Black Cat Stoa

Concerning the Violent Peace-Police

2012-02-09T23:12:00.000-08:00

In response to “The Cancer in Occupy,” by Chris Hedges.
I am writing this on the premise that you are a well-meaning person who wishes Occupy Wall Street to succeed. I am also writing as someone who was deeply involved in the early stages of planning Occupy in New York.
I am also an anarchist who has participated in many Black Blocs. While I have never personally engaged in acts of property destruction, I have on more than one occasion taken part in Blocs where property damage has occurred. (I have taken part in even more Blocs that did not engage in such tactics. It is a common fallacy that this is what Black Blocs are all about. It isn’t.)
I was hardly the only Black Bloc veteran who took part in planning the initial strategy for Occupy Wall Street. In fact, anarchists like myself were the real core of the group that came up with the idea of occupying Zuccotti Park, the “99%” slogan, the General Assembly process, and, in fact, who collectively decided that we would adopt a strategy of Gandhian non-violence and eschew acts of property damage. Many of us had taken part in Black Blocs. We just didn’t feel that was an appropriate tactic for the situation we were in.
This is why I feel compelled to respond to your statement “The Cancer in Occupy.” This statement is not only factually inaccurate, it is quite literally dangerous. This is the sort of misinformation that really can get people killed. In fact, it is far more likely to do so, in my estimation, than anything done by any black-clad teenager throwing rocks.
Let me just lay out a few initial facts:
1. Black Bloc is a tactic, not a group. It is a tactic where activists don masks and black clothing (originally leather jackets in Germany, later, hoodies in America), as a gesture of anonymity, solidarity, and to indicate to others that they are prepared, if the situation calls for it, for militant action. The very nature of the tactic belies the accusation that they are trying to hijack a movement and endanger others. One of the ideas of having a Black Bloc is that everyone who comes to a protest should know where the people likely to engage in militant action are, and thus easily be able to avoid it if that’s what they wish to do.
2. Black Blocs do not represent any specific ideological, or for that matter anti-ideological position. Black Blocs have tended in the past to be made up primarily of anarchists but most contain participants whose politics vary from Maoism to Social Democracy. They are not united by ideology, or lack of ideology, but merely a common feeling that creating a bloc of people with explicitly revolutionary politics and ready to confront the forces of the order through more militant tactics if required, is, on the particular occasion when they assemble, a useful thing to do. It follows one can no more speak of “Black Bloc Anarchists,” as a group with an identifiable ideology, than one can speak of “Sign-Carrying Anarchists” or “Mic-Checking Anarchists.”
3. Even if you must select a tiny, ultra-radical minority within the Black Bloc and pretend their views are representative of anyone who ever put on a hoodie, you could at least be up-to-date about it. It was back in 1999 that people used to pretend “the Black Bloc” was made up of nihilistic primitivist followers of John Zerzan opposed to all forms of organization. Nowadays, the preferred approach is to pretend “the Black Bloc” is made up of nihilistic insurrectionary followers of The Invisible Committee, opposed to all forms of organization. Both are absurd slurs. Yours is also 12 years out of date.
4. Your comment about Black Bloc’ers hating the Zapatistas is one of the weirdest I’ve ever seen. Sure, if you dig around, you can find someone saying almost anything. But I’m guessing that, despite the ideological diversity, if you took a poll of participants in the average Black Bloc and asked what political movement in the world inspired them the most, the EZLN would get about 80% of the vote. In fact I’d be willing to wager that at least a third of participants in the average Black Bloc are wearing or carrying at least one item of Zapatista paraphernalia. (Have you ever actually talked to someone who has taken part in a Black Bloc? Or just to people who dislike them?)
5. “Diversity of tactics” is not a “Black Bloc” idea. The original GA in Tompkins Square Park that planned the original occupation, if I remember, adopted the principle of diversity of tactics (at least it was discussed in a very approving fashion), at the same time as we all also concurred that a Gandhian approach would be the best way to go. This is not a contradiction: “diversity of tactics” means leaving such matters up to individual conscience, rather than imposing a code on anyone. Partly,this is because imposing such a code invariably backfires. In practice, it means some groups break off in indignation and do even more militant things than they would have otherwise, without coordinating with anyone else—as happened, for instance, in Seattle. The results are usually disastrous. After the fiasco of Seattle, of watching some activists actively turning others over to the police—we quickly decided we needed to ensure this never happened again. What we found that if we declared “we shall all be in solidarity with one another. We will not turn in fellow protesters to the police. We will treat you as brothers and sisters. But we expect you to do the same to us”—then, those who might be disposed to more militant tactics will act in solidarity as well, either by not engaging in militant actions at all for fear they will endanger others (as in many later Global Justice Actions, where Black Blocs merely helped protect the lockdowns, or in Zuccotti Park, where mostly people didn’t bloc up at all) or doing so in ways that run the least risk of endangering fellow activists.
All this is secondary. Mainly I am writing as an appeal to conscience. Your conscience, since clearly you are a sincere and well-meaning person who wishes this movement to succeed. I beg you: Please consider what I am saying. Please bear in mind as I say this that I am not a crazy nihilist, but a reasonable person who is one (if just one) of the original authors of the Gandhian strategy OWS adopted—as well as a student of social movements, who has spent many years both participating in such movements, and trying to understand their history and dynamics.
I am appealing to you because I really do believe the kind of statement you made is profoundly dangerous.
The reason I say this is because, whatever your intentions, it is very hard to read your statement as anything but an appeal to violence. After all, what are you basically saying about what you call “Black Bloc anarchists”?
1) they are not part of us
2) they are consciously malevolent in their intentions
3) they are violent
4) they cannot be reasoned with
5) they are all the same
6) they wish to destroy us
7) they are a cancer that must be excised
Surely you must recognize, when it’s laid out in this fashion, that this is precisely the sort of language and argument that, historically, has been invoked by those encouraging one group of people to physically attack, ethnically cleanse, or exterminate another—in fact, the sort of language and argument that is almost never invoked in any other circumstance. After all, if a group is made up exclusively of violent fanatics who cannot be reasoned with, intent on our destruction, what else can we really do? This is the language of violence in its purest form. Far more than “fuck the police.” To see this kind of language employed by someone who claims to be speaking in the name of non-violence is genuinely extraordinary. I recognize that you’ve managed to find certain peculiar fringe elements in anarchism saying some pretty extreme things, it’s not hard to do, especially since such people are much easier to find on the internet than in real life, but it would be difficult to come up with any “Black Bloc anarchist” making a statement as extreme as this.
Even if you did not intend this statement as a call to violence, which I suspect you did not, how can you honestly believe that many will not read it as such?
In my experience, when I point this sort of thing out, the first reaction I normally get from pacifists is along the lines of “what are you talking about? Of course I’m not in favor of attacking anyone! I am non-violent! I am merely calling for non-violently confronting such elements and excluding them from the group!” The problem is that in practice this is almost never what actually happens. Time after time, what it has actually meant in practice is either a) turning fellow activists over to the police, i.e., turning them over to people with weapons who will physically assault, shackle, and imprison them, or b) actual physical activist-on-activist assault. Such things havehappened. There have been physical assaults by activists on other activists, and, to my knowledge, they have never been perpetrated by anyone in Black Bloc, but invariably by purported pacifists against those who dare to pull a hood over their heads or a bandana over their faces, or, simply, against anarchists who adopt tactics someone else thinks are going too far. (Not I should note even potentially violent tactics. During one 15-minute period in Occupy Austin, I was threatened first with arrest, then with assault, by fellow campers because I was expressing verbal solidarity with, and then standing in passive resistance beside, a small group of anarchists who were raising what was considered to be an unauthorized tent.)
This situation often produces extraordinary ironies. In Seattle, the only incidents of actual physical assault by protesters on other individuals were not attacks on the police, since these did not occur at all, but attacks by “pacifists” on Black Bloc’ers engaged in acts of property damage. Since the Black Bloc’ers had collectively agreed on a strict policy of non-violence (which they defined as never doing anything to harm another living being), they uniformly refused to strike back. In many recent occupations, self-appointed “Peace Police” have manhandled activists who showed up to marches in black clothing and hoodies, ripped their masks off, shoved and kicked them: always, without the victims themselves having engaged in any act of violence, always, with the victims refusing, on moral grounds, to shove or kick back.
The kind of rhetoric you are engaging in, if it disseminates widely, will ensure this kind of violence becomes much, much more severe.
Perhaps you do not believe me, or do not believe these events to be particularly significant. If so, let me put the matter in a larger historical context.
If I understand your argument, it seems to come down to this:
1. OWS has been successful because it has followed a Gandhian strategy of showing how, even in the face of strictly non-violent opposition, the state will respond with illegal violence
2. Black Bloc elements who do not act according to principles of Gandhian non-violence are destroying the movement because they provide retroactive justification for state repression, especially in the eyes of the media
3. Therefore, the Black Bloc elements must be somehow rooted out.
As one of the authors of the original Gandhian strategy, I can recall how well aware we were, when we framed this strategy, that we were taking an enormous risk. Gandhian strategies have not historically worked in the US; in fact, they haven’t really worked on a mass scale since the civil rights movement. This is because the US media is simply constitutionally incapable of reporting acts of police repression as “violence.” (One reason the civil rights movement was an exception is so many Americans at the time didn’t view the Deep South as part of the same country.) Many of the young men and women who formed the famous Black Bloc in Seattle were in fact eco-activists who had been involved in tree-sits and forest defense lock-downs that operated on purely Gandhian principles—only to find that in the US of the 1990s, non-violent protesters could be brutalized, tortured (have pepper spray directly rubbed in their eyes), or even killed, without serious objection from the national media. So they turned to other tactics. We knew all this. We decided it was worth the risk.
However, we are also aware that when the repression begins, some will break ranks and respond with greater militancy. Even if this doesn’t happen in a systematic and organized fashion, some violent acts will take place. You write that Black Bloc’ers smashed up a “locally owned coffee shop”; I doubted this when I read it, since most Black Blocs agree on a strict policy of not damaging owner-operated enterprises, and I now find in Susie Cagle’s response to your article that, in fact, it was a chain coffee shop, and the property destruction was carried out by someone not in black. But still, you’re right: A few such incidents will inevitably occur.
The question is how one responds.
If the police decide to attack a group of protesters, they will claim to have been provoked, and the media will repeat whatever the police say, no matter how implausible, as the basic initial facts of what happened. This will happen whether or not anyone at the protest does anything that can be remotely described as violence. Many police claims will be obviously ridiculous – as at the recent Oakland march where police accused participants of throwing “improvised explosive devices”—but no matter how many times the police lie about such matters, the national media will still report their claims as true, and it will be up to protesters to provide evidence to the contrary. Sometimes, with the help of social media, we can demonstrate that particular police attacks were absolutely unjustified, as with the famous Tony Bologna pepper-spray incident. But we cannot by definition prove all police attacks were unjustified, even all attacks at one particular march; it’s simply physically impossible to film every thing that happens from every possible angle all the time. Therefore we can expect that whatever we do, the media will dutifully report “protesters engaged in clashes with police” rather than “police attacked non-violent protesters.” What’s more, when someone does throw back a tear-gas canister, or toss a bottle, or even spray-paint something, we can assume that act will be employed as retroactive justification for whatever police violence occurred before the act took place.
All this will be true whether or not a Black Bloc is present.
If the moral question is “is it defensible to threaten physical harm against those who do no direct harm to others,” one might say the pragmatic, tactical question is, “even if it were somehow possible to create a Peace Police capable of preventing any act that could even be interpreted as ‘violent’ by the corporate media, by anyone at or near a protest, no matter what the provocation, would it have any meaningful effect?” That is, would it create a situation where the police would feel they couldn’t use arbitrary force against non-violent protesters? The example of Zuccotti Park, where we achieved pretty consistent non-violence, suggests this is profoundly unlikely. And perhaps most importantly at all, even if it were somehow possible to create some kind of Peace Police that would prevent anyone under gas attack from so much as tossing a bottle, so that we could justly claim that no one had done anything to warrant the sort of attack that police have routinely brought, would the marginally better media coverage we would thus obtain really be worth the cost in freedom and democracy that would inevitably follow from creating such an internal police force to begin with?
These are not hypothetical questions. Every major movement of mass non-violent civil disobedience has had to grapple with them in one form or another. How inclusive should you be with those who have different ideas about what tactics are appropriate? What do you do about those who go beyond what most people consider acceptable limits? What do you do when the government and its media allies hold up their actions as justification—even retroactive justification—for violent and repressive acts?
Successful movements have understood that it’s absolutely essential not to fall into the trap set out by the authorities and spend one’s time condemning and attempting to police other activists. One makes one’s own principles clear. One expresses what solidarity one can with others who share the same struggle, and if one cannot, tries one’s best to ignore or avoid them, but above all, one keeps the focus on the actual source of violence, without doing or saying anything that might seem to justify that violence because of tactical disagreements you have with fellow activists.
I remember my surprise and amusement, the first time I met activists from the April 6 Youth Movement from Egypt, when the issue of non-violence came up. “Of course we were non-violent,” said one of the original organizers, a young man of liberal politics who actually worked at a bank. “No one ever used firearms, or anything like that. We never did anything more militant than throwing rocks!”
Here was a man who understood what it takes to win a non-violent revolution! He knew that if the police start aiming tear-gas canisters directly at people’s heads, beating them with truncheons, arresting and torturing people, and you have thousands of protesters, then some of them will fight back. There’s no way to absolutely prevent this. The appropriate response is to keep reminding everyone of the violence of the state authorities, and never, ever, start writing long denunciations of fellow activists, claiming they are part of an insane fanatic malevolent cabal. (Even though I am quite sure that if a hypothetical Egyptian activist had wanted to make a case that, say, violent Salafis, or even Trotskyists, were trying to subvert the revolution, and adopted standards of evidence as broad as yours, looking around for inflammatory statements wherever they could find them and pretending they were typical of everyone who threw a rock, they could easily have made a case.) This is why most of us are aware that Mubarak’s regime attacked non-violent protesters, and are not aware that many responded by throwing rocks.
Egyptian activists, in other words, understood what playing into the hands of the police really means.
Actually, why limit ourselves to Egypt? Since we are talking about Gandhian tactics here, why not consider the case of Gandhi himself? He had to deal with what to say about people who went much further than rock-throwing (even though Egyptians throwing rocks at police were already going much further than any US Black Bloc has). Gandhi was part of a very broad anti-colonial movement that included elements that actually were using firearms, in fact, elements engaged in outright terrorism. He first began to frame his own strategy of mass non-violent civil resistance in response to a debate over the act of an Indian nationalist who walked into the office of a British official and shot him five times in the face, killing him instantly. Gandhi made it clear that while he was opposed to murder under any circumstances, he also refused to denounce the murderer. This was a man who was trying to do the right thing, to act against an historical injustice, but did it in the wrong way because he was “drunk with a mad idea.”
Over the course of the next 40 years, Gandhi and his movement were regularly denounced in the media, just as non-violent anarchists are also always denounced in the media (and I might remark here that while not an anarchist himself, Gandhi was strongly influenced by anarchists like Kropotkin and Tolstoy), as a mere front for more violent, terroristic elements, with whom he was said to be secretly collaborating. He was regularly challenged to prove his non-violent credentials by assisting the authorities in suppressing such elements. Here Gandhi remained resolute. It is always morally superior, he insisted, to oppose injustice through non-violent means than through violent means. However, to oppose injustice through violent means is still morally superior to not doing anything to oppose injustice at all.
And Gandhi was talking about people who were blowing up trains, or assassinating government officials. Not damaging windows or spray-painting rude things about the police.

