One can open this 173-page book just about anywhere, read a few pages, and have something to contemplate and meditate for the rest of the day, or several days, or a lifetime. The book is divided into 2 parts: “Collapse, Transition, the Great Turning” and “Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times.” The first part, about 2/3 of the book, works as a kind of Zen-slap to wake up the disconnected, mesmerized and unfocussed to the terrible predations we have made on Planet Earth these past 200 years of the Industrial Revolution and 100 years of Corporate-Federal Reserve-Media-Military-Academic State-ism. The last 63 pages consist of pertinent, sometimes glittering, quotes from Ms. Baker’s wide and varied reading in Jung and psychology, the Arts, environment and political matters—and her thoughts in response to those quotes and insights. This is a book with “designs” on the reader: the author intends to warn, inform, and transform.

The book’s author-profile states that Dr. Baker is a “former psychotherapist and professor of psychology and history. She is nationally renowned for her writing and workshops on emotional resilience in challenging times…. Her books include Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition and “Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse. Her website is SpeakingTruth to Power, at www.carolynbaker.net.”

I confess that I have not read Ms. Baker’s previous books, but I have, in recent years, profitably read her articles appearing at some of the best progressive websites as well as her own site. In spite of her obvious erudition, Ms. Baker has a way of “telling it like it is,” without frills–a wise woman talking frankly to those wise enough to listen.

“Our inexorable reality in this moment is one of contraction, decline, and demise. Industrial civilization is collapsing.” Thus, with punches un-pulled, she launches us outward, upward and within from the get-go. There, in the intro, we also learn a little about her recent battles: “As I send this book to publication, I have recently confronted a personal collapse in the form of a health challenge. I have been humbled and constrained by a recurrence of breast cancer. And although my treatment is complete and my prognosis very good… I recognize it as yet another spiritual rite of passage….

Rites of passage, of course, are not easy to navigate… and impossible to circumvent. Fact is humankind in 2014, decades after those prophetic masters’—Orwell’s and Huxley’s—dark premonitions… has succeeded in trumping those foreboding visions. With Ms. Baker’s book and the daily headlines, it’s easy to catalogue the innumerable crises we face: Polar Vortex? What the hell is that? Is there a tie-in with Global Climate Change? What about all this methane gas being released from Siberia’s permafrost melting? What about “Peak Oil”? What about the plume of radiation emanating from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plants? Why hasn’t something been done about the hole in the ozone that I first read about some 30 years ago? When will the endless “peace process” end and we simply have Peace in the Middle East and elsewhere? Are we incapable of transcending our warrior past, our reptilian brain, our genetic, social and historical limitations?

These are some of the questions Ms. Baker would have us examine, and, always, she urges us to know ourselves, to understand deeply. With her background in psychology—especially Jungian–, she exhorts us to know our “Shadow” side—to embrace even the darkness. Collapse consciously! That’s the ticket. There’s hell to pay. We’ve messed up our only home and things will get a lot worse… before they… if they ever get better!

But we can conceive the multitude of challenges we face as a spiritual journey, too.

Let me be clear: this is no namby-pamby “New Age” book where everything turns out honky-dory if only we chant “Om” while the Earth gets fracked beneath our rising kundalini’s. More than once, Ms. Baker enjoins the human race to “grow up!” We are forewarned in the intro: “I am drawn to the perennial wisdom of the towering giants of poetry, story, art, music, and literature. They never have and never will offer us happy stories with happy endings. Rather, they offer us life—in all of its angst, beauty, ire, terror, joy, celebration, ecstasy and demise.” And, again, in her first chapter: “Preparing logistically or emotionally for the collapse of life as we have known it since arriving on this planet is not supposed to be fun.” And, in a later chapter: “Unless we include the possibility of death in our presentation, we aren’t really preparing.” Yes, this is also a book about learning how to die, how to face death.

Like Chris Hedges in Empire of Illusion, Ms. Baker has no patience with our cult of “positive thinking.” I think that cult is a legitimate target of real thinkers (who acknowledge the Shadow), but, occasionally, Ms. Baker over-shoots her mark, conflating all New Agers with Dale Carnegie-type positivists. Of course, “New Age” goes back some 40 years, and is feeling its knees. But much of it was about much more than positive thinking and Ms. Baker knows that in her bones every time she relates a bit of Eastern wisdom, or quotes Lao Tzu or Buddha.

