It's been 40 years since Jesse Jackson's pivotal Rainbow Coalition runs for president. Following Reagan, there were two competing visions for a new Democratic Party, and the bosses ultimately chose greed over unity. How much different our country might have been, had he won. Near tears watching this speech.
But what he points out applies as much now as then! We don't have to despair! We just have to find our courage, and join together.
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I fight for a more democratic world in part because it would be so much richer. Wage slavery starves our souls.
Google’s inappropriate use of AI at the top of their search results is forcing bad information on everyone, because they don't want to appear to be behind the tech curve. "Gemini" often gives false, and even occasionally harmful ("gasoline can be used to make a spicy spaghetti sauce") advice. Insane.
...All of these companies are covering themselves legally. Look closely, and you’ll see a fine-print disclaimer beneath every AI system telling you that the system makes mistakes and that the onus is on you to double-check everything it tells you to confirm it’s correct.
Erm, right. So you can rely on these systems for information — but then you need to go search somewhere else and see if they’re making something up? In that case, wouldn’t it be faster and more effective to, I don’t know, simply look it up yourself in the first place? Maybe using the types of tools we had before these groundbreaking innovations came our way?
Arielle Angel in Jewish Currents:
As I watched people online debate the models of anti-colonial struggle, raising comparisons to Algeria and North America and South Africa, I found myself returning to the foundational Jewish liberation myth: the Exodus. It was hard not to think about the moment in the Passover seder when we lessen the wine in our full cups with our pinkies as we recite the plagues. This ritual has materialized as an indispensable touchstone, insisting that to hold onto our humanity we must grieve all violence, even against the oppressor.
But I also thought of the plagues themselves, particularly the final one, the slaying of the first born—children, adults, the elderly. It seems that hiding in our liberation myth is a recognition that violence will visit the oppressor society indiscriminately. I know that I have many friends, and that Currentshas many readers, who are asking themselves how they can be part of a left that seems to treat Israeli deaths as a necessary, if not desirable, part of Palestinian liberation. But what Exodus reminds us is that the dehumanization that is required to oppress and occupy another people always dehumanizes the oppressor in turn. For people who feel like their pain is being devalued, it’s because it is; and that devaluation is itself a hallmark of the cycle of the diminishing value of human life. As the abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” We are seeing the ways that Jews as the agents of apartheid will not be spared—even those of us who have devoted our lives to the work of ending it.
The loudest Christian factions in the US have made themselves puppets of the powerful for decades, resulting in one of the largest generational shifts against Christianity in this country’s history. Thankfully, there are those who take the second greatest commandment seriously, and are organizing to push back against greed, in love of one’s neighbor.
Matt McManus in In These Times:
The Institute for Christian Socialism (ICS), founded in the late 2010s by scholars and activists, is one of a growing number of left Christian organizations to emerge or be revived over the past decade, from radical Black churches to LGBTQ-affirming congregations…
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Economic anthropologist Karl Polyani traces the roots of early “utopian” socialism to 17th-century Quakers, whose reading of scripture foregrounded equality and collective self-help. In the 19th and 20th centuries, forms of “ethical” Christian socialism and liberation theology flourished in Europe and Latin America. In the United States, Christian socialism has shaped the Left from the Civil War to Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party, from the civil rights movement to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The most influential U.S. Christian socialist, Martin Luther King Jr., combined his demands for racial equality and economic democracy with biblical moral authority — most notably in the mass anti-poverty crusade he was building when he was assassinated.
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Just as there is no singular socialist movement, there is no singular “Christian socialism.” But its history proves that political religiosity has never been the sole province of conservatives. As the Right promotes new fusions of church and state, Christian socialism provides a much-needed corrective, reminding us that it’s the poor and the meek who inherit the earth.
In spite of institutions which can and should fix the massive misuse of water resources around the Colorado river, each local and state government is fighting each other to win the last drop. But they don’t have to. If we truly democratized our economy, we would diagnose and fix the underlying problem—raising cows in the desert.
“…the entire water crisis in the American West comes down to cows eating alfalfa in a landscape where neither belongs. That the delta of the Colorado could be reborn with the water that today goes to produce a third of 1 percent of the nation’s cattle production. That the federal government sets aside 250 million acres of open land for ranchers who produce less than 10 percent of America’s beef. That no amount of water conservation in the home, on the golf course, or in the swimming pools and fountains of Los Angeles and Las Vegas will make a difference as long as half of the country’s water supply is used to fatten cattle.”
We can have nice things, and avoid catastrophe, if we can democratize every system we rely on.