Democracy

Political democracy must rest upon economic democracy or it is soon reduced to mere forms, which is currently the case with us.  Elite money trumps whatever anyone besides the elite thinks.

This is most evident to any who have lived, as I have, through the destruction of a dispersed agriculture.  The landscape here, consisting of mostly 200 to 300 acre farms in my youth, is now collected into several six and seven thousand acre empires and the situation of the working people and rural communities becomes much more precarious now than it was in the regular former hard times on the farm.  One of these huge establishments has up a sign advertising for "harvest drivers".  It doesn't trouble itself as to how these drivers are to keep body and soul together for the other forty weeks of the year.  Nowhere in our politics or economy is there any sign of elites troubling themselves over the situation of working people.   

It was Malcolm X rather than Martin Luther King who brought this thinking out during the sixties.  It was his insistence on the need for a dispersed wealth to support the black reach for civil rights, plus his failure to guarantee "non-violence" that struck so many whites as dangerous and radical.  It is why Martin is lionized today as an American saint and Malcolm is a historical figure.  Wall Street thought Martin was "safe" where Malcolm was not.  This is, however, a misreading of Martin, as we will find out.

Political democracy cannot be sustained on anything but economic democracy.  If we wish decent treatment for black people, or if we wish to honor the voice of working people, thus reducing support for the Trumps of the world, we must do it by making it possible for people-all people-to build a bit of wealth thus achieving the stability of life, family and community so necessary to a decent life on earth.