For the Fourth: The False Iconography of the American Religion

When GK Chesterton said that America is “a nation with the soul of a church” most Americans think he was complimenting the US. While Chesterton did indeed find things to admire in America, not least the democratic spirit, he was more ambiguous about this fact.

Indeed, “America” is in fact a religion, most often the One True Religion to most Americans, the one that their other religious convictions must not threaten.

And to the extent that America is a religion, it is a false religion.

As such, it has given us an iconography, as false and sacrilegious as that is. While I hesitate to post such blasphemous images, I believe that the good in exposing this heresy outweighs whatever aesthetic or even moral objections one may raise. And please note that I have not included any satirical art, only that done by sincere, if misguided, artists.

As so, a gallery of blasphemy:

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Toward a Cooperative Economy

From Yes! Magazine:

Throughout the Industrial Age, the global economy has increasingly come to be dominated by a single form of ownership: the publicly traded corporation, where shares are bought and sold in stock markets. The systemic crises we face today are deeply entwined with this design, which forms the foundation of what we might call the extractive economy, intent on maximum physical and financial extraction.

The concept of extractive ownership traces its lineage to Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. The 18th century British legal theorist William Blackstone described ownership as the right to “sole and despotic dominion.” This view—the right to control one’s world in order to extract maximum benefit for oneself—is a core legitimating concept for a civilization in which white, property-owning males have claimed dominion over women, other races, laborers, and the earth itself.
In the 20th century, we were schooled to believe there were essentially two economic systems: capitalism (private ownership) and socialism/communism (public ownership). Yet both tended, in practice, to support the concentration of economic power in the hands of the few.

Emerging in our time—in largely disconnected experiments across the globe—are the seeds of a different kind of economy. It, too, is built on a foundation of ownership, but of a unique type. The cooperative economy is a large piece of it. But this economy doesn’t rely on a monoculture of design, the way capitalism does. It’s as rich in diversity as a rainforest is in its plethora of species—with commons ownership, municipal ownership, employee ownership, and others.

Read the rest here: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-cooperatives-are-driving-the-new-economy/the-economy-under-new-ownership

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