Communitarianism? shhhhhh

Obama's former "Green Czar" calls him a Communitarian

This article has been re-posted all over the internet in the past 2 days. I've looked at about 10 pages of search returns, and only one I opened so far added anything original to the Rebel Pundit's story.

Reading the comments from various sites shows how many people think Van Jones made the term up, and how most say it's just another word for communism. (Exactly what happened when Bill Clinton used the word in Montreal. Nobody there knew what it is either and the reporter said Clinton "coined the phrase"). Only one website that reposted Pundit's article had a link to the ACL, and that was onlysecond hand via democratsagainstunagenda21. 

Really interesting is Van Jones' description of it..... and his telling Breibart there's really no way to look it up. Our anti communitarian research has been on the internet for ten years, we're on the wiki "communitarian" page, but for some reason readers never did a keyword search that would lead to us, or to Etzioni, nor did Jones obviously.

Is this a great way to further confuse the American people, or what?

"Jones compared the president’s address to that of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 and recommended that the theater full of college students read Reagan’s “powerful” and “strong,” inaugurals, which he said were “rooted in American tradition and values,” but “unabashedly” and “unapologetically conservative.”'

Following Jones's comparison of President Obama to Ronald Reagan, the “unabashedly conservative” president, I pressed Jones further for some insight into what and who President Obama really is.

Jones replied: “He is a communitarian.” He then elaborated briefly: “I mean you always have individualism, communitarianism, as a part of the, American story, and I think we’ve overbalanced the individualistic direction and I think he’s trying to rebalance toward communitarianism.”

Later, when asked (off tape) to define "communitarian," Jones was unable to answer or to point toward any source for a definition. He said there wasn’t really a way to look up “communitarianism.”

He did reiterate, however, that he saw communitarianism as a counterbalance to libertarianism, which he equated to “individualism.”

Jones declined an interview with Breitbart News following the lecture.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/01/24/Van-Jones-Obama-is-an-unabashed-Communitarian

.The Big Society - in England AND Seattle by Amitai Etzioni

This should cure any lingering doubts whether or not England's Big Society is a communitarian concept. And, this is wild, Etzioni says Seattle is one of the most communitarian places in the U.S. After all my personal first hand experiences with LA21 community developers/COPS in Seattle, I have to agree. We were called "trash" and "pigs" in Seattle Communitarian neighborhood meetings. We were accused of "spreading disease, crime and immorality" in Communitarian property takings. We were called wackos and conspiracy theorists for suggesting Seattle was communitarian. heh. Communitarians may believe themselves to be friendly do-gooders, but deny them power over you, and you'll see, like we did, just how friendly they really are.

From the Jan 20th Communitarian Newsletter #39:

The Big Society—Beyond Trivia and PR

Critics of the Big Society point to the following anecdote to show that this grand communitarian concept is either trivial or a public relations stunt. A road sign, erected by the government, was repeatedly stolen by pranksters. The mayor asked the members of the community to make donations to buy a new sign. Many did, and the money was used to erect a sign that was much better anchored and hence less likely to be stolen.

Critics, who see in this incident evidence that volunteerism does not amount to much, disregard that volunteers can and do make major contributions to major societal missions. Thus in the United States, over 70% of firefighters are volunteers, and many small communities rely on volunteer first aid squads to handle medical emergencies. On the international front, organizations like Doctors without Borders allow medical professionals to provide aid to underserved parts of the world, and Habitat for Humanity relies on volunteers to build homes for needy families. And the amount of donations made by volunteers is far from trivial. For instance, voluntary donations by Americans to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti amounted to more than $1.3 billion, which compares quite favorably to the amount given by China, namely $15.5 million.

Moreover, one should not take lightly the benefits to the volunteers and donors, above and beyond the benefits to those to whom they reach out. When 400,000 citizens in Seattle, Washington learned to do CPR (nearly one in two), they befriended other volunteers. Such programs are one of the reasons Seattle is one of the friendliest, most communitarian places in the U.S. And social scientists found that when citizens participate in discharging a mission, their expectations are adjusted to the economic and political constraints all such projects face. Thus, they are much less likely to hold that if the government merely put its mind to a given mission, say, cutting fraud and abuse, it would be accomplished in a jiffy. They learn from first-hand experience that progress involves much more effort than it first seems and appreciate much more what is gained. In short, they become better— more reasonable and satisfied—citizens.

Even if one views all volunteerism as Lite Communitarianism, a key component of the Big Society program draws on a societal design that can do heavy lifting; namely, turning over important segments of government work to independent trusts of practitioners, say, health care professionals or educators. For example, the Big Society program calls for setting up “co-ops” of physicians and other health care professionals that will be granted a fixed budget to provide services for a given population in a given area, but with the freedom to allocate these resources in ways they deem will best serve (within broad but enforced national guidelines—for instance, they cannot use these funds to increase their fees beyond some agreed-upon limits). This approach is not driven by volunteerism but is financed by the state, indeed by taxpayer funds. And it involves professionals carrying out their work, not some after-hours mission. The decisions they are making as a group are part of their workday, although these are made much easier than they used to be when the same professionals were all part of the NHS, because now they can proceed with much less red tape and much less need to deal with various layers of government. The same holds for trusts of educators who run schools more or less the way charter schools are run in the United States.

