Ways out of Permanent Stagnation

by Marc Batko, marc1seed@yahoo.com, http://www.freetranslations.foundation]

 

In Permanent Stagnation, Late Financial Capitalism and its Far-Right Capture of Discourse

Immigration, equality, and minority rights are viewed as threats to stability to believers in capital.  Loni Gunier, Clinton's assistant Attorney General, said: "Majority rule must be balanced with minority rights for the state to be legitimate."  The far-right disallows such talk as abstractions.

Fascism arises out of system failure.  The poor and homeless are made scapegoats.  Endless wars make system changen taboo in a people bombarded with advertisements and obsessed with optimization!

Neoliberalism is based on myths: the market as a self-healing panacea, financial markets returning to equilibrium, money as a private matter, CEOs as job-creators and workers as cost-factors.  With the far-right capture of the executive and the judiciary, the Roberts Supreme Court is a corrupt court helping the dangerous Trump with its recent immunity, anti-regulation, and anti-homeless decisions.  Around 1980 with the smiling Reagan demagogue, the Senate and the House became millionaire clubs.

State failure and market failure are everywhere and meet us at every corner.  Housing, taxation, and bank security were the three pillars of neoliberalism to collapse first.  Instrumental reason only promotes optimization and cannot understand systemic/structural criticism and alternatives.  There is no alternative to apathy, corruption, and atomized and commodified people!

Ways out of Permanent Stagnation

The welfare state is a human future, not Bolshevism!  The state must invest massively in affordable apartments or normalize the denial of the human right of housing.  Labor and material costs increase so private developers cannot build affordable units. 

Reducing working hours is a socio-economic investment.  With a three-day or four-day work week, people could enjoy better long-term health and have more time-sovereignty, while nature can breathe again!

A Marshall Plan for Journalism run by progressive philanthropists or foundations is vital to break the unsustainable work religion, the trickle-down fixation, infinite growth on a finite planet, narrowness, and hopelessness.  Five or six companies in publishing and broadcasting have amassed 90% of the revenue!  Zillions of romance/nonsense novels are prominent with hardly any economic theory or intercultural learning! 

The human sciences of philosophy, economics, history, play, and literature have a different methodology than the exact sciences.  Experiment differs from experience as introspection and listening differ from test tubes, measurement and predictability (cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1960, ET 1975).

Do we choose the active or punishing state, Hobbes with his Leviathan or Rousseau with his social contract?

Financial markets made themselves independent and took vital resources from the real economy.  Regulation, checks and balances were blocked along with participation of the poor and middle class.  Elites obsessed with maintaining their privileges and power have blocked social housing in city after city.  A reading of Benjamin Barber's "Strong Democracy"could show us the way to vibrant citizenship.

Neoliberalism refuses to see that profit-making is worlds away from profit-maximizing.  As Fabio Vighi explains, the enemy makes introspection taboo in emergency capitalism (cf. thephilosophicalsalon.com).  Beginning with Colin Crouch's "The Surprising Non-Death of Neoliberalism" (1980), a cornicopia of neoliberal criticism arose.  In the UK, Stephan Gill wrote about the neoliberal constitution redefining the state and human activity.  Neoliberalism confuses market dependence with freedom.  The market and competition are not natural laws but human fetishes.  Corporate control and lobbyist decision-making is oligarchy, not democracy.

Vancouver B.C.'s 26 community centers and 2014 Welcoming Center for Immigrants are examples of democracy experimentation.  Community centers could be a third way beyond the state and the market.

The world of light will rise up! (cf. Talking Heads, Remain in Light. 1980)  Life is not longevity and sickness is not sin!  Diversity is a strength, not a threat and tolerance and anti-militarism are "no-brainers."  Tolerance is not for hate-spewing fascists, sociopathic narcissists trashing women, minorities, the poor and the weak.  Trump's ridiculous idea of replacing taxes with tariffs is the opposite of fair taxes and will lead to unprecedented, permanent depression.  In 2023, Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame earned $6.4 million an hour, more than $100K a minute, while Amazon paid no federal tax on $12 billion in annual profits!  Can we mend our own pockets and tax the super-rich so states, regions, and cities won't be strapped?

