People Over Share Price

That's how you fight capitalism:  reject the premise.  Refuse to wage a futile battle on the false grounds of Profit Over All.  Demand to fight on the grounds that individuals and communities, not corporations, represent the Highest Value of civilization, and must be treated as such in every decision about our economy, our politics and our future.

Workers before employers. Voters before elected officials.  Customers before corporations. 

People Over Profits.  Every time.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

I am reminded of what David Simon said years ago about what he was witnessing that became in inspiration for his HBO series The Wire.

We are in the postindustrial age. We do not need as many of us as we once did. We don’t need us to generate capital, to secure wealth. We are in a transitive period where human beings have lost some of their value. Now, whether or not we can figure out a way to validate the humanity of the individual, I have great doubts…

As for the characters on the program, their lives are less and less necessary. They are more and more expendable. The institutions in which they serve are indifferent to their existence…

I didn’t start out as a cynic, but at every given moment where this country has had a choice - its governments, institutions, corporations, its social framework - to exalt the value of individuals over the value of the shared price, we have chosen raw unencumbered capitalism. Capitalism has become our god. You are not looking at a marxist up here, but you are looking at somebody who doesn’t believe that capitalism can work absent a social framework that accepts that it is relatively easy to marginalize more and more people in this economy. Capitalism has to be attended to. And that has to be a conscious calculation on the part of society, if that is going to succeed. Everywhere we have created an alternate America of haves and have-nots. At some point, either more of us are going to find our conscience or we’re not.

All of that was happening years before the Great Recession and isn’t necessarily a result of trade agreements. It points to the need to attend to capitalism in a way that puts the value of human beings into the equation of our social framework. In other words, it requires that we expand our moral imagination.

Protesters are Pro-Community, Not Anti-Police.

Because the police are anti-community.

Alex S. Vitale at The Nation:

It is this mindset that undergirds the punitive nature of the “broken windows” theory and the mindset of many police. Therefore, when people talk about restricting the power of the police in any way, they aren’t just threatening the power of police as such, they are threatening the very stability of society. And many police deeply resent the criticism because they really do feel they risk their lives for the well-being of others.

In order to get out of this dysfunction dynamic, we need to focus intently on the ways in which communities can be made safe and functioning without relying on people with handcuffs and guns. Every time a community calls for more police to solve their crime and disorder problems, it is re-empowering not just the police but a deeply conservative ideology that is, at root, demeaning to poor people and dismissive of the ability of the state to use social programs and market interventions to empower and reinvigorate communities. The challenge is not to be anti-police or pro-police, it is to be pro-community.

"Arresting her wasn't going to solve the problem." Put this officer in charge of the Drug War

This is real community policing: the kind that turns people away from crime instead of turning them into bigger criminals.

John Amato at Crooks and Liars:

And now for something beautiful.
 
A Florida police officer bought one hundred dollars of food for a mother that she detained for stealing groceries. A mom decided to steal food to feed her three hungry kids, but the officer that stopped her didn't arrest her.

She asked, do you even have food at the house and I looked at her and I told her no.

I made the decision to buy her some groceries because arresting her wasn't going to solve the problem with her children being hungry so I went in and bought her some groceries.

It's really nice to see kindness like this. If the officer was a Randian disciple, she probably would have arrested her and let the kids be put into foster care. This was much, much better.

Since this story went viral, other people have sent this mother money and one has offered her a job.  That's not kindness; that's community self-sufficiency.  Jailing that mother and her kids would cost the community far more than helping her does.

After the Dream, the Fight Goes On

On the spot where 150 years ago resistant slaves were sold south to die in the fever swamps and cane fields, 300 gathered last night to honor the continuing fight for freedom. 

Jim Warren at the Herald:

Lexingtonians black and white, young and old, celebrated the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March For Jobs and Freedom on Wednesday night, building on the excitement of a huge celebration in Washington earlier in the day.

