( – promoted by buhdydharma )
I find myself, on some level, torn between my highly strained faith in American democracy and a perception that it no longer exists. I applaud and encourage political activism and cherish the activists that I know, but for all their heroism, commitment and hard work, I see us sliding steadily backwards. This has been my observation for the past 40 years. We progressives have faced unremitting defeat at the hands of the ultra-conservative ‘system’, which clearly serves our super-wealthy overlords – not us.
Only over the past 8 years has it become so shockingly obvious just how blatant is the case against the existence of American democracy. It came to a head, in my view, with “Impeachment is off the table.” That betrayal was the ultimate selling out of the American people – and this at the hands of the democratic leadership. That has to shake one’s faith.
Pelosi has made it clear, the American people and the values they hold (such as justice and government of, by and for the people) no longer matter.
It is a mistake to underestimate the damage that has been done over the past 8 years. I’ve heard many people state that our long national nightmare is approaching an end. I believe it unwise to think so. The Bush years have left us in a weakened condition and facing a monstrous confluence of catastrophes that will not go away when Bush does. Chief among these is an intractable and corrupted government intent on the repression and exploitation of American citizens – which does not lend itself to real solutions to our very real problems. We are headed in exactly the wrong direction.
China’s All-Seeing Eye
With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.
NAOMI KLEIN in Rolling Stone
(snip)
The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology – thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric – to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald’s Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out.
(snip)
Remember how we’ve always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American “homeland security” technologies, pumped up with “war on terror” rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.
Will a President Obama and a solid democratic majority make a difference? Yes – but don’t be surprised if it is far less difference that you may be expecting. The ‘system’ that they will be in charge of will remain essentially unchanged. My guess is that they will treat us pretty much just as Pelosi has (and just as Obama has with FISA) – with a velvet ‘fuck you’ delivered with a huge disingenuous smile, just like she did at Netroots Nation. It was sad to see all the lemmings lapping it up. Too sad for words.
It’s enough to make you wonder if another world is even possible.
Naomi Klein: From Think Tanks to Battle Tanks, “The Quest to Impose a Single World Market Has Casualties Now in the Millions”
‘Is Another World Possible?’ That was the theme of this year’s annual meeting of the American Sociological Association that was held in New York City this past weekend. “We did not lose the battles of ideas. We were not outsmarted and we were not out-argued,” journalist and author Naomi Klein said. “We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks.”
(snip)
As we think about reaching this other possible world, I want to be very clear that I don’t believe the problem is a lack of ideas. I think we’re swimming in ideas: universal healthcare; living wages; cooperatives; participatory democracy; public services that are accountable to the people who use them; food, medicine and shelter as a human right. These aren’t new ideas. They’re enshrined in the UN Charter. And I think most of us still believe in them.
I don’t think our problem is money, lack of resources to act on these basic ideas. Now, at the risk of being accused of economic populism, I would just point out that in this city, the employees of Goldman Sachs received more than $16 billion in Christmas bonuses last year, and ExxonMobil earned $40 billion in annual profits, a world record. It seems to me that there’s clearly enough money sloshing around to pay for our modest dreams.
(snip)
And unlike Jeffrey Sachs, I actually don’t believe that what is lacking is political will at the highest levels, cooperation between world leaders. I don’t think that if we could just present our elites with the right graphs and PowerPoint presentations-no offense-that we would finally convince them to make poverty history. I don’t believe that.
(snip)
That’s because elites don’t make justice because we ask them to nicely and appealingly. They do it when the alternative to justice is worse. And that is what happened all those years ago when the income gap began to close. That was the motivation behind the New Deal and the Marshall Plan. [emphasis my own]
(snip)
The real problem, I want to argue today, is confidence, our confidence, the confidence of people who gather at events like this under the banner of building another world, a kinder more sustainable world. I think we lack the strength of our convictions, the guts to back up our ideas with enough muscle to scare our elites. We are missing movement power. That’s what we’re missing. “The best lacked all convictions,” Yeats wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Think about it. Do you want to tackle climate change as much as Dick Cheney wants Kazakhstan’s oil? Do you? Do you want universal healthcare as much as Paris Hilton wants to be the next new face of Estee Lauder? If not, why not? What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?
“What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?” ~ Naomi Klein
“The best lacked all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” ~ Yeats
Where and when will we ever find the courage to resist repression? What will it take to make the American people stand up for themselves? Or is it living in the past to hold out hope for liberty and justice for all – right here in the birthplace of American democracy?
“We are missing movement power.” ~ Naomi Klein
How is it that we have failed to coalesce our collective outrage into an effective movement? I think that we have failed not by a lot but only by a little – and I think the consolidation/corruption of the MSM has accounted for the margin of failure. When a free press honestly covers marches and protests, it grows a movement – just as we saw during the war in Vietnam. Conversely, minimizing or withholding coverage of same can stunt a movement’s growth – and that’s what we have seen in the Bush years.
