The obstacle is language
Posted by tiffiniy on Oct 1, 2009

By now you heard Ken Lewis of Bank of America is resigning. A notable proposal from England - turn England's post offices into community banks as a way to save their post offices and serve their neighborhoods.

Today, I heard on the radio an interview with education reformist, E.D. Hirsch. His new book happens to pertain to bank reform. Hirsch shows that the difference between those on the top, people who vote, people who rise in their jobs, those with better pay and everyone else is that the haves have a better command of language. They can talk about politics, so they're more likely to vote. The answer to our bank reform ills and lack of engagement can be overcome if we can help each other be better articulators and thinkers. The populists helped educate each other so that each person really owned the issues, owned their democracy, and lived and breath their civic freedoms. Just as much as we need better language education in our schools, group slike ANWF must engage people through language and promote through forums, etc. We have attempted to do so in the past and we only just covered a small corner of a really large territory. Do we do more? The challenge is that we need to find ways to teach each other to think about corporate politics in order to engage in it and for once defeat a political system that promotes the prosperity of a few in the name of democracy.

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I had to laugh when I read
Comment by jack curtis posted on Oct 11, 2009

I had to laugh when I read this, Tiffany, as it reminded me of an exchange I had with YOU recently: I ask if there's a way I can get in touch w the people from Austin who signed the anti-Fed petition, to see if they'd like to get together to discuss forming a group here in Austin. You say there are plenty of activists in Austin you can put me in touch with if I start a group. I say I don't have time to run a group myself & I don't trust professional activists, I'd rather have a group of like-minded real people start a group & share the burden of running it. You say there are plenty of real people in Austin; If I just start a group, they will come. And I give up.

In short, we each spend our time trying to get the other to do what WE want them to do, rather than what THEY want to do, & get nowhere!

P.S. I'm interested in local signatories of the anti-Fed petition because I view the Federal Reserve as Bush's "nexus of evil", a nest of Usurers who print-up our money for us, claim it belongs to them, then use it to gain control of our political & economic systems, & ultimately the people, gradually reducing them to serfdom & slavery. Those among the sentient 10% of the population who recognise the Fed as an enemy are precisely the people we need to help us deal w the problem, while professional activists, who make their living diverting us into useless peripheral activities, dealing w the ever growing plethora of symptoms rather than the problem, are precisely the people we'd like to AVOID.

( Having said all that, maybe I SHOULD start a group myself, then simply seed it w this message, & see what sort of fruit it bears. )

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