This is a book about becoming whole again; reaching deep within, not to overcome the Shadow, but to integrate and join forces with it. It’s a book about developing a planetary consciousness to confront the global muck we’ve created. It’s a book about making connections—within ourselves, and with others. Ms. Baker quotes Francis Weller, author of Entering the Healing Ground: Grief, Ritual, and the Soul of the World:

“Our sorrow eases the hardened places within us, allowing them to open again and freeing us to once more feel our kinship with the living presence around us. This is deep activism, soul activism that actually encourages us to connect with the tears of the world.”

Gary Corseri has taught in US public schools and prisons, and at US and Japanese universities. His dramas have been produced on Atlanta-PBS; he has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library; and his prose and poems have appeared at hundreds of publications/websites worldwide, including, The Greanville Post, Redbook, OpEdNews, Village Voice, The New York Times, Smirking Chimp, L.A./Hollywood Progressive, Countercurrents, BraveNewWorld.in. Contact: Gary_Corseri@comcast.net.

In the early 2008 primaries, Barack Obama ran to the right of everyone except Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.  By the time it became a two-way race, it took a keen eye to discern even trivial differences between Clinton and Obama.

Nevertheless, it was reasonable to expect that if Obama won the nomination and then the general election, a full-fledged Clintonite Restoration would be less likely than if Clinton won.  Obama would be more inclined to make at least cosmetic changes and to bring in fresh faces.  There was no evidence supporting this conjecture however and, as it turned out, it was too optimistic.

But in 2008 that wasn’t yet clear and, for want of any more promising expectation, it should have been reason enough, for anyone planning on voting Democratic, to seal the case for Obama.  What right thinking liberal would not jump at a chance to say adieu to the Clintons once and for all?

But liberals are a strange bunch.   There are even polls that suggest that many of them hold Bill and Hillary in high regard.  Incredible, but true.

For most well-meaning liberals, it therefore came down to whether skin color or genitals mattered more.  Skin color won.

Meanwhile, a collective disorder, Obamamania, had broken out.

Obamamaniacs expected Obama to launch a Second Coming of the New Deal (or rather of popular perceptions of it), but without the racism of the original and without a World War at the end.  Obama would wipe the slate clean of Bush-Cheney misrule and make everything right.

The illusion had legs: it persisted for well into the first year of Obama’s first term.

But, even in the heyday of Obamamania, anyone of a moderately sensible bent who had been paying even casual attention to Obama’s campaign had ample reason to be skeptical.

To be sure, nothing Obama said or did during the campaign provided any inkling of the assault he would launch on the First, Fifth and especially the Fourth Amendments.

But there was every reason to expect that, as president, Obama would kowtow shamelessly to Wall Street and to every corporate predator that might come along; and that he would be faithful to the neoliberal agenda: austerity politics, milquetoast regulation when full-fledged deregulation is impossible, free trade, deficit reduction, and the rest.

[pullquote][A shameless sellout to the core] Obama did nothing to support the unprecedented popular mobilization that came into being early in 2011, in response to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public sector unions, speaks volumes.[/pullquote]

There was also a large grey area, where the evidence was equivocal.

Candidate Obama gave the impression that while he was not about to end George W. Bush’s wars, he would not just take up where Bush and Dick Cheney left off.

However anyone who believed this was grasping at straws.  That the Afghanistan War would be intensified was clear enough, as was the repackaging of the war and occupation of Iraq.

Those wars had been lost long before Obama took office.  But it was plain that Obama intended to take over stewardship of the empire, and therefore that his highest priority would be to save face.

Bush and Cheney had made that objective Number One years earlier; they might as well still have been in charge.

However Obama did give signs that he would continue the perpetual war regime of his predecessors in a more “multilateral,” transparent, and kinder and gentler way.  That would have been a welcome change.

That, in office, he would instead launch or intensify military and paramilitary campaigns in new theaters of operation in Asia and Africa, or that he would do so, as best he could, in secret, was far from obvious.

It was even less predictable that the supposed peace candidate would morph into President Drone; though, in retrospect, the signs were there.

And, of course, no one could predict which campaign promises Obama would forget about – the Employee Free Choice Act is a prime example — or reverse outright, as he is now doing by asking for fast track authority to negotiate the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement.  With the TPT, NAFTA’s former critic is now hell bent on afflicting upon the world what even Obama-friendly pundits regard as NAFTA on steroids.