A Radical Analysis of the Tea Party by Zeno

2011-05-24T15:41:00.000-07:00

Understanding the Current Populism
My point in focusing on the “Tea Party” is to deconstruct what is really at play and not allow the Kabuki “right-left” partisan divide of the two business parties to enable the system by scaring people that the lunatics want to take over the asylum so to speak. We have to distinguish the real issues from the diversionary branding and wedges of parties and politicians.
There is nothing new with the Tea Party milieu . It is the same old reactionary shit in a new package. Old style (paleo-) conservatives are rebranding and selling the same old shit in a populist package and that brand is reacting to the Obama brand.
I want to keep this separate from the discussion of political violence committed by the unstable and focus on what is happening with the relatively stable. The violence is a related issue, but the source lies in capitalism’s effects and not just individual psychology. The inherently violent authoritarian mindset is at play in both cases. I’m not saying we pity them in a paternalistic way that we somehow know the truth because we don’t. We just have a more whole analysis of where we are that gets all their psychological societal baggage they are stuck in out of the way. Much has been said of the “insanity” of the Tea Party, but to paraphrase liberal professor Mellisa Harris-Perry: Insanity is an individual characteristic but insanity can also be an appropriate response to situations of oppression, inequality, and a truly crazy system in which people are simply trying to cope.
Focusing on psychopathic and psychotic individuals and corporations is ultimately too narrow because they are just a symptom. Of course it goes further, to the very structure of capitalism, because that is what propels its atrocities not corrupt or psychopathic individuals. The system of capitalism creates and nurtures those personalities and creates an environment to thrive in. We can focus on the horrific beliefs of its psychopathic individual supporters removed from that perspective too often and move away from institutional analysis when we forget many of their beliefs are merely an extension of how capitalism functions. The logical consequence to anti-human belief systems such as capitalism and the politics it inspires is dehumanization and murder. Some suffering the alienation and atomization of this politically shattered society lash out at the managers, leaving the system intact. That is why the eliminationist notion of targeting individuals is also so wrong-headed beyond the obviousness of why it is wrong to maim/murder. We are dealing with a system and institutions of capitalism, authority, domination, and imperialism not some individual who twisted the benevolent system to become a tyrant that only needs to be removed to revert to some benevolent status quo. The teabaggers see Obama as that tyrant they need to depose to gain national renewal rather than grasping it’s the whole system. That is the problem with building a politic around ignoring institutional analysis or conspiracism. Alienated people in our society end up on the internet finding paranoid conspiracies of evil individuals secretly ruining their lives to salve their pain.
The reactionary core beliefs of the far right as manifested by the “tea party” rebranding of the GOP has been unleashed by the capitalists to deal effectively with the working class. In the same type of class manipulation, Brand Obama has been brought in to neutralize resistance from liberals, progressives, unions and the African-American community. This is all intended to divide working people so that an organized movement against the capitalists can’t be waged. What teacher or anybody is going to strike or protest against austerity cuts if they fear being shot by the tea party? Obama makes those cuts easier to swallow for others. This austerity propaganda is powerful. I am seeing non-talking heads internalizing this call for “sacrifice” to save the nation from right, centrist and even some uninformed liberals all over the place.
In normal times nobody listens to these bigots and fringe freaks, but in times like now they're going to be given endless coverage in the mainstream media. This is why the media won't lay the blame on them for any of their acts of violence and will de-politicize the crimes of Loughner and others.(and whitewash the racism) The “tea party” groups and the media are owned by the same oligarchic interests. The tea party is like a faux vanguard made up of puppets of the real vanguard pulling their strings.The Tea Party organizations involved in Astroturf campaigns like the “I support Scott walker” and the various Koch groups are literally protesting against their own human rights on behalf oligarchs. Given that and the authoritarian mindset I think it’s safe to call that proto-fascism. The working people of Wisconsin and around the country have articulated the inspiration of the Egyptian protesters and these teabaggers have taken their cue from the Mubarak goons and throughout the protests to back up the elites against fellow citizens and their own interest. The right will label anything that helps ordinary people "socialism" to scare people away from things we can all agree on like social security or universal healthcare. That is why they are pointing their followers at liberal churches, unions, working class organizations like ACORN, and progressives in their corporate propaganda. That's what's behind all the cries of "socialism" when we listen to them and realize they understand nothing of the subject. They don’t grasp in their attacks on redistribution of wealth as a communist plot, that they in fact argue in favor of redistributing wealth into concentrated hands at the top. Noam Chomsky has essentially called these people social democrats in denial that they are and that’s quite evident in their support of Social Security and Medicare. The idea that social safety nets would extend to the undeserving people of color and poor motivates their faux anti-government “libertarianism”,so their anti-statism really isn’t a point of agreement that could create a tea party-left libertarian/anarchist alliance as some misguided individuals had initially floated. These are statists that only support the right hand of the state. They have made clear they really want to totally destroy any social welfare system and the labor movement. The Kochs are pushing the propaganda to ease this and are pushing to make sure it kills unions. There is a state bankruptcy scheme underway being enabled by Obama that would allow states to do what walker is doing and would automatically cancel out union contracts to “balance budgets” The GOP is refusing federal aid and GOP governors are refusing to receive aid so they can push this scheme to declare bankruptcy. Obama passed something that signaled or allowed the states to go down that path even though states cannot declare bankruptcy. We’ve also seen the dictatorial bill in Michigan that allows the governor to dissolve municipalities for privatization.