While the event at Courthouse Square in downtown Lexington couldn't match the size and drama of the remembrance in Washington, the sense of history and promise in local memories of the march and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech carried its own significance.

The Rev. Norman Fischer, parish priest at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church, energized the Lexington crowd by leading the chant "I Am The Dream."

Anthony Wright, Stan Shelby, Jonathan Lott and Halden Hunt, all seventh-graders from Lexington's Carter G. Woodson Academy who were born decades after the march and King's speech, read vivid essays that they wrote celebrating both.

Kudos to U.S. Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes as well as Mayor Jim Gray for attending and addressing the gathering. Senator Mitch McConnell rejected President Obama's invitation to speak at the Washington event earlier.

How Guns Destroy Freedom

By destroying community, of course.

Kathleen Geier at Political Animal:

I do, however, want to strongly urge that you all take a look at this powerful piece at the New York Times’ Opinionator site, by philosophy professor Firmin DeBrabander. DeBrabander makes a compelling argument about how, contrary to the perfervid fantasies of the right in this country, guns don’t guarantee our freedom — in fact, they corrosively undermine it.

Now, I don’t entirely endorse DeBrabander’s argument. Certainly, there are times when violence is necessary to bring about political change. But since those times are the exceptions rather than the rule, I think his thesis generally holds. Here are the key grafs, though of course you should read the whole thing:

As Michel Foucault pointed out in his detailed study of the mechanisms of power, nothing suits power so well as extreme individualism. In fact, he explains, political and corporate interests aim at nothing less than “individualization,” since it is far easier to manipulate a collection of discrete and increasingly independent individuals than a community. Guns undermine just that — community. Their pervasive, open presence would sow apprehension, suspicion, mistrust and fear, all emotions that are corrosive of community and civic cooperation. To that extent, then, guns give license to autocratic government.

Our gun culture promotes a fatal slide into extreme individualism. It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite. And as the Occupy movement makes clear, also the demonstrators that precipitated regime change in Egypt and Myanmar last year, assembled masses don’t require guns to exercise and secure their freedom, and wield world-changing political force. Arendt and Foucault reveal that power does not lie in armed individuals, but in assembly — and everything conducive to that.

PZ Myers finds scientific evidence:

I told you that this problem of mass shootings was amenable to skeptical analysis, and that it would take a comparative analysis to work out exactly why America was so violent. But of course, someone has already done this; this is what sociology is all about. So here’s one interesting explanation that I didn’t think of.

Mass shooters in any nation tend to be loners with not much social support who strike out at their communities, schools and families, says Peter Squires of the University of Brighton in the United Kingdom, who has studied mass shootings in his own country, the United States and Europe.

Many other countries where gun ownership is high, such as Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Israel, however, tend to have more tight-knit societies where a strong social bond supports people through crises, and mass killings are fewer, Squires said.
…
“What stops crime above all is informal social controls,” he says. “Close-knit societies where people are supported, where their mood swings are appreciated, where if someone starts to go off the rails it’s noted, where you tend to intervene, where there’s more support.”

At the Nation, Bryce Covert concludes: 

But this is not the time for going further down the individualist path, for cutting ourselves off from the community we live in. This is exactly the time when we need to reinvest in what we can only do collectively, as a community. We need to come together in ways that can begin to respond to the horror visited upon Sandy Hook.

SNIP

Agreeing to ignore the instinct to pick up more guns means trusting that the police will show up to answer your call, that you’ll be treated fairly by our criminal justice system, that our laws will be enforced in a way that truly prevents violence. Our system fails at many of these goals. But the alternative is each citizen being a private army of one, on the defense against all others around him.

SNIP

To paraphrase something I saw on Twitter in the frenzy of sharing that followed news of the tragedy, if our government can’t keep children from being homeless, hungry and in danger, what is it for? This is what coming together is for. It’s for educating our children together. It’s for ensuring that they’re safe, together.