Late-stage financial market capitalism is kept alive by monthly injections of hundreds of billions from the Federal Reserve.  The economy of indebtedness and enrichment is characterized by speculative investment rather than productive investment (cf. Noam Chomsky), ecological destruction, climate instability, wasteful luxury consumption, wasteful endless wars, an abysmal lack of affordable apartments, and increasing homelessness.

In 2024, political debate resembles nonstop mud-throwing and name-calling that resembles a shark tank more than a deliberative exchange of opinions.  Racists, Zionists, and fundamentalists are arrogant and ignorant egomaniacs who never admit a mistake and blame others for everything.  Our system could be described as an elite democracy, democracy for the rich, or "inverted totalitarianism" (cf. Sheldon Wolin).  People are largely atomized and commodified, ahistorical and apolitical, parochial and spiritless, and shallow and hollow.  Neoliberalism destroys curiosity and rhythm.  Fear of the future dominates where the social supports of life have been dismantled.

In 1984, George Orwell warned that war could become a domestic necessity to distract the people from the economic corruption.  The Dustin Hoffman movie "Wag the Dog" shows how easy it is to convince the people that Albania is an existential threat.  Just tell them that not changing horses in midstream is a philosophical gem of wisdom!  The media and politics are wedded so demonstrations are reported from the police perspective.  If Big Brother says two plus two is five, that is true and ends discussion!

Education is the great transformer, economist John Kenneth Galbraith proclaimed.  Since 1980, universities must compete for corporate money since the state squanders billions on unwinnable wars.  In punishing student protestors against the eight-month massacre of Gaza, universities become "the tentacles of the police state" (cf. economist Michael Hudson).

Critical and independent journalism is an anchor in the rapidly declining West.  The West avoids introspection by invoking the pure evil of the "enemy" (cf. The Enemy and the Libidinal Economy of the Apocalypse" by Fabio Vighi, professor at Cardiff University in Wales).  The one-dimensional man is an example of false needs, false consciousness, and alienation or estrangement.  The one-dimensional society, as Herbert Marcuse warned, drowns itself in fear.  "Russians have consistently been portrayed as underdeveloped tyrants driven by a lust for power that, somehow, horrifies us western liberals.  Freud would say, correctly, that we project onto the depraved enemy the violent drives cultivated in our home garden... The most advanced form of capitalism has reached the age of impotence.  In Hegel's famous words, the West is a `form of life grown old' which, however, desperately wants to believe it is still young and full of energy." (Fabio Vighi).

How can we know the signs of the weather and not the signs of the times?  How can we be zealous anti-communists and ignorant of the 27 million Russians who died in defeating Hitler?  How can we have ignored the anti-fascist imperative?  Did we ever learn that Hitler pretended to be anti-capitalist and would say anything to gain followers?

Jesus told parables about self-righteousness.  Self-righteousness is a fatal delusion as blindness is a result of hatred.  Wars are manufactured out of fear and always have two losers (cf. Eugen Drewermann and the poet William Stafford).  US wars since 1945 have killed 20 million.  That ignoble history includes 64 regime changes.

Man does not live by bread alone

Our hyper-materialistic and hyper-individualist culture is massively influenced by consumerism, science and technology.  We are entertained to death!  Other world-views are devalued or marginalized.

God is not necessary but more than necessary

The world can exist independent of God as Christianity can exist without fundamentalism, as the Protestant theologian Eberhard Juengel explained in "God as the Mystery of the World" (1977, ET 1983).  As the author of the 13-volume "Church Dogmatics," the German theologian Karl Barth in the horror of World War II proclaimed God in Jesus Christ as "total help for total need."  God's revelation is absolutely central.  The church with its ceremonies, rituals, prejudices, blindnesses, and stereotypes is often a cowardly supporter of perverse wars, crusades, and witch-hunts.

