Democracy, the market, individuality…

A Swedish leader or editorial writer wrote about an affair in Sweden concerning people belonging to the Moderate Party buying votes to the Swedish Parliament:

“It’s not difficult associating to enterprises and entrepreneurs when the moderates in Stockholm are shaken by the scandal with bought members.”

What they have done is not least full of enterprise. Moderate candidates to the Parliament have simply tried to make long-term investments in a well paid job in the Parliament. A revision firm is involved in the investigation of the scandal. The step isn’t far away that the Moderates are introducing themselves on the market he thinks. Even if you shall not exaggerate the scandal the question returns if there isn’t an ideological component in the whole thing.

Because it’s about a party valuing the market higher than anything else and this party’s members would prefer that the politics move away as much as possible in favor for this market.

And in such a climate the democratic voice is hardly as sacred, as in other movements where the politics’ and democracy’s power are seen as more central.

Yes, are they in fact scared to death for democracy? If they get an opportunity they want to undermine it? In favor of themselves?

The democracy’s subversive formula is as follows:

One human being – one vote. This means that the low paid person’s voice is as much worth as the billionaire’s when they are voting.

However, in the market society it’s the billionaire who has the largest influence. But what happens if the billionaire uses his resources for buying votes?

Then the politics falls to pieces. The democracy is invaded by something for it alien to its nature: the power of money.

This is already the case in a country like Italy, where the media mogul Berlusconi is governing the politics with his money and his Medias.

We don’t have such a meltdown here yet. But the Moderate scandal in Stockholm has undeniably its idea political significances.

Another leader/editorial writer writes about the same scandal; that the electoral cheaters farthest in want to make the society entirely nonpolitical. It’s the “business concept” itself, that the representative democracy’s decision makers shall have as little influence over the society as possible.

It’s how the strict right has resonated ever since this country got universal suffrage.

And apropos the much honored individuality:

“Strange to say, we have gotten parties that are for an individuality that’s sticking out for their own personal sake, but now [in the politics] are promoting a vapid conformism [to gain votes].”

And are those who are preaching the individual (the neoliberals for instance) capable of treating individuals individually instead of lumping them together as for instance accusing people for being cheaters - all of them (in the welfare systems)?

Are they giving or have they given other people the same rights as they are demanding for themselves, and do they feel that they have the corresponding duties? Yes, you can wonder.

A Swedish blogger writes about an article about this affair with the heading saying something like “The confidence for the politics is becoming damaged.” The question is if t isn’t already substantially damaged, maybe because that this old type of party politics doesn’t work anymore.

Now with the European Union why shall one vote for politicians who don’t have so much to decide over because the real right to decisions lies somewhere else. But they can lift substantial fees and pensions. In some countries the members of the Parliament has juridical immunity – if such demands are coming to Sweden we really have to look up.

In the comments to the article some commentators try to come with the old waltz that the social democrats aren’t a bit better. As if cheating in one party apologizes cheating in another.

Elites, or we have to live together…

the first spring flowers.

In a letter to the press a person wrote that the society has become an arithmetical problem. People are crouching by everything they read in the newspapers (the financial crisis) wondering how everything shall end.

It seems as people with a need for a work, public welfare or service are the only ones that are costing money in these days. Old people are costing, children are costing, and workers are costing and so on.

Machines, managing directors, board of director pros, EU bureaucrats/politicians and bank palaces are on the contrary necessities and are seen as investments for the future. No, such things and those people with fantasy earning aren’t seen as costs! Isn’t that strange? But the grassroots are seen as costs.

People are mostly a nuisance - and think how expensive they have become. Can the society, if we follow the logic of today, really afford ordinary inform, weak people?

I mean, the writer writes, can one see the man as an asset or are we book valued only as costs in those eras of accountants, where humanism and humanity only have become a question for the private familiar sphere.

Earlier one had an ambition to anchor political decisions in the citizens. This was seen as natural in a representative democracy. Things are decided above our heads. By people who knows better (they think). What’s the opposite of democracy? Dictatorship?

Is this also neo authoritarianism?

Today the decisions are a process between political representatives and different special interests (lobbyists), above all on the private financial side.

A journalist wrote about a film festival here in Sweden, in an article with the heading “We have to live together”, with films like “The Planet” and “Wall E”, “Marie Antoinette”, “La Zona”. Films exploring big societal differences between people.

About the global elite of the Homo sapiens entrenching themselves behind security gates and walls. Security firms are keeping them away from the congregation. Rage is boiling in the ones kept on distance. Our era’s real power elites enrich each other and are fighting for its right to have their hundred of millions in pensions. The moral question is never posed because they don’ understand the meaning of it or understand the word.

To be ethical and decent doesn’t give profits neither on wage or pension accounts in the strict hierarchical private trade and industry life’s Casino bar.