Peak Tea

Gallup polling released new survey results on April 29 2011, showing that negative opinions of the so-called tea party movement have risen sharply in the US. For all their claims that most teabaggers are Independents not Republicans, Independent voters have turned away from the Tea Party.
Tea Party influence:
“The April 20-23 USA Today/Gallup poll finds favorable opinions of the Tea Party movement dropping to 33%, from 39% in January, and unfavorable opinions rising to 47% from 42%. Twenty percent of Americans say they haven't heard of the Tea Party or have no opinion of it.The views of Republicans split 60% positively to 24% negatively toward the Tea Party; conservatives' views split 56% to 29%. Substantial majorities of Democrats and liberals view the Tea Party unfavorably. Views of the Tea Party became more negative between January and April among both Republicans and independents; there was very little change in Democrats' already negative views.”

Gender breakdown: “The Tea Party has a relatively strong appeal to men aged 50 and older, 49% of whom have favorable opinions of the movement. By contrast, women aged 50 and older are the most negative, with more than half holding a negative opinion."

More proof of Glen Ford’s contention there is no Tea Party in the South, just the same Southern rightwing politics:
"Southerners are most positive about the Tea Party across regions, with essentially equal favorable and unfavorable opinions. Americans living on either coast are the most negative.”

While the Gallup data bolsters the factual claim that the tea party is the GOP, they make the paradoxical claim that it is not officially connected with the Republican Party as if that makes a difference. So much for that tea party influence on the GOP the MSM fakes. The media hoax that the Tea Party is an independent movement pushing the GOP to the right serves centrist neoliberal propaganda that the Democrats must move to the center/right to meet the mood of the country. There are no Tea Party candidates, no Tea Party policies, and no Tea Party voters. They are all Republicans. They run as Republicans and vote for Republicans. Much has been made of the 2010 electoral sweep, but as Paul Street has pointed out the Tea Party will be dissolved into the party again after accomplishing their electoral goals. Maybe teabaggers will get trotted out every election season, but it was pretty much to run its course to get the current politicians back into Congress and maybe for the 2012 election. Once they get in they shake off the teabaggers but they don’t want to leave.
Democratic and independent voters also paved the way for the 2010 GOP wave by abstaining from elections after burning out on the Hopium and false change of 2008. Voters decided that voting was pointless and stayed home. Desperate people in personal and economic pain reached out to the tea party branded GOP for a lifeline to deal with the real problems of unemployment and foreclosures affecting them and all they get is anti-Planned Parenthood, anti-union, privitization, racist immigration, “Birther”, and anti-Sharia laws. People aren't stupid—they’ve been hoodwinked and now they are waking up with buyers’ remorse and demanding the beef at town halls. The Koch groups are now scrambling to undermine genuine populist outburts by citizens(including conservatives) against their politicians.
These rallies were the first rallies most these people attended and their first taste of political engagement and activism. As Paul Street has pointed out in his upcoming book on the subject,they are completely adverse to organizing which would benefit their goals and probably wouldn’t work towards anything with us either anyway. This proto-fascist milieu and Obama’s do nothing economic plan for the poor/working/middle class leaves us wide open for popular fascism as both parties discredit actual democracy while forcing more managed democracy on us. I think the financial class panic-inspired tea party "populism" ran its course so we go back to straight nationalism as evidenced by the nationalistic political boost the assassination of Osama Bin Laden created.

Countering this rightwing populism
Another great point by Paul Street : In the absence of organized opposition to the recession and economic injustice, many people stung by the recession have been attracted by the Tea Party movement -- an exercise in confusion and distraction focused on government abstractions like "the founding fathers" and details about "the Constitution," rather than economic issues. The Tea Party actually demands more economic hardship for the poorest people while it distracts attention from the failures of the capitalist economic system, and subtlely implies that immigrants and minorities are the real problem with its demands to "take American back." From whom? Certainly not the Fortune 500 or the richest 1 percent who make their income from stock dividends, not working a job -- the Tea Party never mentions them. The Tea Party demands small government, but ignores Big Business.

Rage and a lack of radical analysis gives us teabaggers. The failure and suppression of an American left or any kind of class consciousness is to blame. It’s also our fault as radicals. We need to critically examine what we have failed to accomplish as radicals and activists that fails to speak to other working class people in pain,that inspires hitching their wagon to their abusers to seem like a better idea than class struggle. Radical solutions to the crisis would (at the very least) involve feeding the hungry and homeless, urban farming, organizing unions, taking over the resources people require to live foreclosed people squatting houses, strikes,walkouts, occupying workplaces, expropriating and creating co-ops. I think if we work on all these things people who would otherwise fall victim to the siren call of the Kochs and take interest in what we are doing because we are addressing real needs.
The subject of mocking teabaggers needs more nuance and critical thought in my opinion. If we are just laughing at abused people we are part of the problem. In this regard ,Liberals and Democratic partisans I fear will make this worse by gloating and mocking too harshly those that don’t deserve it and thus any working class folks subject to this kind of thinking will see us as the same as the liberals by virtue of being perceived as being on the left, etc. Like Chris Hedges has pointed out the pathetic failure of the liberal class is a key point of rage for these people. They may be interested to hear our take on liberals. I recommend we save our snark and venom for the liars and opportunists and punch Nazis. We should avoid lashing out at people who are really in a Plato's Cave mentality shielding their false consciousness, because it only reinforces their cognitive dissonance. When we engage and argue with them, It’s like reverse propaganda strengthening their beliefs. I can’t say I wouldn't argue back without being mean if somebody just parroted insanity/lies. We are only human. The frustration can be superhuman when reacting to some attitudes that you just can't help but lash out against the bullshit. It’s hard to rationally debate bullshit.
In closing I want to read this Tim Wise quote:

“We’d best commit to a recognition that most of us are just trying to do the best we can, in a world that can be tough and unforgiving. Trying to raise families, keep our heads above water, and do what we think is right. Occasionally we get it wrong, and so do our neighbors. But that doesn’t make us, or them, terrorists, or zombies, or stealth Stalinists, or baby-killers, or gun nuts, or Klansmen, or whatever. It makes us, and them, human. ”

Authority Smashers Tampa/FL Loose "Manifesto"

2011-04-15T03:17:00.000-07:00

I have been a part of the Authority Smashers Collective for going on almost 3 years now and we have learned alot about the various strengths/weaknesses inherent in long distance online organizing,media production,and fundraising. Our collective's goals have been quite modest and sober but reality is what it is no matter how realistic you are. We have been receiving great advice on how to fundraise from veteran activists and we are planning a sustainer program and other tactics to get sustainable. The gathering of the collective's current active members for the Left Forum in NYC was a great live reunion and reminder of the physical distance we have had to overcome in this project. Local,small core groups with greater direct participation and accountability to one another working together on the project can tackle some of tactical issues with long distance collaboration---more people involved can hopefully further rotate tasks to avoid burnout and the developing of in-groups that end up doing all the work when chaos intervenes.

In a statement on our Authority Smashing! Hour Facebook page,collective member Charngchi "Chomskyan" Way put it best:
"Hi friends, for many reasons, internal and external, we are putting this project on pause for now. Thanks to everyone for all the support. We'll be back soon in another form, in a sustainable manner. In the meantime, we urge all of you to join or start local projects that attempts to smash forms of oppressive authority. Solidarity!" --Charngchi

Ron from Philly has started Deep Green Philly with a page under construction.

Deep Green Philly is a podcasting/news website focused on local and international environmentalism from a radical perspective

I am starting Authority Smashers Tampa to work on ASH-related projects and create a collective based on the same radical anti-authoritarian/anarchist principles from here in Florida.Black Cat Stoa will be a placeholder page for Authority Smashers Tampa until a completed official page is up.

In starting another AS collective,I would like to continue and even expand upon our anti-authoritarian consensus decsion making organizing principles and non-sectarian approach to anarchism with a strong focus on class struggle. I am a member of the IWW,so this will be a continuing wob friendly project. Also the focus on building a radical community,mutual aid,solidarity,organzing radical space,and radical analysis will be main goals. Aside from taking cue from basic affinity group organizing,I'd like to take a cue from our comrades at the No Borders Collective,I would also like to suggest these principles as placeholders(in no particular order) until final principles are agreed upon and posted by a collective:

a)Peoples' Global Action Hallmarks1.A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism; all trade agreements, institutions and governments that promote destructive globalization.
2.We reject all forms and systems of domination and discrimination including, but not limited to, patriarchy, racism and religious fundamentalism of all creeds. We embrace the full dignity of all human beings.
3.A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations, in which transnational capital is the only real policy-maker.
4.A call to direct action and civil disobedience, support for social movements’ struggles, advocating forms of resistance which maximize respect for life and oppressed peoples’ rights, as well as the construction of local alternatives to global capitalism.
5.An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy.

b)the St Paul Principles:

1. our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the
plans of other groups.
2. the actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of
time or space.
3. any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement, avoiding any
public or media denunciations of fellow activists and events.
4. we oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance,
infiltration, disruption and violence. we agree not to assist law enforcement
actions against activists and others.

c)NYMAA: Purposes of Existence
A. General Propaganda: To increase the visibility and spread of basic anarchist ideas and information among the general populace through a variety of means.
B. Social Struggles: To establish an anarchist presence in social struggles against oppression and towards freedom.
C. Building Blocks: To create the basis of an anarchist society by building federated socio-economic institutions that reject the illogic of capitalism and the state. This approach is traditionally called "dual power," and consists of production and distribution cooperatives, workers, and neighborhood councils and assemblies, communal housing and shelter, free schools, community/social centers, etc.
D. Coordination & Communication: To increase the level of joint activity, coordination, and face-to-face communication among already established anarchist and social justice organizations.
E. Social Community: To facilitate comradely interaction among anarchists through such means as social events and parties, printed material, classes, forums, discussions, workshops, and reading groups.

e)The RAAN and LAFF models are also an influence for me.