All persons should be reporters

Buckminster Fuller said provocatively "specialization is the death of our culture."  We should be generalists or universalists and not ignore the far-right's capture of the judiciary or takeover of the executive.  What happens when people never recognize or celebrate others?  on the quiet, nihilism can takeover late-stage finance capitalism.

The US is a heavily indebted empire in rapid decline.  One trillion dollars must be spend annually on servicing its $33 trillion debt caused by endless unwinnable wars and luxury consumption of the rich.  Since 2000, the annual US trade deficit has averaged $600 billion; the US imports twice as much as it exports.

In 2010, the Supreme Court in Citizens United showed it was a friend to chaos and judicial overreach.  Declaring money was speech and corporations were persons, the Supreme Court discarded fifty years of state legislative efforts to curb the influence of money.  Now elections are almost certain to be auctions!

Justices Alioto and Thomas are undeniable examples of corruption.  Accepting corporate gifts of vacations, air travel and the like raises suspicions of impropriety.  Chief Justice Roberts and his wife have a very lucrative side-hustle where corporations donate millions for screened lawyers.

"Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted."

In his parables, Jesus urges a reorientation toward God, the infinite Creator out of nothing, fellow persons and nature.  The small and inoffensive should be lifted up; the arrogant and domineering should be deflated and re-humanized.  The lilies of the field should be admired.  The birds who live out of the bounty and generosity of their Creator are our examples of single-mindedness and contentment.  They are not storing into barns or traumatizing one another with fears and anxieties!

Housing is a creative change for humans who unlike clams do not have built-in housing.    Because of steadily rising material and labor costs, private developers cannot afford to build affordable apartments.  The state must invest massively in SRO (single-resident-occupancy) hotels and affordable apartments.  In the Vienna Housing Plan, the state buys up suitable properties to prevent speculators from sending the prices into the stratosphere.  As a result, rents in Vienna are significantly lower than in Munich.

Majority rule must be balanced with minority protection for the state to be legitimate, Loni Gunier explained.  She was Clinton's assistant attorney general and should be remembered to avert sleepwalking into a feudal corporate or oligarchic dystopia.

The US must accept the higher authority of the United Nations so it doesn't follow the colonialist/imperialist model.  With a "Shock and Awe policy," the US under G.W. Bush sought to liberate its oil under the Iraqi soil!  Recognizing this higher authority is an absolute necessity for peace and reconciliation.  Reconciliation in the Christian tradition means agreeing on a higher level so differences and antagonisms can be relativized and dissolved.  Three million Vietnamese were killed because of lawless, malicious US violence.  Seven million tons of bombs were dropped on little Vietnam!

God is the advocate and protector of the poor!

In "Mein Kampf," Hitler said all Jews were Marxists and communists and deserved to be killed like vermin. He said he was carrying out God's will.  Hitler even pretended to be anti-capitalist and would say anything to gain followers.  Americans have more culpability than the Germans if they succumb to Trump's lies and demagogy.  He claims to be the best-friend of African-Americans and the only one who understands economics, taxation, international law, and the rights of nature.  What arrogance and contempt of the people who are sovereign!  What mockery of truth, humility, and intelligence!

Christians accept the collective responsibility for the aggressive, deadly foreign policy of the US.  20 million died in the many US wars since 1945.  Will the US accept its decline and rejection as an empire and become an interdependent republic like the UK?

Since 1945, the US acted as the world hegemon with its superior economic and military power.  Now in 2024, the global South is stronger than ever with BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.  In one generation, China has risen from a country with overwhelming poverty to the work bench of the world.  China has lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty and become the world leader in manufacturing electric cars, semi-conductors, and solar panels.  Can the US say a word of acknowledgment for China's manufacture of millions of cell phones?

