Our government, all branches of it, has failed. Including the Fourth Estate.
Every where we look, brazen corruption and illegality are rampant on the field and riding roughshod over justice, unopposed by a champion of The People.
The latest and lamest outrage can be found here… (h/t Think Progress)
…a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States torturing logic to justify torture by his ideological masters, the Neo-Con Republicans who have usurped our Constitutional government and transformed America into a rogue state that wages illegal war, tortures, and spies on its own citizens. (Including defense lawyers it is opposing in court, fair trial, Hah!)
If you read the blogs, if you are part of the Netroots, if you are paying attention at all, you know how long the list of scandals perpetrated by our out of control, failed government is. The question is….what can we DO about it?
This extends to every issue of course, but at this point, with Bush basically having confessed to both torture ad domestic spying, it seems like a cut and dried cause celebre around which to unite. The crimes are clear. The evidence is there. All that is lacking is the will of Congress to pursue justice. Since they won’t, we must.
Preliminary and defining thoughts:
(Note, this could easily be defined as wanking on my part! My only ‘skill’ is in thinking and talking about this stuff, my aspiration is to do what I can and perhaps, inspire others. I have no illusions about leading a worldwide movement for justice etc. But this stuff needs to be said, so I’m sayin’ it!)
We don’t have the kind of power needed to try and imprison them on our own of course, what we DO have the power to do is to focus the conversation, ideally, to unite in focusing the conversation. The power of a united blogosphere is reflected in the traditional media. If we unite in talking about it, they have to talk about it. If we create a fuss, they have to respond to that fuss. Our power is in the fact that they can’t ignore us.
So….what we need is a vehicle, a form, a way for blogizens to unite. A campaign, a movement. We need a name, we need PR, we need …virality.
We need a clear statement of our goals and our charges.
We need agents to contact the Tradmedia, sympathetic politicians, other blogs and bloggers, as well as folks like Mahathir Mohamad, prominent people of the world stage who show awareness and have access to the Tradmedia to be heard. We need to contact celebrities.
And of course like any good movement out to change the world, we need the invaluable workers, folks to collect and organize the ideas and information and make them accessible and usable. You know….The people who actually get things done….as opposed to wankers like me!
BruceMcF has a good essay along the same lines….coalition. Add suggests lobbying John Edwards to lead some kind of movement! And rewarding politicians, which made me think of the Progressive Caucus, and lobbying them as a body.
wolverine06 talked about the ABA.
NL and 73rd Virgin brought up grass roots/Netroots organizations like Wiser Earth and One World
But mainly what we need right now is to keep talking and moving forward, to keep focusing our writing, and our will, to not let the atrocities against justice on behalf of our War Criminal In Chief fade into history. So …let’s try! If we end up just wanking, well hell, their is nothing wrong with that, it beats twiddling your thumbs!
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… I think “forcing change” may not be the right goal.
But then I’m a believer in the ripple theory, myself (a’la NL, Edger, etc.).
I do agree we should highlight this story and all permutations of it here at DD.
I also think the torture story is extremely difficult to describe in a way the average American can understand — when OPOL even says he had a hard time writing about it, that tells me something.
We need to understand this on a more visceral level ourselves, imo, and be able to write about it in a new way.
(Just wanking along with ya, lol)
60 Minutes interview with Justice (?) Scalia… he’s really
very clever at changing the conversation and even more clever
at parsing the language. To whit: We have the right to not
suffer cruel and unusual punishment. But torture, by his
definition, isn’t punishment! Add to that the fact that he
doesn’t believe the Constitution is a living document…he
believes it is meant to be taken literally. Again, to whit:
They wrote what they meant and meant what they wrote so
there’s no need to look any further. Progress be damned!
Yes buhdy, we really need to get out shit together and soon!
but I think it has something to do with chainsaws.
I think all the “actions” you’ve listed are how organizations continue to fail to bring about real change. When things get organized hierarchically, power and politics tend to take over and the task at hand gets lost.
What I love about what Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest and founder of Wiser Earth, is saying is that the movement is already happening. And this time without a central power house or power figure. Its organic and coming from the bottom up. In my mind, the task at hand is to begin to tap into that movement and connect the pieces.
I remember reading on the blogs a few years ago about “systems that work without leaders.” I can’t find anything right now, maybe I can look a little more later. But I think the idea is to learn what we can from different biological systems that seem to be organized effectively without leaders. For example, flocks of birds that are organized in flight with different leaders for different functions. This kind of thinking is very intriguing to me in helping me imagine a different way.
and it makes total sense.
Perhaps we need an area on the sidebar of the FP to allow each of us to contribute to this list, where we can then begin prioritizing what issues we want to tackle first, what people, groups, celebrities, politicians could speak to each issue most eloquently and then approach them and ask them to be our voice.
It’s a start.
Whatta say, Boss?