Finally, savings to the public budget come in one obvious and one not-so-obvious way. Obvious savings are generated by the fact that the trusts are granted a fixed amount of money to work with, and they realize that if they need to increase expenditures on some items, it is up to them to find cuts elsewhere. The door is closed to what used to be done in the old days: seek to compel the government to cough up more funds. Less well known is the observation that various local groups are willing to accept some limited cuts in their budgets in return for the much greater autonomy they are granted under the Big Society in the ways they employ these funds.

The Big Society is no panacea or cure-all. However, it can serve to build up the third leg of a good society, the communities, and draw less on the other two: the government and the market.

By Amitai Etzioni

Spent - America After Consumerism by A.Etzioni 6/17/2009

Just found this article Etzioni wrote last summer about how Americans should be forced to replace their consumer culture with a communitarian culture. The New Republic features Will Galston (a prominent communitarian during the Clinton years). The comments are priceless.

http://www.tnr.com/article/spent?id=80661c9c-9c63-4c9e-a293-6888fc845351

The BRussells Tribunal

What a suprise. Bertrand Russell formed an International War Crimes Tribunal to combat "American" wars of aggression.

I guess the fact that Russell was also a founder of the "slow march through American institutions" Fabian Society (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/TUrussell.htm) is supposed to be irrelevant. But hey. What if it was Emma Goldman, a Fabian, who trained McKinley's assassin in 1901? What if the Fabians were the ones who induced Wilson to enter WWI in 1917? What if the Fabians were the ones to introduce America to Fabian schooling after they started WWII in 1933? What if the Fabians' actual mission statement was to spread lies and propaganda to help ensure their plans for a global government? What if the Fabians infiltrated or founded American suffragists? What if the Fabians had a prominent role in the first Zionist war against the Arabs in 1947? Are Fabian Socialism and Zionism compatible political ideologies? They do share the same ultimate goal.

What if the founder of the Communitarian Network is also a Fabian? Does this tie into my renewed interest in their "spirituality"? Well, Annie Bessant and Alice Bailey were Fabians and Theosophists, so yes, it does.

http://www.brusselstribunal.org/

MEMBERS OF THE BRUSSELLS TRIBUNAL
Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, Eduardo Galeano, Noam Chomsky, José Saramago, Margarita Papandreou, Harold Pinter (d.2008), François Houtart, Abdul Ilah Albayaty, Howard Zinn, Edward S. Herman, John Pilger, Michel Chossudovsky, Michael Parenti, Samir Amin, Cindy Sheehan, Denis Halliday, Hans von Sponeck, Hana Al Bayaty, Lieven De Cauter, Jean Bricmont, Sabah Al-Mukhtar, Lucas Catherine, Gideon Polya, Francis A. Boyle, Cynthia McKinney, Socorro Gomes, James Petras, Souad Al-Azzawi, Immanuel Wallerstein, Imad Khadduri, Anne Morelli, William Blum, Dahr Jamail, Saad Jawad, Michel Collon, Sr Anne Montgomery RSCJ, Sami Zemni, David Swanson, Ian Douglas, Curtis Doebbler, Karen Parker, Patrick Deboosere, Pierre Galand, Haifa Zangana, Herman De Ley, Dirk Adriaensens, Fouad Elhage, Max Fuller, Ward Treunen, Hana Ibrahim, Serene Assir, Dirk Tuypens, Bert De Belder, Felicity Arbuthnot, Hugo Wanner, Sarah Meyer and many others {boldface mine}

Why are there so many familiar names on this list? Because I'm supposed to know and put my trust in them? Chossodovsky is one of the leading globalist researchers in the world outside mainstream. I link to his site from here. Howard Zinn wrote the tell-all book on American history, and craftily left out the fact that his "text" was a compeltely Marxist viewpoint, designed to teach disrespect for our founding legal system, which was the only barrier to Marxism we had. How fitting that mother of a sacrificial lamb, Cindy Sheehan belongs to this group. And McKinney the open communist ... man.. what's her role in all this?

The bottom line is THIS group represents the legitimate court "opposition" to the "war machine." If the war machine had no high ranking opposition, would it be as successful at pushing us into wars and ultimately toward a Hegelian solution? If there was no phony Fabian led opposition to the war machine, would there arise LEGITIMATE opposition, reasonable and factual based, that would not lead to a Fabian Hegelian solution?

Jeff has opened up another area I missed in his comments that are really opening my eyes today to how many blinders I still have up. Do the communitarians believe their groups are endowed with rights from God, as we believe (and our law supports) that individuals are? I never looked for the answer to that, because I never asked the question.