In retrospect there too, however, there is a discernible pattern: if it benefits working people, don’t count on Obama to do anything about it; count on him to serve and protect his paymasters instead.

But even in retrospect, the extent to which Obama has sided against organized labor could not have been predicted – not in view of how dependent the Democratic Party is on the union movement for foot soldiers and money.

That Obama did nothing to support the unprecedented popular mobilization that came into being early in 2011, in response to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public sector unions, speaks volumes.

And even when mass demonstrations gave way to a recall campaign a year later (the delay being required by Wisconsin law), the most Obama would do was send out a tweet the night before election day.

Had he campaigned for Tom Barrett, the anodyne Democrat running against Walker, Barrett probably would have won.  The former Milwaukee mayor was not popular with African Americans in and around Milwaukee County.  Obama still was; he could have gotten them out to vote.

But, with the 2012 election looming, the President decided that there was more percentage in keeping mum.  And so, instead of coming into the state to campaign, he very conspicuously courted rich donors across the state line in Minnesota and Illinois.

Blame Republicans, blame the Great Recession, blame “we, the people” for not forcing him to do what he supposedly wants to do, blame whatever and whomever Obama apologists like: the fact is that Obama’s allure was always out of sync with an abundance of evidence, and that the reality has turned out to be even worse than anyone looking at the evidence could have imagined.

However the will to believe is a mighty force, and candidate Obama was good at turning himself into a Rorschach figure upon which unwary voters could project their hopes for change.

Ever resourceful, they claimed, for a while, that in running to the right, Obama was only doing what he had to do; that he was faking right in the campaign so that he could turn left after he won.

Then he did win, and news of his appointments began to trickle in.  The true believers had a new set of “disappointments” to make the best of.

For a while, the word was that it only seemed that he was re-empowering Clinton era poltroons.  In fact, like Abraham Lincoln (according to pop historian Doris Kearns Goodwin), he was concocting a “team of rivals” from whom he would take what he needed but still call the shots.  How shrewd!

But the excuses could only prevail for so long.  It started slowly but, in time, the true believers began to fall away.  By the summer of 2009, the pace accelerated.  Even so, it took almost half a year more for the tail of the comet to break off for good.

By now, Obamamania is a distant memory.  It could hardly be otherwise; the Rorschach figure is no more.

At what point did the illusion – an unconscious wish, in Freud’s terminology – give way to a delusion, an illusion maintained in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

I would suggest that the unmistakable tip off came even before Obamamania peaked — in the summer of 2008 when he announced that Joe Biden would be his running mate.

Biden was not just the right most, or second right most, of the early contenders.   He was a creature of the Democratic Party establishment; too whacky and too loose a cannon to stand alone, but a good choice for Vice President, if the idea is to signal (yet again) that the ruling class would have nothing to fear from an Obama presidency.

Before he entered national politics, Obama had said things in passing that might suggest an independent streak and a penchant for decency and reasonableness that could trouble key constituencies.  Biden could help too with that.

There was no leading Democrat more servile to the Israel lobby or to other nefarious right-wing ethnic pressure groups.  Biden takes to them like a duck to water; all they need do is court him, and he jumps on board.

I thought of Obama’s choice of Biden when it was announced that New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, the great progressive hope (along with Elizabeth Warren), chose Bill Clinton to swear him in at Gracie Mansion.  Could this have been another tip off moment?

De Blasio talked up a “populist” storm at the inauguration, as Clinton – the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral – and his official wife smiled on.  He pledged to reverse New York’s “tale of two cities” — one for the filthy rich, one for everyone else – just as he had during the campaign.

The incongruity is staggering: two Clintons presiding over a speech berating inequality.

No president did more to give inequality a boost or to make the neoliberal agenda the order of the day.  Because he could pull liberals along, Bill Clinton was an even more effective Reaganite than the Gipper himself.

On the root causes of the concerns that led voters to support de Blasio in landslide proportions — trade policy and financial deregulation – no president did more to establish the villainous dictum of Reagan’s political soul mate, Margaret Thatcher: “there is no alternative.”

To be sure, de Blasio and the Clintons are not strangers.  In the early 90s, he was a regional director in Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development and, in the 2000 election, he worked as a campaign manager for the First Lady when she was parachuted into New York to run for the Senate.

But we shouldn’t make too much of this.  To get where he now is, de Blasio, like the young Bill Clinton, had “to remain viable within the system.”  He could hardly not have latched on to powerful Democrats.