Disappearing Antiwar Protests
Media shrug off mass movement against war
9/27/05
Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country protested the Iraq War on the weekend of September 24-25, with the largest demonstration bringing between 100,000 and 300,000 to Washington, D.C. on Saturday.
But if you relied on television for your news, you’d hardly know the protests happened at all. According to the Nexis news database, the only mention on the network newscasts that Saturday came on the NBC Nightly News, where the massive march received all of 87 words. (ABC World News Tonight transcripts were not available for September 24, possibly due to pre-emption by college football.)
Cable coverage wasn’t much better. CNN, for example, made only passing references to the weekend protests.
The MSM tactics were the same for our 9/15/07 protest in DC – and every other protest that has occurred during the Bush regime.
We must make the extra effort required to overcome the dampening effects of a dishonest mass media intent on quashing our righteous dissent.
We need everyone to be prepared to hit the streets – or stand up in public for the American dream of liberty and justice for all.
If it were only about liberty and justice, that would be one thing, but this is about the fate of humankind.
‘Shocking’ Truths
The star of the anti-globalization movement [Naomi Klein] returns with a new book that explains Bush’s real agenda
What are the most profound changes the U.S. faces in the next twenty years?
If we just draw all these lines into the future, we can see more disasters, more inequality. We could have a fully privatized response to climate change, with a small group of people buying their way out for a couple of generations. Our world could look more like Baghdad – a green zone guarded by Blackwater and everything provided by Halliburton and then just a raging red zone outside.
What will be the lasting effect of the Bush administration?
People haven’t fully grasped the revolutionary nature of the Bush years. They are leaving a hollow shell to their successors. It’s like what happens in Third World governments, where the reformers take over the presidential palace, only to realize that the power lies elsewhere. That’s what’s going to happen to whoever comes in after the Bush administration. They will find out how much power resides in this parallel contractor economy.
The state won’t have the ability to just cancel those contracts
The state doesn’t even have the ability to oversee those contracts. This is one of their clever tricks – they privatize the war on terror and then say everything about this war is classified, so we don’t even know what we have contracted out. Maybe you catch glimpses of it – the Abu Ghraib scandal breaks, and we find that some of the key people are contractors. We caught another glimpse of it when it became clear that the State Department can’t function without Blackwater.
America has been stolen from us – and this is NOT a figure of speech. If we don’t take it back, our ‘leadership’ will continue to ignore the very real catastrophes that we face – and we will all lose. Everything.
We will all lose. Everything.
How Do We Go from Empire to Earth Community?
The day of reckoning for our reckless human ways that many of us have for decades warned would be coming is here.
We are all well aware of the crisis unfolding around us. The day of reckoning for our reckless human ways that many of us have for decades warned would be coming is here. The future is now. Peak oil, climate chaos, financial collapse, and spreading social disintegration are all consequences of deep cultural and institutional dysfunction. The imperative to address them presents us with an epic test of our human intelligence and creativity. [emphasis my own]
When I was a student in business school my professors always told us. Go for the Big Picture. If you find a problem, don’t just treat the symptoms. Look up stream to find and deal with the cause. Although we face a daunting variety of problems, the big picture of the human confrontation with the reality of our Mother Earth becomes crystal clear once we step back and take a look upstream. This big picture has three critical elements.
The first element is environmental collapse driven by our relentless growth in consumption and population. From the perspective of our Earth Mother our human excesses have for millennia been little more than the normal nuisance one expects from children.Somewhere around 1970 we passed a threshold. Our human consumption became more than a nuisance, it began to exceed what our Mother could bear and began to threaten her very life. We see the results in climate chaos, depletion of fresh water and fertile soils, the collapse of fisheries, the erosion of denuded forest lands and melting ice caps. We are building up toxics in the water, soil, and air. We are killing our mother and thereby ourselves. We must grow up fast and accept our adult responsibilities. The implications are pretty straight forward.
“The implications are pretty straight forward.”
Yes they are. We must get our priorities straight and we must do so in a mighty hurry.
We must stand up every time we have the chance, for everything that is right and against oppression and injustice. Speak out, rise up – do not sit silently as injustices bloom all around you.
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
Elie Wiesel
We need every citizen to stand up like Ray McGovern did.
Ray McGovern Owns Rumsfeld
But confrontation can be so rude. Yes – but some things (like liberty and the fate of our species) are more important than good manners. It’s not the people who sat politely that history will remember (your manners were impeccable).
Good manners are for those capable of reciprocating, not for those who wipe their feet on you.
There is finally a place for rudeness.
