Paul Rosenberg

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Capitalism is a pretty sticky thing. People like owning, buying and selling, or at least have convinced themselves they do. Key to such a system is, of course, having plentiful jobs paying a living wage, which has been less and less true in America over the last four decades. Every now and then there’s a green shoot, but the arrow overall has pointed down. Thanks to political dysfunction on an epic scale, even a relatively short-term bandage like infrastructure investment has been kept in the medicine cabinet.

It’s not easy to see a long-term solution to AI and robotics disappearing millions and millions of positions. Automation may be our friend in the aggregate, but that doesn’t help those left behind to pay the mortgage. Maybe new industries reliant on humans will emerge, work we can’t yet imagine, but it would seem we’re in for a huge transition this century. How much of a role will capitalism play in this new normal? That’s TBD. I don’t think it’s disappearing, but it is poised for a reinvention.

Not everyone agrees, however. In the same vein as Paul Mason’s writing, Paul Rosenberg has penned the Free-Man’s Perspective post “The System Won’t Survive the Robots.” The writer sees no possible transition within the current system from the way things have been to the way they will be. He believes it will be a break, though not likely a clean one. An excerpt:

We All Know the Deal

We usually don’t discuss what the “working man’s deal” is, but we know it just the same. It goes like this:

If you obey authority and support the system, you’ll be able to get a decent job. And if you work hard at your job, you’ll be able to buy a house and raise a small family.

This is what we were taught in school and on TV. It’s the deal our parents and grandparents clung to, and it’s even a fairly open deal. You can fight for the political faction of your choice and you can hold any number of religious and secular alliances, just as long as you stay loyal to the system overall.

This deal has been glamorized in many ways, such as, “Our children will be better off than we are,” “home ownership for everyone,” and of course, “the American Dream.” Except that it isn’t working anymore, or at least it isn’t working well enough.

Among current 20- and 30-year-olds, only about half are able to grasp the deal’s promises. That half is working like crazy, putting up with malignant corporatism and trying to keep ahead of the curve. The other half is dejected and discouraged, taking student loans to chase degrees (there’s more status in that than working at McDonald’s), or else they’re pacified with government handouts and distracted by Facebook.

The deal is plainly unavailable to about half of the young generation, but as I noted above, hope dies slowly and young people raised on promises are still waiting for the deal to kick in. It’s all they know.

Regardless, the deal has abandoned them. It has made them superfluous.•

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Salon’s raison d’être is to serve up red meat to blue states, to provide liberals with just enough news of conservative outrages, whether it’s the personal opinions of fat-necked fartbag Donald Trump or the judicial opinions of that cracker barrel Antonin Scalia, to keep those clicks coming. But that doesn’t mean what the site reports isn’t true or valuable. Case in point: Paul Rosenberg’s new article about the Christian Right’s separatist dreams. There are scary extremists out there seemingly beyond rational thought, some armed and others in office, who want the country to be what it used to be, even if it never really was what they think it was. History may not be on their side, but they’re sure God is. From Rosenberg:

“A Saturday ago at the annual conference of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal accused President Obama and other Democrats of waging a war against religious liberty and all but openly threatened a violent revolution, AP reported:

‘I can sense right now a rebellion brewing amongst these United States,’ Jindal said, ‘where people are ready for a hostile takeover of Washington, D.C., to preserve the American Dream for our children and grandchildren.’

Of course, Jindal’s speech didn’t come out of nowhere. Jindal is notorious as a weather vane, not a leader. So this is a clear sign of the need to take threats of right-wing violence seriously — and to look to its justifications as formulated on the Christian right.

As the latest wave of theocratic violence continues to play out in Iraq, it must feel exotic for most Americans, for whom theocratic violence is something that happens elsewhere. Yet, the idea of such violence coming to America — something Jindal is apparently eager for — is hardly far-fetched. Violence against abortion providers has been with us for decades, after all, and as Jindal’s pandering suggests, there could well be much worse to come, according to a new article from Political Research Associates, ‘Rumblings of Theocratic Violence,’ by Frederick Clarkson, author of Eternal Hostility: the Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, and co-founder of Talk2Actionorg. While violent rhetoric is nothing new on the Christian right, Clarkson observes, there are reasons to take such rhetoric more seriously than ever before. Above all, some of those most dedicated to the idea of America as a Christian nation are beginning to lose faith in their inevitable success.

‘[S]omething has changed in recent years,’ Clarkson notes, as ‘disturbing claims are appearing more frequently, more prominently, and in ways that suggest that they are expressions of deeply held beliefs more than provocative political hyperbole.’ He also cites ‘powerful indications in the writings of some Christian right leaders that elements of their movement have lost confidence in the bright political vision of the United States as the once and future Christian Nation — and that they are desperately seeking alternatives.”

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