It is relevant too that, at least in his first administration, Bill Clinton was less wary than Barack Obama of appointing genuine progressives to low and middle echelon jobs; de Blasio was not the only fish out of water.

Indeed, Clinton’s first Secretary of Labor was Robert Reich, a left-leaning, equality-friendly liberal who mostly kept mute back in the day, but who now, from his perch at UC-Berkeley, sounds rather like de Blasio.

Nevertheless, it was a bit much for the new mayor to have gone on about how “honored” he was to have had the opportunity to work in the Clinton administration.

I know: having asked the former president to administer his oath of office, he had to acknowledge his presence by saying something nice.  But “honored”?  Really?

Working for Hillary, at any time under any circumstances, is even harder to stomach.  But a Democrat’s gotta do what a Democrat’s gotta do.  Maybe de Blasio should get a pass on that as well.

At this point, having not yet done anything awful, the man deserves the benefit of the doubt.

[pullquote]For as long as the wretched Clintons have been on the scene, their way of dealing with left-leaning currents within the Democratic Party has been to coopt what they cannot purge.[/pullquote]

More than that: he deserves praise for talking up equality in Clinton’s face.  That is like talking up privacy or peace or the rule of law at an Obama event.

Still, the incongruity remains.  Why would anyone with a progressive bone in his body bring the Clintons in at all?

The New York Times claims “it was a nod to the pragmatic approach of the former president.”

A more plausible way to put it — also suggested by the Times, though not in so many words — is that de Blasio’s idea was to signal what they euphemistically call “the business community” that it would be unwise to stiff the mayor the way their counterparts in other countries with Third World levels of inequality would.  De Blasio wanted to make a show of having the Democratic Party establishment on his side.

That would matter locally of course, and it is becoming more important nationally too, now that the Republicans are engaged in a fratricidal war between hapless, old order, establishment plutocrats and Tea Party loonies; a war the loonies are winning.

The Times also claims that, for their part, the Clintons are interested in acquiring a “progressive sheen” as the Democratic Party shifts left, and as Hillary “positions herself for 2016.”

In other words, the conventional wisdom, for now, is that de Blasio is playing the Clintons and vice versa.

Maybe that is what de Blasio thinks he is doing — taking advantage of the opportunism that runs in the Clintons’ blood.  But it is a fool’s game; the Clintons don’t take left turns – not for real, anyway.

For as long as that wretched family has been on the scene, their way of dealing with left-leaning currents within the Democratic Party has been to coopt what they cannot purge.

With Hillary Clinton “positioning herself for 2016,” don’t count on that changing just because New York City now has a progressive mayor or because polls show that increasing inequality has got the public’s goat.

If de Blasio thinks he can play the Clintons, he should think again.

He has as much chance of coming out on top as, say, the Palestinians do in negotiations with Israel – with or without John Kerry playing umpire.  The power relations are too lopsided.

Yes, there are Democrats who think of themselves as “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” and there are left leaning Democratic organizations like Progressive Democrats of America.

It is telling, though, that one can hardly utter that name without the word “oxymoron” springing to mind.

This is why, if de Blasio truly deserves the benefit of the doubt  — if he is not, like Obama, just another Clintonized Democrat in disguise – the man is in a terrible fix.

New York isn’t exactly a company town, but the “financial industry” (another euphemism) does have enormous power within it.  A war on banksters, urgent and necessary as it surely is, cannot be fought by one city alone, not even New York City.

De Blasio could hardly fail to worry that banksters and other corporate malefactors will bring his administration to grief; they have motive and opportunity and all the means in the world.

But their power would be nothing without the sufferance and support of the state.  It would therefore help enormously if de Blasio really could get the Democratic establishment on his side.

But that support comes at a steep price.  De Blasio would have to sell out his principles – assuming, again, that, unlike Obama, he really does have principles to sell.

There is no easy way out of this situation.  And the problem is not just de Blazio’s.  It is every genuine progressive’s.

Trying to fix the rot from within is, at best, a waste of energy and time.  The way forward is to break free from it altogether.  De Blasio is bound to realize this soon, if he hasn’t already.  But what will he do then?

*                                                *

Being elected Mayor of New York is a far bigger deal than being elected to the City Council in Seattle.

But Kshama Sawant’s victory there may, in the end, be the more historic achievement.