(False or erroneous) claims of being for democracy…

[Slightly edited and updated February 24]. Anja on the blog Do nothing day writes in the blogposting "Now it is here at last" about a news paper that has started (or rather an old paper that has restarted or become reconstructed; a really needed counterweight to the almost dominant liberal and bourgeois press in Sweden today), something I thought was so well said, starting her post with quoting a journalist, Petter Larsson, when he writes that (in my free translation)

"...the political democracy – that the people are governing itself – demands economical and social equality to become real."

Anja reflects on this and writes (in my free translation)

“…this sentence summarizes a non bourgeois attitude, and the ideological ground on which the socialism and the social democracy rests. The idea that democracy is the inviolable, indivisible atom the society is [or ought to be] built up by – and this democracy demands equality to be working, to be a democracy in whole [If there is no or little equality it's no real democracy]. It says itself.

Democracy is built upon that all human beings have the same possibilities to exercise their democratic rights and duties. If a human being is in the point of an economically or socially weak (disadvantageous) position one easily lands in an unavoidable power relation to the ones having the superior (advantageous) position. This is pretty simple and easy to understand.

So the problem at the bottom, when the bourgeoisie wants to re-establish the society’s inequalities from the time before the democracy’s introduction in Sweden (before 1921) [as they are doing now, also see earlier posting on ‘The Neoliberalism and the school…’], is that the bourgeoisie never has been especially fond of the democracy-concept, something they have tried to pretend, however.”

And Anja points to another blogposting where “everything” the Moderate party in Sweden has been against is enumerated. Yes, also see the label contempt for weakness.

Addition February 24: Petter Larsson writes (a little freely):

”What we see now is how old, bad ideas have gotten a renaissance in an increasingly arrogant bourgeoisie./…/

When people are starting to be worn out (whacked) they are scolded for being cheaters, work shy and simulants and are chased to work [divide and rule/conquer, polarize people, play them out against each other; and that sort of leadership is unhealthy, not really sound]. And when people have fled from violence and oppression they have been sent back to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Then it’s time to gainsay and formulate alternatives.”

Yes, how well said, what too many leaders and people in power positions (the ruling classes) show is arrogance, he said it! And also contempt for weakness, beating their breasts, as we say, or swaggering (blowing their own trumpets). And they don't hide it today. It's opportune showing this and saying these things out loud. And on top they pretend that what they do is "for our own good"! And play on many people's tendencies in this direction. The people doesn't now what their own good is!? As arrogant leaders know?? Quite ironically.

"Don't come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis!!!"

President Barack Obama in argument against the American (and Swedish) right's idea that tax cuts can take us out of the economic crisis.

Also see the article (in Swedish) “The Crusade Against the Welfare or the Swedish Elite’s Violent Revolt.”

About the FRA-law, the need for power and control - and integrity violations...

a sea of meadow flowers.

The Swedish Riksdag or Parliament has voted a new law (what is called the FRA-law) through where authorities are allowed to check our emails, the text-messages we send, what sites at the internet we visit etc. and to store it. And we have a right-government and a right majority in the Riksdag…

The blogger Jenny W. writes that (a little freely):

“An important reason that this FRA-law is so horrid is that it can be used against dissidents and whip consensus forward through fright. For us who don’t see more than said diseases [everyday and everywhere] when we read the daily and evening papers and in our talk with the rank-and-file [gemene] journalist, the law comes out as a codification of the already present state of affairs than a real change of them (excuse me for not crying myself to death over the threatened protection of sources [källskydd], but it feels as if that isn’t really the obstacle for newspapers writing about ’dangerous’ things – but, fine, it’s sickly serious that the state has usurped this tool of controlling nevertheless, and of course I understand that protection of sources is important)./…/

Say something dangerous instead [she thinks the rage in the bloggosphere over this law is mostly because it is comme il faut, and for people to prove they stand on the little human being’s side], something dangerous, so it feels as if the law really can’t be imported without threatening values which usually ought to be important. Not this sort of copies' rattle against the power, so they can feel as part of the power.”

The need for power, and control from the power! See Bob Scharf’s essay “Leaders,” that

“…the more defended psychoclasses tend to lead.”

Yes, what we see in many (maybe most) politicians, and from where does the need for power come (be it on a familial level or a societal, even a global)? The power’s arrogance!!! And entire lack of feelings or empathy…

Another blogger at Motvallsbloggen writes that

“There is another reason, the more serious, to be critical to the FRA-law [than file-sharing] because it implies a great departure from democratic principles. Such as that this law is just another part of a pattern that becomes clearer and clearer. The pattern shows a strong will from the governing elites' part to control the populations in the West-world before what’s coming, namely the entire abolishing of the democracy and an even greater pressure on the populations, where it won’t feel as important in the future whether you can share files from the net or not. The FRA-law is only part of an even darker and disagreeable pattern.”