As an anarchist I will reassert that radical feminism is a given as well as the anti-racist,pro-queer,free love principles inherent or listed in above principles.
Since the AS Collective has been proportionately a collective of people of color(as well as women,queer,and disabled),I'd like to include certain APOC principles as well: http://www.peopleofcolororganize.com/organizing/antioppression-principles-practice/
I think these principles from this online revolutionary group can more fully apply in an anarchist context(and outside radical spaces) and serve as points of solidarity and intervention between activists and communities of all "stripes":

Again,we should oppose any form of white cultural chauvinism/"whiteness",white supremacy, or internalized racism in the anarchist movement. I find it troubling that groups have to organize into APOC and white allies when the anti-racism/privelege should be a given like our feminism and acceptance of our LGBTQ comrades and rejection of rigid gender roles.

I also suggest principles similar to these.

Any Florida anarchists and other anti-authoritarian radicals interested in strengthening a radical presence/community in Florida can reach me at ashcollective@gmail.com

Bizarre/Propaganda Comics

2011-02-09T13:51:00.000-08:00

Here is an excellent blog describing and deconstructing a strange turn to propaganda for the notoriously safe Archie comics. Insanity and Bircher rightwing propagansa abound!

And we are brought back to Hansi as well in this history of crazy Christian propaganda comics.

Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen on Totalitarianism and Resistance

2010-07-16T22:29:00.001-07:00

From Truthout:What is it going to take for concerned and engaged citizens to finally feel as though some crucial threshold has been crossed—that our nation’s political system and the global corporate culture it both serves and feeds into will never represent them or serve their needs? Continuing along that line, what’s to be done once that realization has hit home, as it has for authors Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen? Both Hedges and Jensen offer their ideas in this July 5 interview with Mount Royal University professor Michael Truscello.

http://www.4shared.com/audio/xuueOVa1/Derrick_Jensen_and_Chris_Hedge.html

Great Used Book Finds

2010-06-19T00:58:00.000-07:00

I was very surprised when I ran across these titles at a neat local used bookstore. First I found a decent copy(there is some hightlighting inside) of Guy Debord's situationist masterwork The Society of the Spectacle.

I found an infamous pulp classic I have only read about. A winter 1947 quarterly issue of Amazing Stories featuring The Shaver Mystery. Richard Sharpe Shaver was essentially a mentally ill writer that believed his wild fortean yarns who was exploited by an opportunistic editor/publisher.

From Wikipedia:

Very little is known reliably about Shaver's early life. He claimed to have worked in a factory, where, in 1932, odd things began to occur. As Bruce Lanier Wright notes, Shaver "began to notice that one of the welding guns on his job site, 'by some freak of its coil's field atunements,' was allowing him to hear the thoughts of the men working around him. More frighteningly, he then received the telepathic record of a torture session conducted by malign entities in caverns deep within the earth." According to Barkun, Shaver offered inconsistent accounts of how he first learned of the hidden cavern world, but that the assembly line story was the "most common version." Shaver said he then quit his job, and became a hobo for a period.
Barkun writes that "Shaver was hospitalized briefly for psychiatric problems in 1934, but there does not appear to have been a clear diagnosis."Barkun notes that afterwards, Shaver's whereabouts and actions cannot be reliably traced until the early 1940s.

The magazine I got itself.

The June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories featuring the "Shaver Mystery" I wonder how much a good quality version of the one I have would be worth compared to a copy of this one.

This article on Devil's Tower caught my attention. Inspiration to Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

Shaver wrote of extremely advanced pre-historic races who had built cavern cities inside Earth before abandoning Earth for another planet due to damaging radiation from the Sun. Those ancients also abandoned some of their own offspring here, a minority of whom remained noble and human "Teros", while most degenerated over time into a population of mentally impaired sadists known as Deros—short for "detrimental robots." Shaver's "robots" were not mechanical constructs, but were robot-like due to their savage behavior.
These Deros still lived in the cave cities, according to Shaver, kidnapping surface-dwelling people by the thousands for meat or torture. With sophisticated "ray" machinery that the great ancient races had left behind, they spied on people and projected tormenting thoughts and voices into our minds (reminiscent of schizophrenia's "influencing machines" such as the Air loom). Deros could be blamed for nearly all misfortunes, from minor "accidental" injuries or illnesses to airplane crashes and catastrophic natural disasters. Women especially were singled out for brutal treatment, including rape, and Dash notes that "Sado-masochism was one of the prominent themes of Shaver's writings." Though generally confined to their caves, Shaver claimed that the Deros sometimes traveled by spaceships or rockets, and had dealings with equally evil extraterrestrial beings. Shaver claimed first-hand knowledge of the Deros and their caves, insisting he had been their prisoner for several years.

These bizaare "based on true events" stories about sadomasochistic subterranean evil e.t.'s are considered to be a major influence on UFO's,the paranormal,and the alien abduction phenomenon.

How to solve a problem like Israel?

2010-06-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

The jig is up for Israel,what happens is impossible to predict. I have a suggestion of a couple ways this could go that can have positive results. The state of Israel is sabotaging the 2 state solution because it does not want a sovreign Palestine and refuses to be a single intergrated democracy,let alone follow any international laws or the UN. The flotilla attack was an attack on NATO and of course NATO will not go to war with them.
Alond with their nationlong history of ethnic cleansing,terrorism and expansionist war starting in 1967,the sinking of the USS Liberty, targeted assassinations like killing wrong people in retaliation for Munich,clumsily assassinating a Hamas leader in Dubai using the stolen passports of countless nations--putting those passport holders at risk for retaliationthey have bombed Lebanon several times(losing the last "war"),massacred Gaza--continues bombing Gazi again and starves the population with an illegal blocakade,threatening to bomb Iran and now moving nuclear subs into Iranian waters. Israel has roughly 150 nukes and refuses to acknowledge them,sign on the weapons treaties,or allow inspectors. We know know Israel tried to give nukes to Apartheid South Africa. The recent grab to claim all of Jerusalem and other illegal settlements will make peace impossible. This little Sparta has gone too far and will not stop. Laws,morality,conscience,reality--nothing will push Israel to do right. I highly doubt the Israeli public wants to take this psychopathic suicide ride with their government and those that do are no different than brainwashed nationalist thugs in any country-that is not uniquely Israeli.
This is a lunatic terrorist(not the only one in history) state that will not be appeased by any amount of leeway awarded to them by the US. We have shown them they can do what they want without even a tongue lashing.
Though she appologized,Helen Thomas' statement was essentially correct,if they can colonize they can de-colonize. It was done in Africa and elsewhere. Time to dissolve the current Zionist project and move forward in peace as a multiracial country or multiple,allow palestinians to return and get their stolen land back, and if Israelis want to stay,they can,but should share a country with everybody else not as first class citizens. Why does Israel get to be a one race state? That is not democracy. Everybody else is a melting pot. That there are so many Jews around the world and the Israelis could easily rejoin the diaspora,there is no dissappearance of Jewish demographics,Jewish culture,etc. Nobody goes extinct. Remove the nukes and declare a nuclear free Middle East. Israel,USA,England and UN should pay reparations and all humanitarian costs for enabling the founding of Israel in the first place. Through NATO/UN,the western powers unilaterally dissolved Yugoslavia and created an artificial state against the self determination of the peoples. The Middle East as we know it is a construct of the old empires carving up the region and creating countries. Pakistan was a creation of the West as well. It is not unfeasable to "end a country". Maybe the people of Israel/Palestine and the world community can come to a consensus of how to dissolve this colony in a way fair to all involved and lays the foundation for a peaceful tomorrow. That's a tall order,but a first step that could happen with out going as far as I suggest would be to end the sick israeli exceptionalism,get humble,join the community of nations/international law and stop the occupations/blockade,accept their pre 67 borders,end settlements and accept a real Palestinian state. That has been doable for decades. Let's see what the lunatic state does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLB8DfhnJD0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=ruPRRyBh_G0&playnext_from=TL&videos=t7SXk30jCi4&feature=sub
http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2010/06/video-proof-israeli-commandos-shoot.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

Imperial Citizen:Why I don't fret over Fundementalist Islamic terrorism

2010-05-28T12:23:00.000-07:00

It's not that I don't see the real legitimate dangers of religious fundamentalist violence. I'm an atheist and libertarian socialist who abhors all illegitimate heirarchies-state or based in irrational superstitions/traditions. Islamic fundamentist whackos would kill me just the same and view my beliefs with the same threat as the state and capitalists.,so I have no illusions that the "enemies of my enemies" are my allies or i would be spared as a critic of the empire i live in. Sure there are armed psychos willing to kill Americans,that threat has always existed for all countries and much of it is blowback for our empire's foreign policies,but there will always be moral monsters in and out of governments that believe in killing innocent people to acheive their goals. Their motivations can be real/imagined greivences, religious fanaticism, economic,nationalist,or secular. If I could wish religion away right now,not much of that would change,there just wouldn't be any victims of religious magical thinking blowing shit up. Ireland was as much about religion as it was history, culture, land, colonialism, nationalism,sovereignty,and resistence to oppression. There were secular Marxist/communist IRA factions as well as Catholic. So,removing religion from the equation would not change what the English government did to Ireland over the centuries. How easily it is forgotten that colonialism was tried out on the Irish before being turned on India and Africa. The Orientalism best typified by the White Man's Burden was a tool of that colonization by the European empires.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH2T6a_2gBo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boBzrqF4vmo&feature=related
Is it no surprise that the American empire(and it's proxy Israel) which has inherited much of the territories of the now defunct empires would simply recycle the same memes to reinvent a neo-neo colonialism for the post Cold War power re-allignment? The War on Terror is the new name for the Cold War apparatus that will continue the military-industrial complex that formed it. Something had to be created to justify not dismantling the bloated defense dept. to correctly spend that money on domesctic social programs. The "Peace Dividend" had to be off the table forever.9/11(which I don't believe was an inside job) was the best thing that could happen for the propaganda effort. This was proven under the eight years of W and is being cemented with the current imperator,Our Bomber. If our government was so scared of terroist threats that would destroy our civilization,they would not ignore some http://trueslant.com/allisonkilkenny/page/3/ and only hype the ones that point to Muslims.
http://trueslant.com/allisonkilkenny/2010/05/27/us-to-focus-on-non-white-homegrown-extremists/

The Manichaean Necessary Lie known as the Clash of Civilizations posited by the imperialist intellectual Samuel P. Huntington. is well adapted to be swallowed by Christian/Jewish fundamentalist and secular conservatives/liberals that unifies a collective superior 'Us" to fight off the hoards of "Them".
:
Noam Chomsky on The "Clash of Civilizations"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT64TNho59I&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ObJF6KbWEU&feature=related

Professor Olivier Roy compares/likens the current Malthusian anti-Muslim paranoia of Europe verbalized in language of "the Clash of Civilzations" to the current anti-immigrant hysteria here in America. The Muslim immigrant workforce there are the "Mexicans" of Europe. Fundamentalist political Islam is a reacti...on/result of a modern(not primitive) crisis in that culture,not a primitive traditionalist reaction to advanced Western society. The "Clash" concept is the imperialist 'White man's Burden' of the 21st century. That serves Western imperialists and Al-Qaeda.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Roy

Given that's how the racial backgrounds of the migrant labor classes on each continent and the rise of fascist parties using the same anti-immigrant(or Jew or Gypsy) skapegoating while economics causes state of panic. Here we have the fascist laws in Arizona.

