Deaths of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border are increasing, not because of violent drug dealers, but because of federal regulations that punish volunteers who provide humanitarian aid.Penalizing people for offering water to their fellow humans is just plain wrong, but members of No More Deaths, a humanitarian aid group, are being criminalized for their efforts.
The Vanishing Left
Howard Lisnoff points out to us that there is very little in the way of organization and unification of the left in today's political climate.---JoddaThe vanishing left
By Howard Lisnoff
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Herbert Marcuse was prescient in his observation in Eros and Civilization (1962) that "In every revolution there seems to have been a historical moment when the struggle against domination might have been victorious -- but the moment passed. An element of self-defeat seems to be involved in this dynamic (regardless of the validity of such reasons as the prematurity and inequality of forces)."
The latter is exactly what happened to the revolution of the 1960s that I was fortunate to have been a part of. The government killed some of the revolutionaries of that era outright, while others killed themselves, and some sold out to the establishment in enterprises such as business networking. One former radical had time to write a cookbook. The peace "movement" today is splintered and hardly a shadow of the mass movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Even the feminist movement petered out after the Equal Rights Amendment failed to be ratified by two-thirds of the states. There are echoes in that defeat in the present when the pro-abortion movement can't muster the support to get back out on the streets and defeat the lethal right-wing juggernaut that has taken away so much from that movement.
I recently spoke with a woman who is completing a degree in social work at the graduate level. We discussed just why it was that so many students in her program have no idea whatsoever about any continuum of ideas, of just what it means to be politically left or right in the U.S. today. They have no sense of the liberal and left underpinnings of their soon-to-be profession that seeks to understand and ameliorate the undesirable effects of a capitalist society on individuals and families at the bottom of the socio-economic system.
Many students in this woman's program are solely in school to receive certification as a licensed social worker and move into work that involves psychotherapy. Still others seek to fill administrative roles in social service agencies. Quite often the only person with a left perspective in this woman's classrooms, in addition to herself, is the professor. That trend represents one of the positive spinoffs of the 1960s. Many of the professors in this student's program have a left perspective of society and how the real lives of actual people can be improved.
As professors who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s begin to leave academia, there will be dire consequences about where U.S. society will move in future decades. Who will be left to teach subject matter that seeks to redress the many grievances that have been foisted on those who do not control wealth, or those who do not make the decisions about how society will be organized to meet the needs of people?
If the current economic depression is a litmus test of what is to come in post-industrial capitalism in the U.S., then prospects are not good for ordinary people and those who have long-suffered at the margins of this society. Unlike the Great Depression, where there was a credible left presence both on the streets and on policy makers in Washington, D.C., no such lobby or politics exists today! FDR was moved to create massive jobs programs such as the Works Progress Administration, while today's rescue efforts for errant capitalists have absolutely no, or paltry, programs designed to provide jobs and put people back to work.
Instead of a rush to provide medical insurance for all Americans, talk in Congress and in the mainstream media often involves threats to eliminate Social Security and Medicare, or discussions about how those social welfare programs will soon run out of funds. Rather than stabilizing the housing market, in which millions of people have invested their life savings, puny efforts are made to save only a few. Instead of investing in energy efficient means of transportation, money is poured into a dying auto industry that has proven it cannot rise to the challenge of producing energy-efficient autos and environmentally sound mass-transportation systems. In lieu of making wholesome food available to all, schemes are designed to turn farmland into places where substitutes for fossil fuel can be grown.
CBS Evening News runs a series called "Children of the Recession." These are heart-wrenching stories of kids who have been seriously hurt by the economy. Nowhere in the series, however, is there any mention that the economic system in the U.S. is specifically tailored to produce high levels of poverty and human suffering. Some are rewarded through the system, while others starve!
War, which has raged unbridled for so many decades, continues to sap the finances of this nation. Trillions are poured into lethal and immoral nation-building enterprises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and the larger Middle East, while the human wreckage of this society is housed in its massive prison system.
When I graduated from college at the end of the 1960s, both revolution and high ideals existed side by side. There were great imperfections in how society and individuals and groups operated, but there was hope! I don't think that either a society or people can exist without a sense of hopefulness and the idea that the circumstances of life will get better in the future.
The great party that has just ended on Wall Street and in many upscale communities across the U.S. has come to an inglorious end. Soon there will be no organized and unified effort to change the status quo in a meaningful way. And, there will also be no, or few, models in higher education to provide the intellectual motivation to find a new way.
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He can be reached at http://howielisnoff.com.
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