Koch

Yes, Frannie, I just read about it. Thanks for posting.  It's the beginning of the end for these dark money figures. Looking forward to hearing that Charles is fading. 

Jeanne, do you really have a vision that the dark money folks are just going to fade away? We can be hopeful but I am skeptical that the oligarchs will have a change of heart. 

There will always be ultra wealthy people, although there has never been so much wealth in the hands of so few as there is now. If the markets crash, that will actually make the oligarchs wealthier relative to the rest of the world. They actually want a market crash. Then they can buy up cheap labor.  Think Grapes of Wrath.  

But I feel that a large portion of people will break from the oligarch-controlled mainstream economy.  A new grass roots economy will develop. More sustainable, local, peaceful, with less accumulation of useless stuff. More back to basics. The book Grapes of Wrath ends with a lactating young woman bending down and feeding a starving man.  It's a tragic and shocking ending but it has a powerful message:  that no matter what the wealthy barons do to starve people into submission, the fundamental mothering drive to nurture each other will prevail. 

Steinbeck also wrote an amazing letter on New Year's Day 1941 on the subject of evil winning.  The blogger, Maria Popova, found the quote and posted it with her commentary on her amazing website.   Steinbeck, who championed the grassroots,  is saying that evil won't win but it also won't die.  He first says this:

Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded.

But then a note of hope: 

Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked [the influential microbiologist] Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.

Thank you for reminding us about Steinbeck's novels, Jeanne, and for sharing his new years letter. When I look up close at this world, now and into the future, I feel the same sense of pessimism he conveyed. But sometimes I can step back far away from this earth and look again--and feel the hope and peace conveyed by singer-songwriter Julie Gold, who wrote From a Distance.

I pasted lyrics from the Bette Midler version, which tells me that given enough time, enough distance, and enough perspective, everything is fine.