I guess what has me thinking about this more lately has been the continuity of the PNAC imperial plan for transforming the Middle East under Obama, and the recent "activism" of atheists lately like the Boobquake and Everybody Draw Mohammed Day was in reaction to a recent South Park cartoon addressing the tabbo on visual representations of the prophet receiving veiled threats from an American radical muslim website founded by an ex-Israeli settler turned convert to political Islam who in all appearances is a COINTELPRO agent provacateur. This immature faux activism of overpriveleged imperial citizens reeks of David Horowitzian islamofascism propaganda and I was dissappointed to see otherwise intelligent and skeptical atheists,liberals,progressives,humanists and others jumping on this bandwagon shared by Christian fundamentalists,Zionists, bigots,racists,and neocons. the pervasiveness of the War on Terror propaganda is playing out the same way as the Cold War.

YouTube is full of racist demagogues embraced for their "daring" atheism in criticising islam, as is the case with bigoted cranky Brit Pat Condell. Jon responds quite appropriately to the scam he is trying to pull using atheism as a cover. Chomsky also puts it best. I recently made similar arguements on Facebook:
As an atheist, I'd like to ask atheists why fall for the fraudulent "Clash of Civilzations" and "War on Terror" propaganda? Why recycle Orientalism in our criticism of religious terrorism? Where is the criticism of the theocratic fanaticism of Zionism/Israeli? Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons and believes their s...overeignty and real estate comes from "God". The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinans is hardly brought up in the laundry list of crimes of the religious. America has thousands of nukes and is the greatest exporter of military violence/terrorism around the world and we are supposed to be worried about the nationless religious terrorists hiding in caves? As citizens of the American empire,we can affect the violence of our country and our client state Israel. We can do something when our leaders choose religious fanaticism as a guiding principle. Where is the consistency in critical thinking?

These videos made the points I am trying to verbalize politely quite well and I mostly agree:
Why I Refuse to Draw Muhammad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Wnq2F-bU8
As a libertarian socialist,humanist,anti-racist and atheist--I concur. All that effort could have been channelled into something productive that actually helped people with real problems in their lives. What was accomplished?Catharsis for overprivileged Westerners and a platform for bigotry that serves empire? Epic fail. Catharsis for people here adding insult to injury to our victims that are caught between our military and local fanatics/oppressive regimes. Kind of like teasing the surviving ants being killed by our nation-the bully kid with a magnifying glass. More censorship in the Middle East has been a result of this "free speech" action. Reminds me of the Teabaggers. People in this country can get worked up by astroturfers and truthers to get mobilized to protest windmills or organize boob quakes but "nobody" is in the streets protesting the continued endless wars,BP,the banks,foreclosures,healthcare,forming unions etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJh5rGL-la4

I think there could have been a better way to actually do what the claims of the event was that would have served free expression better and stuck one to religious terrorists.

My distaste at this quixotic intermingling of beleifs unified by common irrational Islamophobia is best illustrated with my disgust for imperialist cheerleaders turned darlings of the new American atheism movement: intellectual frauds Christopher Hitchens and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Phoney iconoclasts that are really suck ups to authority and power. Ali is a real pathological piece of work. A good house negro. Like Hitchens,she is a model foreigner lapdog to American imperialism and a darling of the neocons.http://www.aei.org/scholar/117

This sophist neocon slimeball's fraud can't be exposed soon enough. No Christian fundamentalists trying to impose theocracy in America? Muslims aren't being perscuted and desciriminated against here? No such thing as Islamophobia?She pathologically can't be honest. She lied about her persecution and abuse in her native ...country to abuse asylum rules. She is the worst kind of opportunist. She traded one religion for neoconservatism. She can't even back up her propaganda. She's read Alexis de Tocqueville. lol Typical neocon hack. Her last appearance on Bill Maher was a joke. Another Dinesh D'Souza/Michelle Malkin/Jon Mcwhorter giving cover to bigots.I had no idea Ali was with the imperialist revisionist "historian" and fellow Clash-worshipper Niall Ferguson. lol Two of a kind. Their spawn will make Henry Kissinger look like Gandhi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/02/and_you_thought_dating_was_har.html
Her establishment-funded propaganda attack on Malalai Joya--- a true freedom fighter unlike herself, belittles someone who has risked her life for freedom from local warlords and American imperialist occupation. For all the criticizing of the lack of rights of women in the region that is didactly proclaimed by neocons, when an independant woman wants to excercise her freedom of self determination for her people,she must shut up,stop resisting, and accept the "help" of her American saviors. You will be celebrated if you speak out against Islamic cultural repression,but don't you dare bring up what America is doing in you country. Ali,whose main beef with Islam is the "submission", is telling this Muslim woman to submit to America.This is Ali's purpose as a cheerleader for empire and I wonder how many atheists who fawn over her will get sucked into doing the same.

Zeno

The ASH Thursday, 4/8/2010

2010-04-08T22:57:00.000-07:00

http://authoritysmashers.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/s02_week02_thurs/

On tonight's show, we learn that dozens more Massey mines are sited unsafe, a non-nuke arms race is beginning, nuclear waste cannot be safely disposed of "French-style" like the industry promises,I learn to my horror that antibacterial products are in fact worthless and carcenogenic,airplane pilots can now fly under the influence of antidepressants with dangerous side effects, Krazy Karzai, Kyrgyzstan and radical history from the Daily Bleed.

Zeno's Kyrgyzstan Transcript:

A lot of Americans probably haven’t heard of this country or think it’s where Borat’s from.
Kyrgyzstan is a mountainous landlocked ex-Soviet nation of about 5 million people bordering Kazakhstan to the north, Uzbekistan to the west, China to the east, and Tajikistan to the southwest.I jokingly call this region the Stans.

They have been destitute since the fall of the USSR and have been an unsuccessful lab for the Western investors like the IMF,WTO.
As others have noted they are mostly Muslim, speak Russian,and look Chinese. They became on the western press’ radar big time with the CIA influenced Tulip Revolution that overthrew plutocrat Akayev and his cronies and installed plutocrat Bakiyev and his cronies. This “revolution” was part of the series of U.S. engineered color revolutions Bush Jr. was touting as a ‘global democratic revolution’.

According to June 16, 2009 Stars and Stripes, “More than 170,000 coalition personnel passed through the base on their way in or out of Afghanistan, and Manas was the transit point for 5,000 tons of cargo, including spare parts and equipment, uniforms and various items to support personnel and mission needs.”

Last year, Kyrgyzstan told US to leave Manas Airbase which they’ve hosted since 2001,but that seemed to be a shakedown for more money. Apparently Bakiyev made a deal
with Russia at the same time getting $2 Billion in aid/loans right before “changing” mind to allow US to stay. Bakiyev is perceived to have been playing both powers against each other in bidding wars. Bakiyev has fucked over both sides. President Bakiyev recently canceled democracy for something he called “consultative democracy” and that didn’t go over too well .

Bakiyev,who fled the capital Bishkek on his plane, is now in hiding refusing to surrender as
“legit”president while the parliament has been dissolved and a new government is forming,by the opposition Ata-Meken ,run by allies of his that turned on him. How corrupt are they? They now claim they will only rule for 6 months.

From what I’ve read the masses were against the corruption, Manas base ,the lack of democracy, and unfair utilities rates.

It is yet to be seen if the people take a more systemic view of their governmental situation than simply replacing Bakiyev with another president to start the cycle of cronyism all over again, but with a new ruling family .
For instance, anti-US and anti-Russian meddling sentiment is debatable in spite of anger over base leasing.

At least 41to 100 people have been killed and more than 400 injured clashing with riot police,who fired upon the crowds like the cowards most riot cops are. Those numbers have no doubt increased and the hospitals are overrun as
violence has continued .

There are rumors of security forces loyal to Bakiyev exchanging fire with the riot police.
Notice the nonchalance of the current mainstream media coverage of the violence and unrest in Kyrgyzstan in sharp contrast to their hysterical coverage of the Iranian “green” color revolution that was supportive of the demonstrators and
their rights. There is a media clampdown there, so it’s hard to get the full picture .
Any way,all signs seem to indicate the new government is going to renew the base lease with USA, which is why the our masters aren’t freaking out more.

There are Western “peacekeeping” forces helping contain the violence and looting that could be used to turn around and squash them the second US interests actually were really fucked. Nevermind the 1,100 US/NATO troops currently sitting in the base. The Pentagon says it’s suspended flights.

The lesson the establishment seems to be taking away here as voiced in the press on this subject as well as with Afghanistan is that we need more reliable and less corrupt proxies.
Calling for restraint,Russia and China are pretending outwardly that this event don’t bother them as much as they really do, but the implications of America destabilizing so many of their neighbors isn’t lost on anyone. Our war in Afghanistan is costing the Afghanis,Pakistanis and the rest of Central Asia such a high price and they all know it’s our
doing.

How long until real revolutions rise up against us in all of these countries?

The Authority Smashing! Hour Tues. 4/6/2010

2010-04-06T21:29:00.000-07:00

Mr1001Nights and Paul from RI go through the headlines,radical history and discuss the recent protests in D.C.,the tragic coal mine disaster in West Virginia,and French bossnappings get explosive. Why do these horrible "accidents" still happen? We also learn what kind of people attend AIPAC conventions. Mr1001Nights explains the "Bad Apple" analogy.
Paul shares what he experienced in D.C. Tonight's caller was Julia Riber Pitt,who also protested.

