It all traces back to greed. One of the great lessons of my life was the crab fishery in Alaska. The fisherman were drowning and the federal government stepped in with regulation and you would have thought the communists had invaded. They screamed that they were being driven out of business….but they made plenty of money. And many lives were saved. Placing profits above human life is the key issue that gets covered up every time when billionaires and politicians combine to exploit and prey on the public.
The only hope is tax and regulate billionaires into oblivion. Or they will own everything and everyone.
Overturn Citizens United? Restrict super pac contributions? America is over. Too late.
“When I was running for congress, I had to sit in a free clinic.”
If I made 100 million dollars a year and saved every penny, I would have to work over 2000 years to have as much money as Elon Musk. It is their country and I count for less than nothing.
They are terrified of AOC…when I worked with Trumpists they made remarks about her life ending on numerous occasions. They never talked about anyone else with such extreme malice.
Yuval has a negative definition of “populist” while Thomas Frank has a positive view.
0:40 – “Trump says power is fear…what do you think power is?
Well, the question is what do you do with power? Do you use power just to gain more power, or do you try to use power to change the world for the better-?
1:15 “Democracy is a system in which you give power to somebody, on condition that after four years or so, they give it back, and the public can make another decision: did you use your power wisely and compassionately for four years? Okay, then we give it again, if not, we give it to somebody else.”
1:48 “I think the American public has made a very big gamble (taken) a very big risk, with giving so much power to Trump, who has already proved he wants to stay in power at all costs.”
3:17 “You see both on the radical right and also on the radical left, they have different ideas about many things, but one thing unites them, it is thinking that the only reality is power, and that all human interactions are power struggles. They don’t believe (populists) that humans and human institutions really care about the truth. In the populist imagination, when I am now talking with you, this is a power struggle. Everything we say is just trying to manipulate each other, or to manipulate the viewers; so, the question to ask whenever you hear somebody say something, the question to ask is not is it true, what is the evidence, the question to ask is who is winning, who is gaining power, whose interests are being served? This view of humanity, as if all humans are power-crazy demons, this erodes trust in human beings, this erodes trust in institutions, in the media, in university, in courts, people think “(these) are just conspiracies of people to gain power. And if you lose trust in all institutions, democracy collapses. Democracy functions based on trust. If there is no trust, the only system that can still function is a dictatorship. Because dictatorship is built on terror, not on trust, to frighten people, not make them trust.”
5:12 “We really want to know the truth about the world. Why? Because if you don’t know the truth about life, you will never be happy, because you don’t know what are the true sources of your misery. Even if you are the most powerful person in the world, if you don’t know about life, you will waste all your power trying to solve the wrong problem.
8:52 “And yet, Americans are so dissatisfied, so angry, so fearful. You look at the long span of history and in terms of health, nutrition, security…countries like the United States, like France, like Germany; the is the best place in history, and people are so dissatisfied.
9:36 (Regarding spirituality as the solution to this dissatisfaction) “The problem of real spirituality is that it doesn’t scale. – You go on a very deep, sometimes difficult journey, to find the answers, and you – no matter what obstacle you encounter – you go on. – (regarding religion) people, they become attached to rites and rituals, they become attached to beliefs, and they forget about the true essence of the spiritual path, and then it becomes a religion (religion does scale), and it often leads to more conflict and political strife – “
13:57 “You take a Jew today, you take a Jew a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, they believe in different things, they dress differently, they behave differently, so religion will continue to change, to adapt to new realities, like the rise of AI will also change religion, – if it wants to survive it has to change; if you don’t change you don’t survive.”
22:20 (regarding money and also AI) “- we see the rise of new cryptocurrencies like bitcoin- based on distrust, you don’t trust the banks, you don’t trust the government, – it’s another sign that humans are losing trust in other humans and instead trying to base their trust on technology, and this is a very dangerous development.”
24:10 “This is the paradox, because we should have more trust in humans than in this completely new alien AI intelligence.”
Yes, Musk has mentioned he is going to freeze himself.
As for democrats doing anything, it is too late. Nothing can save us now except the one thing that cannot happen…the military stepping in and taking Trump and his cronies to Guantanamo. It is the end of America. 248 years of democracy thrown on the trash pile. Whatever comes next will not be what was.
An interesting comment was that if you made 100 million dollars a year and saved every penny it would take a couple thousand years to have as much money as Musk. These creatures consider themselves demi-gods. In their ideology everything is assigned a dollar value, and the worth of a human being is only how much money they have. To them a domesticated animal that is worth several thousand dollars is worth more than an elderly person who can no longer work and is on social security.
As production soared in the 80’s, and unions were busted and taxes were cut, the rise of the super-rich was assured and it was inevitable these monsters would exist. If we had progressively taxed them so they could not amass such astronomical wealth, so they could not come into being, it might have turned out differently.