US economic strength was gained through the theft of the natural resources of the global South.  Wars of territorial expansion have resulted in between 60 and 200 million refugees.  Under the structural adjustment policy, countries had to grow tulips and strawberries for Miami.  Now countries rely more on China for development assistance and can grow rice and beans for their own people.  In Investor-State tribunals, corporations could sue countries for lost profits while states could not sue corporations (see the Metalclad decision in 1999).

Most multinational corporations shift their profits to tax havens like the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, Delaware or Wyoming.  In stock buybacks, corporations buy back their own stock in the hundreds of billions or even trillions.  The tax avoidance industry has become increasingly inventive and surreptitious.  In the 1960s, 40% of federal revenue came from corporate taxes.  Now, only 7% comes from corporate taxes.  States, regions, and cities face revenue shortfalls and must choose between food assistance, housing aid, and healthcare subsidies.

Neoliberalism has led to unprecedented inequality, participation deficits, ecological destruction and knowledge vacuums.  The financial sector should be shriveled and the public sector expanded.  Education is the great transformer, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith  said.  Education is also the key form of qualitative growth.  Investing in weapons and wars makes us an unsustainable country and black hole that further enriches those already wealthy and sacrifices its young and the future.

Colin Crouch's book "The Surprising Non-Death of Neoliberalism" triggered an avalanche of economic studies exposing the myths and contradictions of financial capitalism: money out of thin air, money as a private matter, soaring profits and falling investments.  Socialism for the rich and the ruthless, merciless market for everyone else!  We clean the outside of the cup and leave the inside filthy!

The state runs away from feeding and housing its people while corporations run away from paying their fair taxes.  Trump threatens to bring chaos and uncertainty to new levels by replacing taxes with tariffs.  More than a hundred years ago, Chief Justice Oliver Holmes said taxation was the price of citizenship.

With the destruction of language and democracy, Trump and his authoritarian cult could strengthen oligarchy and police power.  As Fabio Vighi explains, a new emergency follows the last emergency.  The Fed continues injecting hundreds of billions into the financial markets.  Back in 2000, the German economist Jorg Goldberg wrote an essay "The Cure is the Sickness."  The Washington Consensus of privatization, deregulation and liberalized markets has finally collapsed allowing the global South to breathe again.

We stand on the shoulders of our prophets, martyrs and simple resisters.  The time of the Bill Clintons, the Grover Norquists, the Elliot Abrams, and the John Boltons is hopefully over.  Democracy and corruption do not match any more than democracy and capitalism.  Politics should limit and constrain the economy; the economy should not control and define politics.  "We can have democracy or concentration of wealth, not both," said Justice Brandeis, the longest serving Supreme Court justice.

Instead of reproaching Trump for attacking and dismantling democracy and our regulatory/administrative state, the Supreme Court in three new decisions in July 2024 (immunity, agency power, and criminalizing homelessness) seems to be enabling "bold and decisive" executive action and Trumpian dictatorship!

The moral alternative is to become a respectable republic instead of an abusive and unpopular empire.  The people are sovereign; our memory and independence are not for sale!  The multi-polar world should replace the uni-polar world!  Reason, compromise, and the human rights orientation must not give way to street fights and three corrupted branches of government!

How is the constitutional state different from the security or emergency state?  Is procedural justice a safeguard against the police state?  How can participation increase so people share in democracy and are more than spectators or cogs in an outmoded system?

"Those who control the present control the future.  Those who control the past control the present," the prophet George Orwell warned.  The elites are not ultimately responsible for corruption but rather the population that allows this, declared Albert Einstein.  We are called to be conscious, vigorous subjects, not helpless spiritless objects.  Machines lack feelings, sensations of pain, and consciousness.