I’ve heard many a good progressive put down Code Pink because they offend their sense of decorum. But people, this is serious. This is no time to be quiet and respectful. This is the time to sound the alarm. Code Pink are noisy, rude and clownish – but they get peoples’ attention. And Code Pink will be remembered in history far kinder than will be all those who sat quietly and politely- or those who disapproved of protest, as democracy was displaced by authoritarianism.
Make no mistake, this comes down to the citizens. We have no leaders. We are alone. And if we don’t stand up and turn it around, we’ll lose it all.
Our avenues for recourse have become extremely limited, but we can always choose to stand up.
Am I suggesting violence? No, not at all – I am advocating peaceful civil disobedience. Even less than that, I am asking that we stop taking no for an answer and stop accepting lies for truth – and to stop kissing ass when we should be kicking it (metaphorically speaking).
It’s time we all stand up for what we believe and take every opportunity to speak truth to power – unlike the shameful debacle we witnessed at Netroots Nation.
The disgraceful Pelosi ass-kissing festival I witnessed at Netroots Nation alarmed me – and alarms me still.
If kissing the ass of power is what the netroots have come to – it has come to naught.
It is time to stand up for America – not sit down or rollover. It is time to demand justice and a return to representative democracy that honors the will of the American people. It’s time to demand transparency and sanity in our government and leaders who won’t lead us into war.
It is time to wise up and rise up – or kiss it all goodbye.
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While many people, such as yourself OPOL, have been seeing and fighting what has been going on for the past decades, most of America has been oblivious.
In a way, ut’s sadly ironic that Naomi Klein, the woman who perhaps, has best assembled and defined what is happening to the United States in a single, easy-to-understand, book is not an American. She’s a Canadian.
Most Americans can’t see what’s happening to our country right before our eyes.
I wonder though are we fighting a losing battle? Is retreating a better, personal option for survival? Why are we staying here fighting to save our country when our own countrymen and women seemingly could care less?
Maybe we should just kiss it goodbye and leave?
(needless to say, most Americans) don’t know the words or even the tune:
Perhaps it’s time we start reading things along the lines of What is to be Done.
Your art is great. Your words are great. But it’s your message, trying to raise the apparently dead from their slumbers, that is the most significant and important aspect of your work.
Once again, I’m emailing this to my fence-sitting friends.
http://rockcreekfreepress.com/…
Page 5 outlines the sameness of two “opposing” false political parties. We have one party much like the Communist party, it’s the Globo-corp party.
Rethinking the rural escape scenario as “shortages” are starting to become evident. Transporting stuff to low density populated areas does not seem to be a priority.
saddest, and truest essay I’ve ever seen from you OPOL.
Us, and them
And after all were only ordinary men.
Me, and you.
God only knows its not what we would choose to do.
Forward he cried from the rear
And the front rank died.
And the general sat and the lines on the map
Moved from side to side.
for making me aware of this great article. Naomi Klein is someone I’ve found, because of her sanity and great writing, I can get my fence sitting friends and relatives to read. I will pass this on. Americans may be asleep but they aren’t going to like this one bit. The “Don’t Tread on ME ” aspect of our individualism is going to be hard to control.
For instance I lost my liceence and went to DMV to get a relace net and was told I needed a marrage license to get a replacement as they had no way of knowing how my name got to be what it is with out tracing it though the state, My bith certificate did not match. I don’t even think I filed for a marrage certificate and so I am screwed. No license or picture ID for me.
Everyone in line got really pissed at this. Grumbling erupted words like I can’t believe this is Ammerica came out of drivers mouths and all advised me to just keep driving and screw em. all who witnessed this argreed it was fior immigration repression not terrorists and said thing to the clerk like “You think a terrorists not smart enough to fake a marriage license. But hey the IRS takes my checks signed with my bogus name WTF? Soon we will all be off the grid as only the really ‘upstanding ‘ can get this level of good German together.
Post-Mortem America: Bush’s Year of Triumph and the Hard Way Ahead
Hat tip to Truong Son Traveler for this link the other day…
Go read the whole article, if you can stand to.
There will be an election in November. It won’t be, as many including I have said, a coke or pepsi choice.
It will be a good cop/bad cop choice. Obama is there as the “good cop”. Put there by the Oligarch “Party” to calm and coopt war/fascism/imperialism opposition.
It appears to be working quite well…………………
You paint a rather bleak picture, but, I fear, a realistic one. Naomi Klein has a handle of this whole thing — is anyone REALLY listening? She is reading the “barometer” very well.
When something such as we have experienced these near eight years now has had, more or less, a clear path to its ends, as has BushCo Adm. It is a runaway train that appears not to be stopped in its course.
It isn’t that there aren’t those who have been raising hell right down the line, it’s that there aren’t enough of us — not enough Americans ready to stand up and fight back.
I hope that by the time most Americans do WAKE UP that, indeed, it won’t be TOO LATE!