Sawant ran on the Socialist Alternative ticket – in express opposition to the Democratic Party of Barack Obama and the Clintons.

That she won – at a time when “socialism” has become a term of reproach for both Democrats and Republicans, and when the media all but ignore third parties and independent candidacies  – is attributable not just to her political skills, but to the fact that public support for the two-party system and for capitalism itself is now extraordinarily low.

The Occupy movements provided more than an inkling of this, and the polling evidence is clear.  There has not been a better time in years to shake our duopoly party system to its foundations.

The Democratic Party, in the Age of Clinton and Obama, is beyond redemption.  The only thing it is good for is fighting Republicans back.

This is why the only argument Democratic Party cheerleaders, like the ones on MSNBC, still have is the lesser evil argument.  And, by now, everyone knows or should know where lesser evilism leads; all one need do is look around.

But as de Blasio’s victory in New York shows, disgust with the status quo is so far-reaching and profound that, in the right circumstances, progressive candidates can sometimes win electoral contests under the Democratic Party’s aegis.

But then the next step, if de Blasio is not to go Obama’s way, is just the opposite of the one he took at Gracie Mansion.  It is to break free from the forces he invited in.

De Blasio is of an age when, like everyone else learning to type in the United States, he must have encountered the old drill sentence “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.”

That well-worn phrase is thought to have been contrived by a typing instructor named Charles Weller some hundred years ago.  It has performed yeoman’s service as a teaching aid to generations of students.  But, for de Blasio, it is terrible advice.

What he and other progressive Democrats should realize, the sooner the better, is that Weller got it exactly wrong.  Now is not the time to come to the Democratic Party’s aid.

Now is the time to defect.

This is advice Elizabeth Warren too should heed, along with a few other elected officials.  Progressives, real ones, are not about to become players in the Democratic fold; they are not going to move the party leftward or anywhere at all.

No matter how outrageous inequality has become, that option is foreclosed.  For that, we have not only the GOP but also, more importantly, the Clintons and Obama to thank.

Kshama Sawant won her City Council seat running for office as a socialist.  We need more of that; a lot more.

But it would also be enormously helpful if de Blasio and others like him, who ran and won as Democrats, would join her – if not on the same party ticket then in some other way – by breaking free from the Democratic Party’s control.

A good slogan might be: “Kshama yes, Hillary no.”

For making the world a better place, electoral politics can only be part of a larger story – especially in today’s world where, thanks to neoliberal globalization, democracy deficits are everywhere; in other words, where the outcomes are more or less the same regardless who gets the most votes.

In the United States, where very nearly the only politics there is is electoral, elections are an especially important part of the larger story.

This is why making common cause with the Clintons is such a dangerous game.

Fortunately, though, it is not the only game in town; not after Kshama Sawant and others like her.

A better world is possible; de Blasio’s victory, like Sawant’s, shows that.  But there is the problem of getting from here to there.  The Clinton way is no way at all.

Will it be de Blasio’s way?  Inviting Clinton to do his master of ceremonies routine at Gracie Mansion was an ominous sign.  But, in all fairness, it is too soon to say it was his Joe Biden moment; a tip off of what to expect.

At this point, the jury is out.   It could hardly be otherwise: in all likelihood, de Blasio hasn’t yet figured out what his way will be.

The choice is still his – and everyone else’s who genuinely does believe that a better world is possible, and who is prepared to do something to bring it, not just its “sheen,” into public consciousness.

ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

 

by Cliff Conner and Michael Steven Smith, Black Agenda Report

Lots of people who call themselves socialists have high hopes for Bill de Blasio, the new mayor of New York City. If de Blasio is really as “left” as some imagine, he could use his bully pulpit “to rally public support to fight for socially progressive measures.” The authors have some suggestions.

 

“Martin Luther King said, “If we are going to achieve real equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.”

For a lot of people lately, “socialism” is not a dirty word.  Trying to smear Bill DeBlasio by falsely calling him a socialist seems not to have hurt his campaign at all.  In fact, his support continued to grow and he won by a landslide.

Proving that socialists can be elected in America, a young woman named Kshama Sawant recently ran a bold socialist campaign for City Council in Seattle and, with a great deal of union and community support, defeated a long-tenured Democrat.  A 20l2 national Pew poll discovered that 49% of people under the age of 29 had a favorable reaction to the word “socialism,” and the two most looked-up words in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary last year were “socialism” and “capitalism.”  Pope Francis recently described capitalism as a “new tyranny” that has created a “throwaway culture that discards young people as well as its older people.”  None of this should be surprising, given the failure of real wages to rise over the past 40 years and the quantum leap in economic hopelessness brought about by the 2008 crash and the current great recession.