Thousands marched agains the war and close to a million marched for comprehensive immigration reform. Who got the press? A few hundred teabaggers(being egged on by Republican politicians) outside Congress protesting against Obama's joke healthcare bill they fear is ushering in socialism. It was newsworthy that they spat on a black congressman and threw around the word "nigger" at another who marched with MLK Jr,and used homophobic slurs against an openly gay congressman and his partner.

This was part of a rash of right wing violence including the murder of a noted abortion provider,a shootout at the Holocaust Museum,the murder of cops by a deranged gun owner,a terrorist suicide plane crash into an IRS building,bricks through politicians' windows,cut brake lines,a Christian terrorist group suffering mass arrests,and a group of soveriegn citizens demanding the resignation of governors. Our hosts adress an audience question pertaining to reaching out to members of the Tea Party movement,who have shown in a recent poll to have the support of 28% of the U.S. public. Can reasonable people be reached within a movement that includes white supremacists,neo-Nazis,KKK,Birchers,Randroids,and Left Behind fans?

Continuing from last night,the Wikileaks video of the July 12, 2007 Apache helicopter slaughter of Iraqi civilians is further discussed. This video is making the rounds on the internet,but quiet in the MSM. Once again proving American "conservatives" live in a parallel universe.:
The racist neocon blog The Jawa Report(Jawas are Arabs--wouldn't archliberal George Lucas love how Tatooine is their political metaphor for the Middle East?) claims to have "proof" one of the victims had an RPG,thus the video/story is a fraud. http://authoritysmashers.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/s02_week02_tues/
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/tash

Part II: Michelle Alexander on “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”

2010-03-13T01:59:00.000-08:00

Part II: Michelle Alexander on “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”
Part II of our interview with legal scholar, civil rights advocate and author Michelle Alexander. Her book is The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underclass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_lower_class

Obama knows better about all of this and "upward mobility" to be lying to black children the way he has. It is mostly myth in America,sold with the fraudulant "American Dream" used to delude all that anybody can "make it" in America.

"While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control." Howard Zinn

JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to the second part of our interview with legal scholar, civil rights advocate and author, Michelle Alexander. Her book is The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. A former director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, she now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

AMY GOODMAN: We continued yesterday’s interview with Michelle Alexander after the broadcast, and we started with a clip of President Obama’s speech at the NAACP centennial celebration last year.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We’ve got to say to our children, yes, if you’re African American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that somebody in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. But that’s not a reason to get bad grades. That’s not a reason to cut class. That’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands. You cannot forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children. No excuses.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander, “no excuses.” Can you respond to President Obama?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Well, I think, you know, a major point that is often lost in debates about the so-called underclass, you know, poor African Americans who are trapped in racially segregated ghettos, the point that’s often missed is that huge percentages of the people residing in those communities have been branded felons, and therefore discrimination is perfectly legal against them. You know, employment discrimination is perfectly legal. Most job applications, ranging from Burger King clerk to accountant, ask whether you’ve been convicted of a felony. And studies show that, you know, about 70 percent of employers say they won’t even consider hiring someone who’s been convicted of a drug felony.
Public housing is off-limits to you if you have been convicted of a felony. For a minimum of five years, you are deemed ineligible for public housing once you’ve been branded a felon. Discrimination in private housing market’s perfectly legal. So here you are, recently released from prison, having been branded a felon for engaging in precisely the kind of drug activity that’s ignored in middle-class white communities. You’re branded a felon. You can’t get a job. And then public housing is off-limits to you? Where are you expected to sleep? So an aunt or grandmother takes you in.
Now, let’s say you’re one of the lucky few who manage to get a job. Well, up to 100 percent of your wages can be garnished—that’s right, up to 100 percent of your wages can be garnished—to pay the cost of your imprisonment. Increasing numbers of states are requiring former prisoners to pay back the cost of their imprisonment, pay back court costs, court processing fees, even the cost of their representation, even if they’ve been assigned a public defender, and back child support. You’re required to pay back all of the accumulated child support that you incurred while you were in prison. So up to 100 percent of your wages can be garnished, even if you’re one of the lucky few who manage to get a job after being branded a felon.
What is the system designed to do? The system is designed to send you right back to prison, which is, in fact, what happens to the vast majority of people who are released. About 70 percent of former prisoners are returned within three years. And the majority of those who are returned are returned within three months, because the obstacles, the legal barriers to just surviving on the outside, are so great. I’m often—you know, people often say to me, “Well, I know somebody who is a felon and who managed to get a job. You know, it’s possible to get a job,” they say.
Well, it may be possible, but what kind of job? Why is it that, you know, our young kids, young black and brown kids, are expected to be locked into low-wage jobs for life, if they’re lucky enough to get them, but kids in other communities are given the opportunity to go on to college, to compete for a full range of job opportunities? During the Jim Crow era, the problem wasn’t that black people couldn’t get jobs; it was that they were locked permanently in a lower tier of jobs. And that’s the reality. That’s the reality.
For us to tell young African American kids in ghetto communities, “Your destiny is in your own hands,” that may be an inspirational message, but for many of them it may turn out to be a lie, because the rules and laws that govern ghetto communities today and the war that is being waged there ensures that a large majority of black and brown boys in those communities will be branded felons and then relegated to a permanent second-class status for life.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Michelle Alexander, I’d like to ask you about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Governor Schwarzenegger, at his State of the State address in January, called for privatizing some of the state’s prisons.

GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: The priorities have become out of whack over the years. I mean, think about it. Thirty years ago, ten percent of the general fund went to higher education, and only three percent went to prisons. Today, almost 11 percent goes to prisons and only seven-and-a-half percent goes to higher education. Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Your reaction to Governor Schwarzenegger’s newfound concern about the situation with the prison system in his state?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, well, many people reacted with glee to Governor Schwarzenegger’s kind of apparent embrace of the Books Not Bars theme that had been a rallying cry for grassroots organizations in the state for more than a decade. But if you read between the lines there, what Schwarzenegger is actually saying is not that we should change our laws to ensure that nonviolent drug offenders don’t end up spending years or decades behind bars or that we should rethink harsh mandatory minimum sentences or our three-strikes laws, which have been responsible for the prison boom in California and other states around the country. His remedy has not been to reduce prison populations through kind of rethinking draconian laws, but instead to privatize, try to save money, make warehousing and caging human beings cheaper by privatizing the system.
Certainly, you know, this announcement must have been met with glee on Wall Street, where, you know, many companies like the Correctional Corporation of America, you know, is making millions of dollars, and it hopes to expand its market of caging human beings for a profit. So, sadly, although, you know, Schwarzenegger embraced the Books Not Bars motto, what he actually plans to do in practice is, or may well be, worse than the system that we have today.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you about another aspect of this whole issue, in terms of—you mentioned mandatory sentencing laws, especially in relationship to the war on drugs. One of the aspects that rarely gets much attention, and you might want to talk about it, is how mandatory sentencing laws have essentially corrupted the criminal justice system by pressuring many defendants to basically cop a plea rather than take their chances through an actual trial, where their guilt or innocence might be decided by a jury.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: That’s right. We will never know how many innocent people are doing time for supposed drug offenses in the United States, but there’s good reason to believe that those numbers are higher than they’ve ever been, because of mandatory sentencing laws. Today, for a relatively minor drug crime, you could be looking at five, ten, even a life sentence in prison. Now, if you are arrested and charged with, you know, a relatively minor drug offense and told that you will spend twenty-five years in prison if you take your case to trial, but if you cop a plea and get only three years, a few months, or even be willing to be labeled a felon for life, you know, you’ll be out in a matter of months, days or just a few years, most people aren’t willing to take the risk that they could be forfeiting decades of their life for a minor drug offense and will take the deal, whether innocent or guilty.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, explain, Michelle Alexander, what—

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: The pressure to plead guilty is overwhelming.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain then what that means, once a person is a felon, in terms of the rights they lose for life.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, well, once you’re branded a felon, you may be denied the right to vote; automatically excluded from juries; and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. You know, the very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That’s why I say we have not ended racial caste in America; we’ve merely redesigned it. All the old forms of discrimination, the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind, are now perfectly legal once you’ve been labeled a felon. And thanks to the war on drugs, millions of people of color have been branded felons for relatively minor drug activity, you know, in the past few decades.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander—

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Our prison population has quintupled.

AMY GOODMAN: To what, in terms of the world, comparing our prison population to the rest of the world?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, well, our prison population has quintupled. We’ve gone from about 300,000 people behind bars in the 1970s—you know, a time, by the way, that many civil rights activists thought that our rates of incarceration were egregiously high. But we went from about 300,000 people in prison and jails to more than two million today. And the vast majority of that increase has been due to drug offenses. About two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison population is due to drug offenses, and more than half of the increase in the state population.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Michelle Alexander, for one sec—

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Now, in fact, if we had to go back—

AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to ask if you could talk about the jailing of black men often in white, rural communities and what that means in terms of bringing federal aid into those communities.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes. You know, kind of a well-kept secret about the way our census laws and redistricting operates in the United States is that people who are warehoused in prisons—and the majority of new prison building in the United States has taken place in relatively white rural areas—the majority of the people who are put in those prisons, particularly in a state like New York, are poor people of color. But the people warehoused in those prisons are denied the right to vote, right? But those people behind bars are counted through the census as part of the local population for the purposes of redistricting, leading to a greater number of state representatives assigned to those rural communities, even though the people behind bars can’t vote, and they’re not accountable to them. And additional federal funding flows to those communities, because their population has been inflated because they have such large prison populations. Meanwhile, the poor communities of color, you know, from which these prisoners came, lose representation in their state legislatures, because their population has declined. And the funding and support that might otherwise flow to those communities is reduced, because their numbers have been deflated as a result of the mass imprisonment of their community members in rural white communities.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander, we want to thank you very much for being with us. Her new book is called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Thank you so much.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Thank you for having me.