God can remove the prejudices and stereotypes that block new life and enlightenment if we come to him with hearts and minds open to transformation.  Community differs from society.  Liberate yourselves from mental slavery! (Bob Marley)  Decolonize your minds!  Overcome the false needs, false consciousness, and alienation of the one-dimensional society! (Herbert Marcuse)  Think spiritually!  Be post-materialists enthralled with life beyond the work religion and nonstop consumerism!  Be futurists, not conformist, conventional trickle-down economists in a hamster wheel that only rewards the  super-rich and leaves our society a de-industrialized wasteland of skid-rows and helpless hypocritical politicians!

Martin Luther King emphasized that nonviolence is stronger than violence.  There is good in every person.  Put students in the center!  Demonstrations at over 200 US colleges and universities protest the eight-month massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.  Can't we applaud the courageous students defending the abandoned Palestinians?

Economic myths debunked

According to Richard Reich, 5.5 million manufacturing jobs vanished from 2005-2017.  Global trade rules and costs jobs because of Chinese imports.  That global trade benefits everyone is a prominent myth.  The doctrine of comparative advantage says every nation specializes in what it does best.  But what about the costs to workers and the environment?  What if comparative advantage comes from dangerous working conditions, preventing workers from forming labor unions, allowing child labor, polluting the environment, or destroying rain-forests?

Globalization is not a natural force like wind or water.  Robert Reich corrected Bill Clinton on this point.  Global trade is structured by rules negotiated by nations about which assets will be protected and which will not.  These rules define who benefits and who is harmed by trade.  Over the decades, trade deals like NAFTA or agreements under the WTO have protected the assets of corporations including intellectual property rights.  In Investor-State Dispute Settlements, oil companies can seek compensation for their reduced profits.  Trade deals have also benefited pharmaceutical companies through extended drug patents.

Trump pretends to be an environmentalist and an anti-white supremacist.  Hitler pretended to be an anti-capitalist and would say anything to gain followers.  Practiced in the dubious arts of propaganda and the repetition of lies, Trump complains again and again that he is the victim of the media and culture wars.

Facts, self-criticism, and acknowledging others cannot upset the sociopathic narcissist.  The Trump economy was not the best and the Biden economy was not the worst although he repeats these lies at every opportunity!

Stolen election, criminal Joe, climate change as a hoax, slandering judges, prosecutors and witnesses, the would-be autocrat with 34 criminal convictions calls himself an innocent bystander and the only one who understands the economy, taxation, international law, and immigration. In truth, he is a master of bank fraud and insurance fraud upgrading and downgrading the value of his hotels for the maximum personal tax advantage.  The emperor has no clothes, the child cries in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale.  The modern Pinocchio's nose gets bigger and bigger!

The tribal God became the universal God with Jesus Christ and the New Testament.  The ego must die so the self can be born.  "There is no longer male or female, slave or free, or Jew or Greek for you are all one in Christ Jesus."  When we praise what is small and humble, we live int he enlightened mindset of Jesus of Nazareth.  When we criticize the self-righteous and the powerful, we share the life orientation of the prophets.  In his parable, the tax collector who said only "O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!" went home justified, not the Pharisee who boasted of his achievements and thanked God he was not like other men.

Trump often refers to immigrants as "invaders" and repeatedly called Mexicans "rapists and murderers."  He is surely a loose cannon if there ever was one!  He is a clear and present danger to democracy, language, the rule of law and the four-hundred year Enlightenment tradition.  Hitler made up complete lies: "International Jewry was exterminating Germany... In this total war, all power has to be given to me."  Americans have greater culpability than the Germans since they came 80 years later and should have heard the warnings and lessons.

Don't be downcast if you aren't a millionaire!  The powerful are full of prejudices and stereotypes, confuse market dependence with freedom, deride kindness, generosity and selflessness as feminine weaknesses and usually live thankless, spiritless, and passive lives serving the idol mammon or the golden calf.  What does it profit a man to gain the world and see all rivals as enemies or vermin?

