The Democrats have pretty much given up on the white working class. That would require a commitment to economic issues and that's not their concern.
Everything depends very much on who you are, what your values are, what your commitments are, what circumstances you live in and what options you're willing to undertake, and that determines what you ought to be doing.
The first commitment is raise your salary. One of the ways to raise your salary sometimes is to have short-term profits but there are many other ways.
There are a lot of people that form movements around particular commitments, like gay rights. It is important, but it does not link easily to, say, economic rights, and it often looks like it's opposed to them. The attempt to bring these together has yet to be done in a truly effective way, and I think it can be.
the Federal Reserve, has an official commitment to two different policies. One is to prevent inflation from getting too high. The second is to maintain high employment... The European central bank has only the first. It has no commitment to keep employment up.
Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.
America is a very fundamentalist society. It's like Iran in the degree of fanatic religious commitment.
It's kind of interesting and sick that the intellectual culture called the 1960s, "time of troubles," a dangerous period in which a lot of harm was done to the society. And the reason is because we were civilized and that's dangerous. That increased the commitment to democracy, to rights and so on, and this left people much less obedient.
I think that the real tragedy of Greece - aside of the savagery of European bureaucracy, Brussels bureaucracy and northern banks, which was really savage - is that the Greek crisis didn't have to erupt. It could have been taken care of pretty easily at the very beginning. But it happened and Syriza came into office with a declared commitment to combat it, and in fact as I recall they actually called a referendum, which horrified Europe.