This blogger also writes that there is no real opposition today either! Not from the left either!!! True! And this is really scary...

What can this law mean? That we become careful about what we write and express without even being aware of it too?

And is this really a control-instrument against terrorism (as is said)?? Because the ones with bad intentions already have all means to hide their doings??

It’s violation of the integrity of people in general in the worst manner!!

I come to think of parents reading their children’s letters and diaries…

Yes, there ought to be reactions even from the surrounding world!??? Both on what’s happening here and what’s happening in ones own home-countries! It IS very important we try to influence the state of affairs?? By voting if nothing else!?

Once again, yes, we minimize and belittle, if not deny, that we are violated??? In a similar manner as stood in “The Prize we pay for shaming little boys”:

The reluctance of Germans to ‘know about’ what was done to them after the fighting was over reminds me of those three little monkeys: See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Speak No Evil. In my twenty years as a psychotherapist treating survivors of childhood trauma, I am familiar with this tendency of those who were once helpless to minimize the impact abuse has had on their lives. It is the same with my abused clients who trivialize the beatings of their childhood, saying they deserved to be hit, that they were very bad children. People who have been traumatized tend to normalize their traumatic situations.

It is hard for humans to accept that they were powerless to protect themselves from deliberate mistreatment. They are much more likely to take the blame for having been abused."

And that about obedience, instilling it in children, to be in advance of their supposed innate evilness... Arhur Silber has come back to the theme obedience in his Alice Miller-essays... That's what we see in too many of our politicians in our government today?

Parent’s rights contra children’s…

[Udated June 5 and 6 in the end] In a review over the new book ”Skapelsekonspirationen – Fundamentalisternas angrepp på utvecklingsläran” or ”The Conspiracy of Creation – the Fundamentalists’ attack on the Doctrine of Evolution” by Per Kornhall (picture on him above) it stood that the author points out a somersault in the legislation in Sweden, namely; in it it stands about parent’s rights to educate their children in whatever spirit they feel is right, but this isn’t put up against children’s rights to learn to think freely and make their own opinions. The author means that the children (in religious schools, especially very fundamentalist ones) get democracy deficits or losses; they don’t get equivalent education and not the same possibilities as other children.

He thinks the society should see more to the children’s rights and he want to defend the secular society. The British writer George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906) coined the term "secularism."

Kornhall himself about his book:

”A book about the Christian fundamentalists attack on the theory of evolution and the open secular society.”

Thought this was interesting, and wanted to safe these text and thoughts here.

When I searched on the author and his book I found that he belonged to the religious sect Livets ord for 17 years. Left it 2000. Here his own words about why he thinks this church is a sect (in Swedish). Livets ord started their first primary and secondary (?) school 1985 and five years later a gymnasium. So earlier pupils and students are now grown up... The Livet ord home site. Here about it in wikipedia (in English). Livets ord is the Swedish based church of Word of life.

Here another interview with him in which it stands that Kornhall called himself creationist earlier. Here his blog (both these sites are in Swedish).

My grandmother grew up in a laestadian family with 16 children born on 21 years near the Arctic Circle. She freed herself fairly a lot, or they weren't extremely strict raised, but I think she was marked by her upbringing and what she experienced during it, probably things of many different kinds. She was extremely self-occupied and now as grown up I have wondered over her behavior and what it actually was a sign of: a constant anxiety making her restless. All of a sudden she went from the dinner-table to her bed, when all others sat there eating, which s one of many things.

She forwarded this. But I think people see me as very calm and down to earth (hmmm, see that test about being practician!).

She was 60 years when I was born, her first grandchild. It's a pity I can't interview her any more. I was 31 when she died and hadn't read Miller at that time. I would have wanted to ask her a lot of things. And I wonder if she had answered my questions, if they had been honest and straight forward? I am sure she experienced both physical and emotional abuse, and I wonder about sexual. The physical and emotional abuse they probably didn't see as abuse, but for the children's own good. They were forced to ask forgiveness, even if there was nothing to ask forgiveness about. One thing of many probably...

I have a former friend who joined Livets ord too... I think she had difficulties with herself and was a seeking soul... That's so sad.

George Jacob Holyoake

Addition June 5: I got a tip about the film ”The Clash Between Faith and Reason.” And yesterday evening I watched the documentary "Friends of God" by Alexandra Pelosi. Read here and here about it.

Addition June 6: Was tipped about this film Jesus camp too today.

Addition June 7: But I came across a blog where the blog-owner wrote about evolution in a way that made me feel very uncomfortable, so I don't mean to advocate evolutionism either I want to underline.