Trust in the Everlasting like the birds of the air and the prophets down the ages!  Be post-materialists!   Be non-conformists like Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope!  Early in his 11-year papacy, he was a passionate advocate of the poor and liberation theology.  "This economy kills!" he exclaimed. "NATO barks at Russia's border," he decried.

Beginning in 1999, NATO expanded from 16 to 30 states.  US wars since 1945 have cost 20 million lives.  Serving the idol of capital and profit maximization, the US transitioned from a source of hope to a never-ending war-mongerer.  In "The Present Age" written in the 1840s, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said: "Our age is not an age of courage but one of advertising and publicity."  "Without humility, there is no sense of wonder."

Thanks Donny for trashing politics into nonstop mud-throwing and name-calling just as Hitler declared the soldier the only model of courage.  Thanks Donny for reducing life to street fights and a pig-sty, for slandering different women at different campaign stops and for trashing everything positive and noble in life to a smoldering mess of self-righteous nonsense!  No, drinking bleach doesn't cure COVID!  Taxes can't be replaced by tariffs without plunging the world into permanent depression!  Presidents who spend their time in bed or on the golf course are like the laughable Roman emperor Caligula who appointed his horse to the Roman senate.  The stench of corruption in Trump's xenophobic, misogynist and homophobic misanthropy cannot be perfumed away by all the sycophantic journalists in the country!  Life is more than the secular hymn "Three Little Piggies."  Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall and all the king's horses and men cannot make him into a respectable human being without repentance!

Resist the beginnings of fascism when obeying the Party and the all-seeing Leader make a mockery of the rule of law, the constitutional state, and all history!  The people are sovereign, not Wall Street banks who capture the state or dangerous authoritarians in love with themselves!  The race is to the most truthful and the most humble, not the one who barks the loudest or tells the most lies!  Put students in the center, not greedy speculators without a trace of empathy or courage!

Friends, we are limited creatures and our lives are inevitably fragments, as the pastor, theologian, and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer said.  "The fog is lifted!  The language of proclamation runs crossways to the language of time."  "Only the suffering God can help."  "Only those who say a word for the Jews may sing Gregorian!"

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make a pathological liar say one truthful sentence!  Truth has to well up within an individual so he sees others as persons and not as stepping stones to his supposed omnipotence!  St. Francis' prayer for peace emphasizes courage, wisdom and serenity.  Can you tell the difference between a green field and a course derailed?  Did you trade your heroes for a pot of gold?  We are just two fish swimming in the same fishbowl year after year.  Have we found the same old fears?  (Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall, 1979)

Colin Crouch's book "The Surprising Non-Death of Neoliberalism" triggered an avalanche of economic studies exposing the myths and contradictions of financial capitalism: money out of thin air, money as a private matter, soaring profits and falling investments.  Socialism for the rich and the ruthless, merciless market for everyone else!  We clean the outside of the cup and leave the inside filthy!

The state runs away from feeding and housing its people while corporations run away from paying their fair taxes.  Trump threatens to bring chaos and uncertainty to new levels by replacing taxes with tariffs.  More than a hundred years ago, Chief Justice Oliver Holmes said taxation was the price of citizenship.  In 2024, the far-right don’t seem interested in truth, history, memory, compromise or reconciliation!

With the destruction of language and democracy, Trump and his authoritarian cult could strengthen oligarchy and police power.  As Fabio Vighi explains, a new emergency follows the last emergency.  The Fed continues injecting hundreds of billions into the financial markets.  Back in 2000, the German economist Jorg Goldberg wrote an essay "The Cure is the Sickness."  The Washington Consensus of privatization, deregulation and liberalized markets has finally collapsed allowing the global South to breathe again.

We stand on the shoulders of our prophets, martyrs and simple resisters.  The time of the Bill Clintons, the Grover Norquists, the Elliot Abrams, and the John Boltons is hopefully over.  Democracy and corruption do not match any more than democracy and capitalism.  Politics should limit and constrain the economy; the economy should control and define politics.  "We can have democracy or concentration of wealth, not both," said Justice Brandeis, the longest serving Supreme Court justice.

