The legacy
by Marge Piercy #poetry

What a world we’re leaving—
I want to apologize to every
child I see. Yes, we baked it,
poisoned it, gutted it, cooked

up new diseases from tropics,
wet markets, arrogance. How
can they ever forgive us,
we who remember oceans

with live fish in them, gardens
with butterflies and many birds,
savannas with lions, jungles
with tigers, elephant families.

We who could swim in clean
rivers, who remember when
hurricanes were occasional
when summers were bearable

in cities. We didn’t care enough
to leave you a livable world.
We were just too busy buying
and selling, polluting and burning.

We were just too greedy to care.

"The communist peasant and trade union leadership that was behind the BDS saw it as a social cooperative embedded in the political struggles of the agrarian classes that would prioritize the welfare of agrarian communities over profit. After the cooperative has covered its expenditure on raw materials, infrastructure, and marketing, it uses a democratic decision-making process to allocate a portion of the surplus to modernize agriculture and expand the cooperative market. The agricultural producers themselves share the remaining surplus in the form of higher prices and better wages.

The BDS has learned from previous experiences of Indian cooperative movements that became trapped in a mesh of state control and bureaucracy, with leadership positions monopolized by members of the dominant castes, rich farmers, and local political elites. It promotes horizontal forms of decision-making based on worker self-management, through which its members conduct their day-to-day affairs and make policy decisions. This facilitates positive change in the relations of production and promotes class solidarity at the workplace."

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/kerala-india-communist-party-farmers-cooperatives-bds-wayanad/

The challenge now is to democratize the American constitution while preserving its function as a framework that protects minorities and ensures their fundamental rights. A big part of the current problem is that the rise of corporate capital and its associated corruptions has generated a different set of interests to those of property holders. Moreover, corporations have used their power over Congress to impose their sectional interests on voters as a whole, for example preventing the protection of the environment. In January 2021, 69% of Americans agreed ‘that American democracy serves the interests of only the wealthy and powerful’. Seventy percent of Democrats believed this, as did 66% of Republicans. This is one measure of a significant loss of consent to the system as a whole.

There are therefore at least two, linked issues at stake in any effort to create a democratic polity in the US. The first is over who is included in the ‘we’ of ‘We, the people’. The second is over the role of big money and dark money in controlling policy outcomes. The latter uses divisions within the former to protect its influence. To turn the page on US constitutional exceptionalism, as Aziz Rana calls for, demands confronting both.

https://www.eurozine.com/the-decline-and-fall-of-american-exceptionalism/#

"The New York Times editorial board has warned that the reason Democrats lost the recent Virginia gubernatorial election is that the party is trying to do too much to solve the country’s problems. Its excessive ambition, the Times says, is off-putting to voters who prefer a government that does less, one that simply presides in quiet dignity rather than overstepping its role with such grandiose goals as ending poverty or providing paid family leave.

I am not kidding. The paper cautions that “polls show that many independents already think that the government is trying to do too much to deal with the nation’s problems,” and says that Joe Biden was elected “because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence,” not because he promised substantive policy agenda. The Times quotes Democratic representative Abigail Spanberger, who says “nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.” The Times criticizes the more ambitious parts of the “Build Back Better” agenda, saying that parts of the “electorate are feeling leery of a sharp leftward push in the party, including on priorities like Build Back Better.”

The Times editorial should offer pretty definitive proof that the basic ideology of the U.S. media is right-wing, not left-wing. Here we have the great liberal Paper of Record taking the position that the Democratic Party is too aggressive in trying to pass transformative public policies, a position I cannot believe anyone really holds. In fact, the party has spent months scaling back its ambitions. It has failed to pass voting rights and police reform legislation. It has dropped attempts to add dental and vision coverage to Medicare, and dropped Biden’s clean power plan. Joe Biden has resisted pushes to cancel student loan debt. If there is one thing I rarely hear anyone accusing the Democratic Party of, it’s that they’re trying too hard."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/11/why-democrats-fold-on-everything/