Imagine if Bill DeBlasio were really a socialist and came into office with socialist goals.  What might he do as Mayor of New York City?  He would have one potent weapon to wield: the “bully pulpit” of which Theodore Roosevelt spoke.  He could mount that pulpit to rally public support to fight for socially progressive measures.

“A 20l2 national Pew poll discovered that 49% of people under the age of 29 had a favorable reaction to the word ‘socialism.’”

Socialist Mayor DeBlasio could continue to emphasize that he is telling a tale of two cities, one of the 99% versus the ruling 1%.  (The disparity is actually much more stark; more like 99.99% against .01%.)  The latter are the finance, real estate, and insurance interests that really run our city, where 50,000 individuals make more than $500,000 a year and 60,000 persons, mostly children, are homeless on any given night.

A socialist mayor could be a tribune of and for the people.  What agenda might he advance?  Here are some possibilities:

*Launch a mass action campaign for single-payer health care, “Medicare for All,” free for everyone, recognizing health as a human right.

*Put the city’s resources on the side of the poorest workers, like those in the food chains and garment shops, and demand a $15-an-hour minimum wage, sick days, pensions, and vacations with pay.

*Find or build housing for every homeless person.

*Support tenants defending rent controls and extend rent control to small businesses as well.

*End the illegal stop-and-frisk practice of the Police Department by withdrawing Bloomberg’s appeal and abiding by Judge Scheindlin’s decision that 600,000 persons a year, mostly young people of color, had their 4th and 14th amendment rights violated.

*Dismantle the police state surveillance of New Yorkers.  Take the street cameras down.  Get the police spies out of the mosques and Muslim communities.  Stop police collaboration and office-sharing with Wall Street bankers.  Get the police out of our grassroots political organizations.

*Allow for street protests without pens and nets and videotaping of activists.  Apologize for collaboration with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in raiding and breaking up the Occupy Wall Street encampment.  Restore the Handschu consent decree limiting how police can spy on New Yorkers.

*Prosecute the banksters who crashed the economy in 2008 and then got bailed out with our money.

*Work to implement a municipal tax code that eliminates all regressive taxes like the sales tax.  Replace them with taxes on Wall Street financial transactions and support higher corporate taxes.

*March on picket lines with teachers and students to roll back cuts in education financing and tuition.

*Declare New York City a “Demilitarized Zone” within the USA where the peace movement is encouraged in its opposition to our country’s illegal, immoral, obscenely expensive, and seemingly endless wars abroad.

*Make education and actions about human-caused climate change the number one priority which if not controlled will doom us.

Michael Moore, echoing FDR, proposed a second Bill of Rights in our visionary new book Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA.  Moore wrote of the goals that might guide a socialist mayor: “That every American has a human right to employment, to health care, and a free and full education; to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and eat safe food; and to be cared for with dignity and respect in their old age.”

Socialism has a tradition in America.  Our most famous thinker, Albert Einstein, was a socialist.  Martin Luther King said, “If we are going to achieve real equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.”  Mayor DeBlasio, as you take office, we remind you of the song of another socialist, John Lennon, who wrote in “Imagine” that “You may say I’m a dreamer / But I’m not the only one / I hope someday you’ll join us / And the world will live as one.”

Mr. Mayor, this expresses the desires of humanity since the days of the prophets.  The majority of the people who elected you would be for it.  Do you dare?

Cliff Conner is on the faculty of the School of Professional Studies of the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he teaches history.  Michael Steven Smith is the co-host of the radio show Law and Disorder and on the Board of the Center for Constitutional Rights.  Both contributed to and Smith co-edited with Frances Goldin and Debby Smith the forthcoming book Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA to be published by HarperCollins on January 22, 2014.

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/imagine-if-mayor-deblasio-really-were-socialist

• Stop-and-frisk [1] | 
• Police Surveillance [2] | 
• Martin Luther King Socialist [3] | 
• socialism [4] | 
• Right to Housing [5] | 
• Rent Control [6] | 
• Pope on Socialism [7] | 
• Medicare for All [8] | 
• Kshama Sawant [9] | 
• Jail Bankers [10] | 
• Albert Einstein Socialist [11]