Instead of reproaching Trump for attacking and dismantling democracy and our regulatory/administrative state, the Supreme Court in three new decisions in July 2024 (immunity, agency power, and criminalizing homelessness) seems to be enabling "bold and decisive" executive action and Trumpian dictatorship!

The moral alternative is to become a respectable republic instead of an abusive and unpopular empire.  The people are sovereign; our memory and independence are not for sale!  The multi-polar world should replace the uni-polar world!  Reason, compromise, and the human rights orientation must not give way to street fights and three corrupted branches of government!

How is the constitutional state different from the security or emergency state?  Is procedural justice a safeguard against the police state?  How can participation increase so people share in democracy and are more than spectators or cogs in an outmoded system?

"Those who control the present control the future.  Those who control the past control the present," the prophet George Orwell warned.  The elites are not ultimately responsible for corruption but rather the population that allows this, declared Albert Einstein.  We are called to be conscious, vigorous subjects, not helpless spiritless objects.  Machines lack feelings, sensations of pain, and consciousness.

God can remove the prejudices and stereotypes that block new life and enlightenment if we come to him with hearts and minds open to transformation.  Community differs from society.  Liberate yourselves from mental slavery! (Bob Marley)  Decolonize your minds!  Overcome the false needs, false consciousness, and alienation of the one-dimensional society! (Herbert Marcuse)   Think spiritually!  Be post-materialists enthralled with life beyond the work religion and nonstop consumerism!  Be futurists, not conformist, conventional trickle-down economists in a hamster wheel that only rewards the super-rich and leaves our society a de-industrialized wasteland of skid-rows and helpless hypocritical politicians!

Martin Luther King emphasized that nonviolence is stronger than violence.  There is good in every person.  Put students in the center!  Demonstrations at over 200 US colleges and universities protest the eight-month massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.  Can't we applaud the courageous students defending the abandoned  Palestinians?

Economic myths debunked

According to Richard Reich, 5.5 million manufacturing jobs vanished from 2005-2017.  Global trade rules and costs jobs because of Chinese imports.  That global trade benefits everyone is a prominent myth.  The doctrine of comparative advantage says every nation specializes in what it does best.  But what about the costs to workers and the environment?  What if comparative advantage comes from dangerous working conditions, preventing workers from forming labor unions, allowing child labor, polluting the environment, or destroying rain-forests?

Globalization is not a natural force like wind or water.  Robert Reich corrected Bill Clinton on this point.  Global trade is structured by rules negotiated by nations about which assets will be protected and which will not.  These rules define who benefits and who is harmed by trade.  Over the decades, trade deals like NAFTA or agreements under the WTO have protected the assets of corporations including intellectual property rights.  In Investor-State Dispute Settlements, oil companies can seek compensation for their reduced profits.  Trade deals have also benefited pharmaceutical companies through extended drug patents.

Trump pretends to be an environmentalist and an anti-white supremacist.  Hitler pretended to be an anti-capitalist and would say anything to gain followers.  Practiced in the dubious arts of propaganda and the repetition of lies, Trump complains again and again that he is the victim of the media and culture wars.  Facts, self-criticism, and acknowledging others cannot upset the sociopathic narcissist.  The Trump economy was not the best and the Biden economy was not the worst although he repeats these lies at every opportunity!

Stolen election, criminal Joe, climate change as a hoax, slandering judges, prosecutors and witnesses, the would-be autocrat with 34 criminal convictions calls himself an innocent bystander and the only one who understands the economy, taxation, international law, and immigration. In truth, he is a master of bank fraud and insurance fraud upgrading and downgrading the value of his hotels for the maximum personal tax advantage.  The emperor has no clothes, the child cries in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale.  The modern Pinocchio's nose gets bigger and bigger!