Legal Scholar Michelle Alexander on "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness"

2010-03-13T01:29:00.000-08:00

Democracy Now! Video
Legal Scholar Michelle Alexander on "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness"

A new book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.

from wikiquote: The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drug-war machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture.
Ellen Willis, "Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs", The Village Voice (September 19, 1989)

"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." - Bill Hicks

Guest: Michelle Alexander, author of the new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. A former director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, she now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama’s election a year and a half ago continues to be lauded for ushering in a new era of colorblindness. The very fact of his presidency is regarded by some as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow. Yet, today there are more African Americans under correctional control, whether in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in 1850. And more African American men are disenfranchised now because of felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870.
A new book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now from Columbus, Ohio by Michelle Alexander, author of the new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Her latest article exploring how the war on drugs gave birth to what she calls a permanent American undercaste is available at tomdispatch.com. She’s a former director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. She now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.
Michelle Alexander, welcome to Democracy Now! Nearly half of America’s young black men are behind bars or have been labeled felons for life? That’s an astounding figure. Also, what does it mean in terms of their rights for the rest of their lives?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, thanks largely to the war on drugs, a war that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. The war on drugs waged in these ghetto communities has managed to brand as felons millions of people of color for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. And once branded a felon, they’re ushered into a permanent second-class status, not unlike the one we supposedly left behind. Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and my be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you mention that the—in the war on drugs, four out of five people arrested have actually been arrested for use of drugs, not for—or possession or use of drugs, not for the sale of drugs. Could you talk about how the—both political parties joined in this increasing incarceration around drug use?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: That’s right. The war on drugs, contrary to popular belief, was not declared in response to rising drug crime. Actually, the war on drugs, the current drug war, was declared in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline. A few years later, crack cocaine hit the streets in poor communities of color across America, and the Reagan administration hired staff to publicize crack babies, crack mothers, crack dealers in inner-city communities, in an effort to build public support and more funding, and ensure more funding, for the new war that had been declared. But the drug war had relatively little to do with drug crime, even from the outset.
The drug war was launched in response to racial politics, not drug crime. The drug war was part of the Republican Party’s grand strategy, often referred to as the Southern strategy, an effort to appear—appeal to poor and working-class white voters who were threatened by, felt vulnerable, threatened by the gains of the civil rights movement, particularly desegregation, busing and affirmative action. And the Republican Party found that it could get Democrats—white, you know, working-class poor Democrats—to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party through racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare.
And the strategy worked like a charm. You know, within weeks of the Reagan administration’s publicity campaign around crack cocaine, you know, images of black crack users and crack dealers flooded, you know, our nation’s television sets and forever changed our nation’s conception of who drug users and dealers are. And law enforcement efforts became targeted on poor communities of color in the drug war. And drug law enforcement agencies, state and local law enforcement task forces committed to drug law enforcement, have been rewarded for drastically increasing the volume of drug arrests. Federal funding flows to state and local law enforcement that boost the volume of drug arrests, the sheer numbers.
Many people think the drug war, you know, has been targeted at violent offenders or aimed at rooting out drug kingpins, but nothing could be further from the truth. Local and state law enforcement agencies get rewarded for the sheer numbers of drug arrests. And federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement officials to keep 80 percent of the cash, cars, homes that they seize from suspected drug offenders, granting to law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability and longevity in the drug war.
And the results have been predictable. Millions of poor people of color have been rounded up for relatively minor nonviolent drug offenses. In fact, in 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession. Only one out of five were for sales. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant selling activity. And during the 1990s, the period of the greatest expansion of the drug war, nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests were for marijuana possession, a drug now widely believed to be less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class and suburban white communities as it is in the ghetto.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander—

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: President Clinton—

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, I just wanted to bring it up to President Obama, because this piece you wrote, very interesting, at tomdispatch.com called “The Age of Obama as Racial Nightmare.” Explain.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, well, you know, today, people around the globe, people of color in particular, have been celebrating the election of Barack Obama as kind of our nation’s triumph over race and the history of racial caste in America. Yet, the appearance of racial equality, the superficial appearance of racial equality that Barack Obama’s election has afforded, serves to mask a deeply disturbing underlying racial reality, which is that large segments, you know, a majority, of African American men in some urban areas, are either under the control of the criminal justice system or branded felons for life, locked in a permanent second-class status.
This vast new racial undercaste—and I say “caste”, not “class,” because this is a population which is locked into an inferior status by law and by policy—this vast population has been rendered largely invisible through affirmative action and the appearance of success with, you know, a handful of African Americans doing well in universities and corporations. The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress. It helps to mask the underlying racial reality, which is that a racial caste system has been reborn in the United States. Young men of color, in particular, are labeled as felons, labeled as criminals, at very young ages, often before they even reach voting age, before they turn eighteen. Their backpacks are searched. They’re frisked on the way to school, while standing waiting for the school bus to arrive. Once they learn to drive, their cars are searched, often dismantled in a search for drugs. The drug war waged in these poor communities of color has created generations of black and brown people who have been branded felons and relegated to a permanent second-class status for life.
And the reason for their excommunication from our society, our mainstream society, is for engaging in precisely the same kind of drug activity that is largely ignored in middle-class and upper-middle-class white communities. People often say to me, “Well, if people—if, you know, black and brown men don’t want to be labeled felons, well, then they just shouldn’t commit drug crimes.” But, you know, we have known, as a nation, for a long time now that simply prohibiting drug activity does not lead people to stop using illegal drugs. We learned that lesson with alcohol prohibition. Banning the use of alcohol didn’t discourage many people from using or selling alcohol. And people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. Our stereotype of a drug dealer in the United States is of an African American kid standing on a street corner with his pants hanging down. But the reality is that drug dealing happens everywhere in America. Drug markets in the United States, much like our society generally, is relatively segregated by race. Blacks tend to sell to blacks. Whites tend to sell to whites.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there for the part one of this interview, Michelle Alexander, but we’re going to ask you to stay after for part two, which we’ll play on Democracy Now! Michelle Alexander, her new book is called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Study: Median Wealth for Single Black Women: $100, Single Hispanic Women: $120, Single White Women: $41,000

2010-03-13T00:49:00.000-08:00

From Democracy Now!
Study: Median Wealth for Single Black Women: $100, Single Hispanic Women: $120, Single White Women: $41,000

Dennis Kucinich Takes on Democratic Leaders with Call Public Option, Afghan Withdrawal 3 of 3

2010-03-12T02:58:00.001-08:00

Dennis Kucinich Takes on Democratic Leaders with Call Public Option, Afghan Withdrawal 2 of 3

2010-03-12T02:57:00.001-08:00

Insurance coverage does not mean healthcare. Pretty simple.Put your cynical politician hat on : would he take this position if the "bill" wasn't such a disaster? What does he have to gain/lose "standing in the way of passing" it? Is he positioning himself in a good spot to survive an electoral "boodbath"? The Republicans taking money from health insurance companies that will make out like bandits because of Obama's backroom deals are "attacking" Obama and playing obstructorinionist will win on two levels:1) The bill will benefit their(and the Dems/Obama's) masters financially.
2)the shittyness of the bill that they "resisted" will be hung around the Dem's necks for them to attack them with when all the dust settles and the fine print becomes clear.
Both parties just played "good cop,bad cop" on us and used the media to do it pro wrestling style. Republicans have been both sloppy and drank their own Kool-aid in their fervor to play their part and get back into power.
Why are so many incumbant politicians quitting?
We ignore the canaries in the coal
mines and rats jumping ship at our peril.

Dennis Kucinich Takes on Democratic Leaders with Call Public Option, Afghan Withdrawal 1 of 3

2010-03-12T02:37:00.001-08:00

Motivations aside, his reasoning is sound.

The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with Worlds Worst Polluters 3 of 3

2010-03-11T03:29:00.001-08:00

The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with Worlds Worst Polluters 3 of 3

2010-03-11T03:26:00.001-08:00

The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with Worlds Worst Polluters 2 of 3

2010-03-11T03:18:00.001-08:00

The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with Worlds Worst Polluters 1 of 3

2010-03-11T02:58:00.001-08:00

Dscription:Major environmental groups are coming under criticism from within their own ranks for taking positions that some say are antithetical to their stated missions of saving the planet. In the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the British journalist Johann Hari writes, As we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the worlds worst polluters—and burying science-based environmentalism in returnIn the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate. [includes rush transcriptpartial]

