An Evening With Danny Glover: Part 2

So it took me so long to finish part two of this blog because I was trying hard not to make it sound like a research paper.  Very hard to do when research papers have pretty much been your life for the last three to four years.  The second point of Danny Glover’s session at Vanderbilt on which I picked up was his mention of President Jefferson’s stance on corporations undermining democracy.  Jefferson himself was a slave owner who thought the notion of owning slaves was immoral.  Yet he freed very few slaves from his two plantations.

At the time, slavery was used to grow and produce the institution of agriculture and created many organizations which thereafter became corporations.  Much like James Madison, Jefferson believed that given the chance, corporations could become too big and override the societies that gave rise to them.  What would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. say about corporations today?  He’d probably say some of the same things that the Occupy Wall Streeters were saying in that the greed of corporations and the wealthiest one percent are disrupting the democracy of this country.

Democracy, plainly defined, is a form of government by which people choose leaders through voting.  However, if you can buy a congressman’s or a senator’s vote by throwing insane amounts of money behind immoral causes, does voting by the people really count?  How does capitalism hurt America?

It is without question that the capitalistic system in America must be transformed.  I recently read an article that mentioned four books that address radical and practical alternative visions for both the workplace and the economy more generally:  Rick Wolff’s Democracy at Work:  A Cure for Capitalism (2012), David Schweickart’s After Capitalism (2011), Gar Alperovitz’s America Beyond Capitalism:  Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty and Our Democracy (2011), and Dada Maheshvarananda’s After Capitalism:  Economic Democracy in Action (2012).  “One important aspect shared by each of these books is that each was either written, or expanded and reissued, in reaction to the crisis of 2008 and the Occupy movement of 2011,” states Hans G. Despain, the article’s author.  “All four books provide highly practical calls to action which are capable of transforming the economy…”

 

One of the questions Danny Glover asked at the point in the talk on MLK Day at Vanderbilt where I jotted down these notes was, “What makes us more human?”  In answering this question for myself, I think of things like being of service to others, having compassion and humility, and loving your neighbor as yourself—all clichés that seem to be lost in this society of being the biggest and the best at the cost of the middle class.  When does one exhaust having more?