I hate violence more than anything, but . . . . !
you’ve nailed it again!
your work needs publishing in every sunday paper in the nation…in that parade thingey that everyone reads….
you say plainly what is on everyones mind… i think if this(your work) was public/publicizied more broadly, more people could gather their courage & stand up for what is true & just.
The situation is hopeless. For example, I reluctantly and cynically ended up hoping Obama would be the standard bearer for a movement that moved away from fascism. In fact, he seems to have no interest in doing that at all as can be seen by his statements on Iran and Russia recently.
We on the left have to understand that Obama cannot take a left position on anything because those positions are genuinely disliked by most Americans. Yes, I know that studies show that people want universal health care and peace and all that. But those feelings immeadiately disappear when someone waves the flag and scares folks into supporting the destruction of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights–even Habeas Corpus is gone. Essentially the government can do anything it wants to us anytime it wants–they are no better than the average street gang.
We are endangered and a small minority of the population and not likely to increase in numbers. The only chance we have is to build a tightly knit communities (there are many ways to do that) and use synergy to have an effect on politics as we can see from the many special interest groups that are well-organized with a good grasp of realpolitik (e.g. AIPAC, Miami Cubans) and work that way. We have to understand that most people are hostile to us because we use big words and read books–most of the opposition to the left comes from the visceral hatred of the upper middle class by the lower middle class whites that Karl Rove has mined so expertly. Progressive are elitists and we shouldn’t run away from that term. We can make alliances with working-class folks and that was possible in the 60’s but today that alliance is very difficult since that population is so locked into the mass culture that they are literally hypnotized into thinking rain fall upward.
Every time you do this, the pissed-off person in me rises to the surface and, usually, I bring up the assassinations of the 1960s.
Tonight, I think like a military person.
Let’s define our enemy and our battlefield. If we can define a battlefield we can control, then we can be like Napolean flanking and defeating an enemy (the Austrians) with a much smaller force.
The key, I think, is to define and to lure the enemy onto a battlefield of our own making.
I don’t know how to do it. But I know that getting up each day and thrashing around in the same mudhole, as is done at Dkos, gets one nowhere. Except back at the same spot.
The problem to be solved doesn’t take intelligence or knowledge so much as it does imagination.
Hate to say it, but Karl Rove has lots of imagination in addition to lots of smarts and lots of knowledge.
I’m not sure things would change much if more people were willing to join us and fight back. I really don’t see the MICMC giving up any of their power to control things any more than the same kinds of systems are willing to do in Russia or China today. They have the money and the weapons if/when the time ever comes that they are seriously threatened.
And in my mind, I don’t see that we’ve ever really had a representative democracy – just check into the way the plutocracy got us involved in WWI to ensure their war debts were paid back by our allies.
What makes it different today is that this gang in power right now is flaunting it in our face rather than doing it covertly, in addition to the fact that things like the climate crisis, peak oil, and an economic meltdown are on the horizon.
So I wind up agreeing with banger and magnifico. Our options are to either leave and perhaps get an improved perspective on things and/or build communities that can leverage some power and sustain us when the empire falls.
I keep saying it looks like we are in for some big change, if you get my drift. But it is still too soon to really say, there is still a chance we could pull it out, humanitywise.
We must all hang together….
i find encouragement in your words and ideas. i think some of us are creating new communities, with good cores. it’s all i know to do.
I instantly thought of this diary, which has touched me deeply.
So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have you found? The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
rights and freedoms from our government. Isn’t it possible that our government (well, the elite class) might be bracing itself for the time when our middle class drops into poverty – which is coming, as our tax dollars are transferred to war profiteers? The Patriot act, the telecom spying, the Homeland security police force, and the tinfoil proof crowd control weapons will be very useful when salaries start to go down and prices start to go up.
We’d better believe there is nothing to stop that from happening except our insatiable consumerism. Well, there are alot more insatiable consumers in China so our jobs as consumers can be outsourced. Where will the food come from when everything is so centralized? Our government will need some serious controls put in place when our national blood sugar starts to drop and we get grouchy. I am sorry to see such a bleak future, but poverty is all around us and even those who believe that god protects the US surely must admit that a country that tortures might not remain in exclusive possession of his graces.
Thanks OPOL – I don’t know when the next protest will be but I’ll see you there.
Things stateside are a little better than they appear. I’ll post a diary about it shortly, here. Just some points from this thread for now:
1 – If the real Teresa Heinz posted the comment above, she would serve well in a logistics capacity. Front lines protests as she sees fit and, more importantly, mounting a general legal assistance fund for those arrested — which will be inevitable.
2 – A GenStrike was called last year (on 9-11, as I recall). Nothing happened, no strike.
3 – GenStrike has to have solid enough preparation for what will happen. One day won’t be enough. That will dissipate in the wind.
More later. I’m a warm zone, maybe turning hot.
Never, ever surrender. And love always, no matter what.