More confused everyday. I thought “Woke” just meant to be aware of white supremacist policies and worldviews affecting society. Now Chris is telling me, no, it is bad. Some on the left seem to be defecting to the right (not Chris). I was all in for Harris and now….after listening to Thomas Frank I seem to have myself defected from the Democratic Party.
Everything is devolving into many separate camps. Divide and conquer. Some are saying the Russians are behind all this, some are saying Russia is a hoax. It is becoming incredibly confusing. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would say it is Artificial Intelligence manipulating humankind to some superintelligent design. But I am not.
3:54 “-(Wokeness) comes at the expense of universalist class politics that seek to redistribute wealth – those questions drop away.”
4:40 “It is in fact universalist class politics that delivers the most for whatever hyper-variegated subgroup of the most oppressed there is.”
Woke ideology is left in form, professing concern for the downtrodden, but right in content, because it is compatible with economic exploitation…(divide et impera)
Parenti went a little off the rails at the end talking about Covid and “experimental vaccines” and free speech and gradually throughout the interview he alludes to being a Marxist. Chris is not a Marxist and while he called relativism and subjectivism evils, Christian Parenti stated they were not necessarily evil. So, there are some differences here, but Chris seems to agree that “woke is bad” and this is, again, very confusing to those of us who instantly associate criticism of the word “woke” with the far-right demonization of anything progressive.
At a bible study a few days ago the subject of the United Health CEO assassination came up and someone said at the end of the exchange, “it is us against them.” My thoughts as of late have leaned toward, “there is no us” and that is in fact what Parenti is trying to get across: the strategy of the ruling class is to divide the working class up so there is no us. Simple. That Parenti used forbidden language and said the word “redistribute” is refreshing. The phrase “redistribution of wealth” is the universal trigger that enrages the hard right. It has been so incessantly demonized that even liberals will rarely dare to use it. It is the key because in a kind of projection, redistribution of wealth is exactly what the right does for their minority while denying it to the majority. They scream theft when it is about their wealth. In reality, they take almost everything from their workers. They eventually convince themselves that their workers are so fortunate to have the jobs they provide that they should essentially, as wage slaves, work for free. In their Market Fundamentalist belief system, they as individuals have as much “value” as thousands of other human beings.
It is the idolatry of the golden calf. Mammon worship. And it is in the process of destroying humankind.
This kind of discussion is very difficult to find in American media and never on mainstream corporate-owned media. Never.
Social Darwinism and finally showers and ovens is where competition inevitably leads. Cooperation uses competition as a carefully controlled tool. Trying to reverse that is the very definition of corruption.
Whitehouse is the only one even trying anymore, God bless him.
“The lure of fossil fuel money and influence corrupted our politics.”
“-Flooded shorelines, damaged ecosystems, blighted agriculture, and ravaged oceans.”
Space Solar Power by way of lunar resources is the solution to Climate Change. By relocating the entire energy industry to the Moon, the feedback loop of greenhouse gas production while trying to meet demand with renewable energy is avoided. This multi-trillion-dollar public energy project would save the world.
Greed will not allow us to avoid catastrophe.
Financial consequences are nothing compared to what is going to happen.
That is how much money has been transferred from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent over the last half a century. What happened a half century ago? Then end of New Deal imbedded liberalism and the rise of neoliberal Market Fundamentalism.
The Reagan Revolution.
This has brought us three people having more wealth than the bottom half of American society. And with the election of Trump the billionaire class have now ended that society and turned it into a fascist oligarchy.
Nothing can save us from what is about to happen.
We landed on the Moon, and now even NASA is being handed over to a billionaire hobbyist. He “saluted” Musk’s satellite carrying monster rocket with a Russian fighter plane fly-by. The symbolism is apt…Russia is also an oligarchy.
Every day something new and worse. Seeing NASA go out this way is heartbreaking.
This blog was started to promote Space exploration and now I am going to have to take a break from it, maybe for good, and just forget and live what is left of my life on another path.
Trump is in so now this kind of garbage will flood the zone. All we can pray is that showers and ovens do not follow. The only subject I ever received A’s in was Anthropology, so this hits a nerve. When the white supremacists start coming out and using denigration of other races to poison society with “the truth” then it is a huge flag that the end times have arrived.
This is essentially what the Nazis did with their campaign to rid Germany of “useless eaters.” These two billionaires are going to go after all services the government provides for the public using tax dollars. To market fundamentalists, who worship money as the god of this world, non-revenue producing government agencies and any individual not working for them are the useless eaters. As services are cut off, those at the bottom of the pyramid will start protesting and they will instantly become terrorists, just as the black lives matters people and antifa were demonized. This downward spiral into massive civil unrest is exactly what those who want to burn down the government and take control of everything want. White supremacy will become the invisible empire and all these non-whites helping the Trumpists will find this out in the end.
Ice on the Moon 