leads in confronting global climate change with renewable energy technologies, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the process. Europe is twice as energy efficient as the US and their ecological "footprint" (the amount of the earth's capacity that a population consumes) is about half that of the United States for the same standard of living.

Unemployment in the US is widespread and becoming chronic, but when Americans have jobs, we work much longer hours than our peers in Europe. Before the recession, Americans were working 1,804 hours per year versus 1,436 hours for Germans -- the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour weeks per year.

They're better paid, have more money, live better, have more--far more---vacation time,  pay less for education,don't ship jobs overseas, there's less--again, far less--poverty, they have more "green", sustainable energy sources, all while producing more, as a nation.

Great interview. It sounds like a good to great book, possibly an important one. Eye-opening to most Americans. Too many of us, without international travel, don't know what we don't have, of course, nor what, maybe, likely, even, we could, if only for better national priorities. Some things we could maybe have if we had statesmen and stateswomen in our leadership instead of what we have now.
I love this---something the author found:  "...if you don't have much poverty, life is better for everybody. Not just for the poor, but for everybody.

It's what a lot of us have been saying and for a long time. It seems something the Waltons of Walmart and the Koch brothers and their ilk just can't comprehend or accept or agree to.

What's to not want to emulate here, on our part? Heck, on anyone's part?

That is really some ugly Socialism there, isn't it?

I'm sure glad we aren't Socialists and have that ugly stuff here, aren't you?

The NFL, Socialism, Intelligence and Fairness

Oddball billboards in Southwest Missouri

I'm telling you, this is one very different part of the country this Southwest Missouri.  I see things and I keep seeing things I can't even imagine prior to being here, let alone not seeing them before now.

Here's the first one I'll mention so far-- it's a billboard, apparently by and from the Catholic Church and it's in Springfield.  It says:

"CATHOLICISM:  THE BIGGEST OBSTACLE TO SOCIALISM"

Because, after all, isn't that--Socialism--one of the biggest ongoing fears of most Americans, in general, but Right Wingers and Republicans, more specifically, since the core of Communism died with the old Soviet Union and China as we knew them?

God forbid we have Socialism, right?

Except I can't think of a more fair, just, moral and even "Christian" or "Christ-like" political system than Socialism, personally, when you think about it.

These, after all, are the definitions of the big, ugly Socialism:

1)  any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

 

2) a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property

b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state

3) : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done.

 

And face it, we're never, ever going to have total ownership of anything in this country, let's be real here. No one's talking about or realistically promoting anything like total Socialism or, again, total ownership of production by "the state", by the government.

 

That said, Socialism, in various degrees, exists over much of the free world and it's certainly in existence here, now, in America, much to a lot of people's dislike and even though, to others of us, there isn't near enough practiced here.

The only things we'd push for in this country is that the gross inequities and inequalities of, as a best comparison and example, the obscenely wealthy vs. the horribly immorality of the extremely poor.

And it was Jesus Christ himself who ran the "money changers" out of the temple, as a reminder and said things like

--"It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God"

--"...go, sell what you own and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven..." and this one:  "

--"Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days”

Suffice to say, Jesus was well known as anything but a fan of the wealthy. Keeping "safety nets" for the very poor of us is the only decent, humane, moral and yes, even "Christian" thing to do. And sure, it shouldn't be set up so it makes for an "easy ride" one can be on perpetually but our current systems of assistance to the poor and food stamps and unemployment insurance is anything but.

And Catholicism? 

What a Capitalist racket that's turned out to be. No wonder they want to fight "Socialism."

Who would Jesus help?

What those daffy Liberals and Lefties and Communists believe

Just crazy, aren't they?

Can you imagine?