Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun
Oh but mama, that’s where the fun is
– Blinded by the Light
So, in 2010, the trajectory of an American life is you grow up a Republican in Cincinnati, attend Princeton, and eventually become a big-shot editor at the Washington Post, and finally end up giving speeches to the Democratic Socialists of America, to which the only immediate response is, “Are they still around?” The next question, how does one get there? Well that’s easy, you quit the Post, write the seminal book on the Fed, Secrets of the Temple, follow that up five years later with Who Will Tell the People, a documenting of the corporate take over of Washington DC, and then just to make sure you’re never invited to another bigwig dinner party, you write One World Ready or Not, a scathing indictment of corporate globalization in the middle of the “high” Clinton years, where the Democratic party became a wholly owned subsidiary of Global INC and Wall Street. Such is the American life of Bill Greider.
Greider’s speech is excellent. It is a shot against way too much pessimism and despair currently gripping this republic. It is a reminder, that this country is a very wealthy place and we need to embrace our history, and more importantly embrace the opportunities to meet the challenges of this era. We need to change, we can change, and it can be better. We can have, as Greider puts it, “larger lives.” But we need to rethink many many things and simultaneously we need to begin to act. Let us first and foremost embrace our heritage of self-government — the democratic idea — as a reconstructed foundation. What is the democratic idea, “Every person has the ability to participate in the decision makings that affect their lives.” Reforming our political economy to the realities of the 21st century, based on this fundamental principle, will get us a very long way.
Cross-posted from Greider
Archein