The tribal God became the universal God with Jesus Christ and the New Testament.  The ego must die so the self can be born.  "There is no longer male or female, slave or free, or Jew or Greek for you are all one in Christ Jesus."  When we praise what is small and humble, we live int he enlightened mindset of Jesus of Nazareth.  When we criticize the self-righteous and the powerful, we share the life orientation of the prophets.  In his parable, the tax collector who said only "O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!" went home justified, not the Pharisee who boasted of his achievements and thanked God he was not like other men.

Trump often refers to immigrants as "invaders" and repeatedly called Mexicans "rapists and murderers."  He is surely a loose cannon if there ever was one!  He is a clear and present danger to democracy, language, the rule of law and the four-hundred year Enlightenment tradition.  Hitler made up complete lies: "International Jewry was exterminating Germany... In this total war, all power has to be given to me."  Americans have greater culpability than the Germans since they came 80 years later and should have heard the warnings and lessons.

Don't be downcast if you aren't a millionaire!  The powerful are full of prejudices and stereotypes, confuse market dependence with freedom, deride kindness, generosity and selflessness as feminine weaknesses and usually live thankless, spiritless, and passive lives serving the idol mammon or the golden calf.  What does it profit to gain the world and see all rivals as enemies or vermin?

Trust in the Everlasting like the birds of the air and the prophets down the ages!  Be post-materialists!   Be non-conformists like Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope!  Early in his 11-year papacy, he was a passionate advocate of the poor and liberation theology.  "This economy kills!" he exclaimed. "NATO barks at Russia's border," he warned before the 400,000 Ukranians were slaughtered!

Beginning in 1999, NATO expanded from 16 to 30 states.  US wars since 1945 have cost 20 million lives.  Serving the idol of capital and profit maximization, the US transitioned from a source of hope to a never-ending war-mongerer.  In "The Present Age" written in the 1840s, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said: "Our age is not an age of courage but one of advertising and publicity."  "Without humility, there is no sense of wonder."

Thanks Donny for trashing politics into nonstop mud-throwing and name-calling just as Hitler declared the soldier the only model of courage.  Thanks Donny for reducing life to street fights and a pig-sty, for slandering different women at different campaign stops and for trashing everything positive and noble in life to a smoldering mess of self-righteous nonsense!  No, drinking bleach doesn't cure COVID!  Taxes can't be replaced by tariffs without plunging the world into permanent depression!  Presidents who spend their time in bed or on the golf course are like the laughable Roman emperor Caligula who appointed his horse to the Roman senate.  The stench of corruption in Trump's xenophobic, misogynist and homophobic misanthropy cannot be perfumed away by all the sycophantic journalists in the country!  Life is more than the secular hymn "Three Little Piggies."  Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall and all the king's horses and men cannot make him into a respectable human being without repentance!

Resist the beginnings of fascism when obeying the Party and the all-seeing Leader make a mockery of the rule of law, the constitutional state, and all history!  The people are sovereign, not Wall Street banks who capture the state or dangerous authoritarians in love with themselves!  The race is to the most truthful and the most humble, not the one who barks the loudest or tells the most lies!  Put students in the center, not greedy speculators without a trace of empathy or courage!

Friends, we are limited creatures and our lives are inevitably fragments, as the pastor, theologian, and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer said.  "The fog is lifted!  The language of proclamation runs crossways to the language of time."  "Only the suffering God can help."  "Only those who say a word for the Jews may sing Gregorian!"

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make a pathological liar say one truthful sentence!  Truth has to well up within an individual so he sees others as persons and not as stepping stones to his supposed omnipotence!  St. Francis' prayer for peace emphasizes courage, wisdom and serenity.  Can you tell the difference between a green field and a course derailed?  Did you trade your heroes for a pot of gold?  We are just two fish swimming in the same fishbowl year after year.  Have we found the same old fears?  (Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall, 1979)