[Dialogue] [Oe List ...] articulating underlying contradictions of government

[Adam Thomson]

 From this side of the pond I have been listening 
to this conversation with great interest.

I feel emboldened to throw in the fact that in 
this week's Time magazine dated Nov 1 2020 the 
cover article on "Restoring the Amercian Dream" 
by Fareed Zakaria was very helpful (to 
me).  http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2026776,00.html

Love to all,

Adam Thomson in Dover England.

END OF MESSAGE

At 16:34 26/10/2010, you wrote:
>Good article, John.  On this same subject see 
>Robert Reich's Aftershock: The Next Economy and 
>America's Future.  Reich states that "the" 
>contradiction is an ever deepening economic 
>disparity.  (We've heard that one before.)  He 
>deals with this, not as a moral issue, but as an 
>economic and political contradiction with deep social implications.
>
>His thesis is "that our fundamentals are 
>profoundly skewed, that the Great Recession was 
>but the latest and largest outgrowth of an 
>increasingly distorted distribution of income, 
>and that we will have to choose, inevitably, 
>between deepening discontent (and its even 
>nastier politics) and fundamental social and 
>economic reform."  He believes reform will occur 
>but not until there has been a crisis of major 
>enough proportions--economic depression, 
>enveloping war, profound threat to our civil 
>liberties--to cause us to put partisan politics 
>and abstract ideology aside and come back together as one nation.
>
>Randy
>
>--- On Tue, 10/26/10, John Cock <jpc2025 at triad.rr.com> wrote:
>
>From: John Cock <jpc2025 at triad.rr.com>
>Subject: [Oe List ...] articulating underlying contradictions of government
>To: "'Order Ecumenical Community'" 
><oe at wedgeblade.net>, "'Colleague Dialogue'" <dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
>Date: Tuesday, October 26, 2010, 9:58 AM
>
>excerpts from Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt (March 2010):
>Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, 
>fear of decline, fear of strangers and ann 
>unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and 
>interdependence on whiich civil societies rest.
>All change is disruptive. We have seen that the 
>specter of terrorism is enough to cast stable 
>democracies into turmoil. Climate change will 
>have even more dramatic consequences. Men and 
>women will be thrown back upon the resources of 
>the state. They will look to their political 
>leaders and representatives to protect them: 
>open societies will once again be urged to close 
>in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for 
>“security.” The choice will no longer be 
>between the state and the market, but between 
>two sorts of state [which he begins to 
>articulate]. It is thus incumbent upon us to 
>reconceive the role of government. If we do not, others will
.
>As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the 
>point of life was to get rich and that 
>governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed
.
>~excerpts from the opening chapter of Ill Fares 
>the Land (3/2010) by Tony Judt, as published in 
>New York Review of Books 
><http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/29/ill-fares-the-land/>http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/29/ill-fares-the-land/ 
>via Bruce Lanphear, who read this book out loud 
>to Fred during his last few months (he died of 
>ALS about four weeks before Fred)
>
>
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>
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