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i don't know what sense the question makes, really. i don't understand how it came to pass that the measure of addressing a systemic crisis is what the talking heads say that obama says, nor do i understand how exactly obama is supposed to single-handedly "fix things"...it's ludicrous. it's like folk see the president as a father figure and so by extension themselves as children. you want to see how the moves that he's made work, wait until there's been enough time for things to start to happen.
right now, folk have no idea what these moves mean because they have no idea how and in what way they'll have effects.
i don't care at all about the ways conservatives use the terms "socialism" or "neo-marxism" because now, as always, they've no particular understanding of what the terms mean. i see them as rightwing memes aimed at attempting to keep the republican approval ratings from dropping into single digits by giving the few remaining faithful something to focus on that they don't like. bad words, bad bad.
fact is that older style democratic socialist politics were predicated on a very different economic geography, both in terms of production and in terms of political power--you know, economies with significant large-scale industrial production in the context of powerful trade unions. you can take a measure of the vaporization of that world by the phenomenon of "outsourcing" and the extent to which labor is now a variable cost.
so i didn't answer the poll.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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