Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Oh me oh my, an Americanized (and hence by necessity bowdlerized?) version of Sweden’s Meidener Plan, with worker-owned enterprises shunting aside through a stealth buy-out process the institutional investors, majority shareholders, and executive boards who run things (not that anyone really runs things: it may not be a von Hayekian world, but it’s not a world of portly cigar-chomping fat cats commanding and controlling like Gosplan commissars either – with some all-too notable exceptions adumbrated below)

Anyhow, even in the (overhyped!) Nordic “socialist” paradise of one score and ten years ago, the big banking and Volvo making bourgeoisie was, courtesy of their sponsorship of the Nobel Prize in (Pareto optimized) Economics among other factors, able to turn respectable public opinion upon itself regarding the Meidener Plan, and Sweden has been gradually slouching toward Blairism ever since… so JSP is right, imagine the tough sledding in these parts

But a lightning bolt hit me this afternoon while scanning the radio dial and (accidentally I assure you) coming across the local NPR affiliate and spitting up my liberal latte… in the disguise of reportage, a fawning account of Warren Buffet’s ploy to give away billions of dollars of (earned? no, silly) wealth to the Gates Foundation, itself an outfit the vast endowment of which is predicated upon the IP rights-bounded hoarding of social knowledge, but one that nonetheless earns nauseating plaudits from (philanthropy teat-sucking) pwogs for, in essence, unilaterally deciding where, when, and how the global body politic’s stolen patrimony will be allocated… apparently it’s toward malaria vaccines this epoch, and I’m sure many a structurally adjusted Third World public health commissioner cannot afford to look a “gift” horse in the month, and assume properly genuflecting postures!

ANYWAY… a good few heartland populists hate jet-setting “do-gooders”… how to channel this disposition, often vented in nativist fashion toward the US’ allegedly cornucopian “foreign aid” budget (government cheese for shiftless Biafrans!) or in vacuous ressentiment toward equally vacuous Hollywood types, in a leftward direction, toward a mad-as-hell critique of those who vacuum surplus value out of you with the axe of a possible lay-off over your head, and then singlehandedly decide how to spend the accumulated stash, for good or for ill? It’s about ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY, and the quickest way to deprive these pious pricks of their self-regarding philanthrophics is to deprive them of what they’ve deprived you, with a FUCKING HUGE TRANSFER TAX ON CAPITAL OWNERSHIP and stealth movement toward WORKER-COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP (and CONTROL!) the key links.

But reaching a mass audience requires finding willing and able organic intellectuals who have the habitus down and who don’t condescend despite themselves… GOOD LUCK WITH THAT among today’s Toby Keith white working class (perhaps my perspective is skewed by where I live, a wannabe upwardly mobile lower middle-income neighborhood in suburban evangelical southern Appalachia)… in any event, knowing how to swim in the sea of culture IS key, thank you Gramsci

If it ever worked, once they stopped shitting bricks, the CBO-NGO-think tank minions of the Nation Magazine “left” (save a few savvy players who know better than the grant-makers the difference between radical reforms and reformist reforms) would run whoever is on the organizing committee of such a stunt out of town! Let the contradictions mount, as they say.

Gluelicker

PS Particularly telling was the “progressive” Buffet’s professed desire to model his philanthropy after Andrew Carnegie… forget the bloody massacre at Homestead Steel and all that, just clue into the Carnegie Foundation’s backing of the stage-managed “color revolutions” on Russia’s western frontier, the US’ odiously hypocritical campaign (with John Edwards riding shotgun) to contain Putin’s “neo-authoritarian” (ha!) regime – the underlying goal, in fine liberal internationalist style, to forestall the dread Sino-Russian alliance… I swear, on foreign policy the post neocon-syndrome Republicans will be lesser evils than the security moms and dads of the DP, just look at Chuck Hagel vs the Clinton relics on Taepaedong II

glue:
a stalwart effort indeed
right down to the carefuly co-figured lingo
------------------------
(btw
both doc smiff
and the present writer
were hoping
her majesty queen mehrvert
would find her way
to
this site carried here
by the meme stream
of one of you
visiting commenting
"fiends " )

--------------------
if i might reunderline
what you point out
about
my ex boss warren B's
"give back " to society
thru foundationing
nearly
40 bills worth
of capital assets ...

yes t'is
a nice victorian invention
this brand of
charity

its
at its best here
at least
in the post dickensian sense of best
there's no conversion here

the foundation is an estention of the corporation
not
like scrooge
no tight wad explodes
no burst of largesse
not even is this
the secular off shoot
of a purchase
of an indulgence

this is bigger
more systematic
its the application
of the same
shrewd weighng
analytic mind set
to altruism
as formerly was applied to
egotism

this is founderation
gone wild

a total give over

carnegie belt winner stuff as you point out

but just best of show
not a freak out

rules

extract it all
from em first
----any way necessary
but no worse then necessary ------
then
hold it till its ripe
or the funs over for ya
or your juices
for aquisition are dried
then and only then
start to give it back
and even then
only in
measured minimal dribbles
and not heaven forbid
directly
to the rubes
from whom it was extracted
and build for perpetuity
no one off splash
that is key here
not say
announcing
there'll be
200 bucks in the mail to every american
from me
next march 17th

nope this is in intention
for all time and a day there after

okay
maybe in some sense
you dribble it back
for the benefit
of the rubes
as partners
in our
joint humanity project

but i hasten to add certainly
only for uplifting
salvationary
merciful uses
that at least by intent
and by routes
though intricate
that
never the less
help to reproduce
with all its blessings
their present
earthly
tour of duty
for a job based society

with maybe a little more
of the unhealthy fat
cut away
and the lean made
supple and full of
grace

...knowing how to swim in the sea of culture is key...

You might try reading some of Joe Bageant's columns, if you haven't yet, g.

So I attended the Maryland Green Party's state convention earlier this month and they invited Gar Alperovitz to be their keynote speaker. He talked about his book America Beyond Capitalism, which touches on many of the things that Gluelicker mentioned above (i.e. "a FUCKING HUGE TRANSFER TAX ON CAPITAL OWNERSHIP and stealth movement toward WORKER-COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP (and CONTROL!))."

Anyway, I bought his book and started to read it and I have been really impressed. Some thoughtful progressive candidate should probably invite (or beg) Alperovitz to write his or her economic platform...

Ms. X,

Thanks, I have read the inimitable Joe Baegent, and now that you mention it, he's precisely the sort of cadre I had in mind... but there'd have to be a thousand, ten thousand Joe Baegents (each peculiarly unique of course, reflecting their specific milieu), all tied together into some coherent apparatus, for the train to leave the station.

Well, glue. You've gotta' start somewhere. Sometimes his blase' attitudes about gender and racial issues make me want to scream. I can live with it, though.

A major stumbling block, but also a potential unification point between Bageant's crowd and mine would be that each side has countless people feeding at the myth-trough of infinite class mobility. Each has us buying ourselves stuff to hide from the truth of our doomed lot if things keep on as they are. I have no idea how to drag anyone away from the trough without rendering them either suicidal or homicidal, however.

I promise fresh bread (not cake) to the first person here who does figure it out, however.