Life in Limbo? : turbulence

2010-03-09T03:53:00.000-08:00

Life in Limbo? : turbulence

Life in Limbo?
By Turbulence
We are trapped in a state of limbo, neither one thing nor the other. For more than two years, the world has been wracked by a series of interrelated crises, and they show no sign of being resolved anytime soon. The unshakable certainties of neoliberalism, which held us fast for so long, have collapsed. Yet we seem unable to move on. Anger and protest have erupted around different aspects of the crises, but no common or consistent reaction has seemed able to cohere. A general sense of frustration marks the attempts to break free from the morass of a failing world.
There is a crisis of belief in the future, leaving us with the prospect of an endless, deteriorating present that hangs around by sheer inertia. In spite of all this turmoil – this time of ‘crisis’ when it seems like everything could, and should, have changed – it paradoxically feels as though history has stopped. There is an unwillingness, or inability, to face up to the scale of the crisis. Individuals, companies and governments have hunkered down, hoping to ride out the storm until the old world re-emerges in a couple of years. Attempts to wish the ‘green shoots’ of recovery into existence mistake an epochal crisis for a cyclical one; they are little more than wide-eyed boosterism. Yes, astronomical sums of money have prevented the complete collapse of the financial system, but the bailouts have been used to prevent change, not initiate it. We are trapped in a state of limbo.
Crisis in the middle
And yet, something did happen. Recall those frightening yet heady days that began in late 2008, when everything happened so quickly, when the old dogmas fell like autumn leaves? They were real. Something happened there: the tried and tested ways of doings things, well-rehearsed after nearly 30 years of global neoliberalism, started to come unstuck. What had been taken as read no longer made sense. There was a shift in what we call the middle ground: the discourses and practices that define the centre of the political field.
To be sure, the middle ground is not all that there is, but it is what assigns the things in the world around it a greater or lesser degree of relevance, validity or marginality. It constitutes a relatively stable centre against which all else is measured. The farther from the centre an idea, project or practice is, the more likely it is to be ignored, publicly dismissed or disqualified, or in some way suppressed. The closer to it, the more it stands a chance of being incorporated – which in turn will shift the middle more or less. Neither are middle grounds defined ‘from above’, as in some conspiratorial nightmare. They emerge out of different ways of doing and being, thinking and speaking, becoming intertwined in such a way as to reinforce each other individually and as a whole. The more they have become unified ‘from below’ as a middle ground, the more this middle ground acquires the power of unifying ‘from above’. In this sense, the grounds of something like ‘neoliberalism’ were set before something was named as such; but the moment when it was named is a qualitative leap: the point at which relatively disconnected policies, theories and practices became identifiable as forming a whole.
The naming of things like Thatcherism in the UK, or Reganism in the US, marked such a moment for something that had been constituting itself for some time before, and which has for the past three decades dominated the middle ground: neoliberalism, itself a response to the crisis of the previous middle, Fordism/Keynesianism. The era of the New Deal and its various international equivalents had seen the rise of a powerful working class that had grown used to the idea that its basic needs should be met by the welfare state, that real wages would rise, and that it was always entitled to more. Initially, the centrepiece of the neoliberal project was an attack on this ‘demanding’ working class and the state institutions wherein the old class compromise had been enshrined. Welfare provisions were rolled back, wages held steady or forced downwards, and precariousness increasingly became the general condition of work.
But this attack came at a price. The New Deal had integrated powerful workers’ movements – mass-based trade unions – into the middle ground, helping to stabilise a long period of capitalist growth. And it provided sufficiently high wages to ensure that all the stuff generated by a suddenly vastly more productive industrial system – based on Henry Ford’s assembly line and Frederick Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ – could be bought. Bit by bit, the ferocious attack on the working classes of the global North was offset by low interest rates (i.e. cheap credit) and access to cheap commodities, mass-produced in areas where wages were at their lowest (like China). In the global South, the prospect of one day attaining similar living conditions was promised as a possibility. In this sense, neoliberal globalisation was the globalisation of the American dream: get rich or die trying.
Clearly, neoliberalism also relied on a ‘deal’ of some kind. But the word here has a different meaning; its mode of attraction/incorporation was quite unlike that of Fordism/Keynesianism. The latter involved visible, constituted collective forces through the likes of trade unions or farmers’ organisations; the former worked more as a buyout from the original deal, addressing individuals directly as individuals. It was a middle ground that emerged out of ‘deviant’ desires, discourses and practices that looked for ways out of the existing one (the fear that unions had become too powerful, dissatisfaction with the drab uniformity of everything, para-statal practices of corruption that compensated an over-regulated life), and as such were very much about individualisation. Indeed, it aimed to create a certain kind of individual, an atomised self-entrepreneur whose collective social ties are subordinated to the search for private gain.
Crisis of the common
Today, the neoliberal deal is null and void; the middle ground has crumbled away. We’ve gone past the era when cheap credit, rising asset prices and falling commodity prices could compensate for stagnant wages. Those days are over but no new middle ground has cohered. Nobody has ‘agreed’ any replacement ‘deal’. That’s why we find ourselves in a state of limbo.
Mind you, deals and middle ground don’t necessarily go hand in hand. A new middle ground might result from a deal, explicit (like that of the New Deal of the 1930s) or implicit (like neoliberalism) – indeed, it will be firmer, more stable, if this is the case. But a new centre of the political field can also emerge without one. A middle ground does not require the degree of consent implied by a deal; it’s a sufficient but not a necessary condition. It does, however, always involve a process of attraction and incorporation of forces that could threaten it – the extent of which is defined by the terms of each emerging middle ground itself.
Striking a deal is like agreeing – consciously or otherwise – to a (temporary) truce following a fierce battle. But a middle ground could establish itself in the midst of a period of ongoing conflict and contestation – a more protracted struggle of attrition. From our current vantage point, much is unknown. We certainly can’t predict the duration or outcome of the struggle over what becomes the new political ‘common sense’. Moreover, the sides aren’t even clear. Finding out who your allies are only really happens once a fight has been picked. So who will be fighting whom and about what? What will be the common ground among movements in the new struggles and those further down the line?
Our concept of ‘common ground’ is, like middle grounds, a theoretical tool. We use it to name the intersections and resonances of diverse struggles, practices, discourses, targets and referents. In the previous alter-globalisation movement, the common ground was the shared ‘One No’ – against the monopolising logic of neoliberalism – along with the acceptance that there were ‘Many Yeses’ – the multiplicity of alternative notions of economy, commons and sociality. For many years, many movements could meet and recognise one another as kindred on this common ground of rejection of neoliberalism – without denying their difference. But the shattering of the middle ground means a common ground rooted in antagonism to it now lies in ruins.
SHIFTING GROUNDS
From madness to mainstream?
Until recently, anyone who suggested nationalising the banks would have been derided as a quack and a crank, as lacking the most basic understanding of economics and the functioning of a ‘complex, globalised world’. So strong was the grip of ‘orthodoxy’ that such an idea would have been disqualified without the need to offer a counter-argument. Yet over the past year, governments around the world have effectively nationalised large parts of the financial sector, while handing over dizzyingly large amounts of public money to those institutions that remained in private hands. Similar moves into the mainstream have taken place with the discourses around climate change and commons. Every ‘serious’ politician must at least appear to be concerned about global warming. And the ‘commons’, long an exclusive focus of the left, has also entered the vocabulary of centrist intellectuals and politicians: from widening recognition of the ‘public benefits’ of access to cheap drugs and other intellectual property, to cautiously approving comments in The Economist, and the economics professions’ faux Nobel prize going to Elinor Ostrom for her work on commons. Put these together and some might argue that the centre of gravity of public discourse has shifted to the left.
Yet it cannot escape notice that the recent nationalisations were argued for precisely on the grounds that they are necessary to save financialised capitalism, not as part of a social democratic programme of redistribution, let alone a strategy for a socialist transition. Likewise, the new green economy that is now on politicians’ public agendas aims to maintain a big-business, productivist model of development by marrying it to more environmentally sustainable energies and processes.
So things have changed, but, trapped in limbo, the extent of change is by no means obvious. Let us be clear, then, about where things have started to happen. Perhaps the most obvious change is at the level of what can be said - what can be accepted as valid argument, rather than being consigned to a wilderness inhabited by raging ideologues, and the ignorant. In its heyday, neoliberal ideology was effective in banishing all other thought because it posed as non-ideological, as merely the ‘reasonable’ application of the ‘science’ of utility. Today, however, it is possible to see (and say) that the presuppositions of these reasonable decisions were, of course, ideological. The market does not tend toward equilibrium, the maximisation of self-interest can override instincts of self-preservation and lead to sub-optimal outcomes, and in times of crisis any trickle down is reverted into the upstream splurge of bailouts. The premises of those supposedly non-ideological arguments – such as the transformation of ‘the market’ into a natural given governed by scientific laws available to ortho-dox (‘correct opinion’) but not to hetero-dox (‘other opinion’) economists – have now been debunked. Hardcore neoliberal ideology will cease to shape the space of politics by defining its terms, what is good and bad (investment rather than public spending, efficient private versus inefficient public, markets not planning), and pulling the centre of gravity of the debate towards itself. Neoliberal orthodoxy no longer forms the middle ground of politics in regard to which all other opinions have to position themselves.
Zombie-liberalism
But does the disappearance of the ideological middle ground mean that the neoliberal era is actually over? Or is this just a pause, a kind of radical diet to shed inefficient capital and institutions, in order for neoliberalism to emerge leaner and meaner at the other end? On the one hand, rather than the banking system being restructured, and financial capital being subordinated to political direction, the recent bailout mania has simply been a massive robber-baron-style plunder of public resources, exacerbating 30 years of neoliberal upward redistribution of wealth. On the other, this major heist has lost its ideological justification, and been revealed as just that: theft. Neoliberalism has always had two sides. It was both a counterattack by elites against social gains won by workers’ and other movements from the 1930s onwards, an attempt to shift wealth back up the social ladder; and an ideological project claiming to rid ‘the markets’ of unwarranted intervention by governments and their ilk.
What remains of neoliberalism once the ideological padding comes off? It is no longer a (relatively) coherent politico-economic programme: it has become the plunder of a retreating army, a way of booby-trapping the political system before it has to relinquish control over it. But these booby traps, even if stripped of their ideological camouflage, are dangerous and deadly. In all the countries that have seen bailouts and/or financial crises, the enormous government deficits created are now being used by exactly those social forces that most benefited from them (in absolute terms) to argue that they should be paid off through yet more rounds of austerity and spending cuts. By handing over control to some ‘safe hands’ outside any form of accountability, neoliberalism gets locked in. A neat trick: the financial sector uses the debts incurred bailing it out to secure continued control over policy.
The picture is confusing, and gets even more so. As credit dries up and food and energy prices rise, workers are left underpaid and, in the North, over-indebted – a so-called recovery that doesn’t massively increase wages and/or cancel personal debt will not change that. Deal’s off, as it were. But if there is no more deal, and no more ideology, what of the social basis of neoliberalism – the neoliberal power bloc? In short, it is in disarray, if not totally shattered. There is no longer any social group that can credibly claim ‘leadership’ in society, politics, culture or the economy. ‘The centre cannot hold’, the middle ground is broken, leaving behind a confused and vicious army, institutions no longer guided by a coherent framework, political parties still vying for power but without any real programmes.
So if the power bloc is weak, engaged in obvious, large-scale looting of the system it used to run, and if – above all – the ideological core of neoliberalism is gone, why is a new middle ground failing to emerge? Why is the apparent discursive shift to the left not paying off in practical terms? The answer lies at least partly in the fact that the neoliberal project relied a lot less on ideology than its critics tended to think. Theories and ideologies are used to create neoliberal ideologues and activists, but persuasion through argument isn’t how it transforms our subjectivities and the limits of what we perceive possible. These changes are brought about more operationally than ideologically, that is, through interventions into the composition of society. Neoliberalism re-organises material processes in order to bring about the social reality that its ideology claims already exists. It attempts to create its own presuppositions.
Rather than being persuaded by the power of neoliberal arguments, people are trained to view themselves as rational benefit-maximisers, those elusive creatures of economic theory. This training takes place through a forced engagement with markets, not just in our economic activities, but in every sphere of our lives: in education, health care, child care, you name it. Take the school system in Britain. An army of government inspectors and statisticians compiles mountains of data on schools’ performance; parents, for their part, are expected to use this information to make the best decision regarding school choice. Education is seen as preparing bodies for the labour market, so ‘rational choice’ is invoked to justify the channelling of certain students into vocational training from an early age. Meanwhile, many ‘middle-class’ parents attempt to maximise their offspring’s chances of ‘getting the best start in life’ by engaging private tutors or dragging themselves to church every Sunday morning (Anglican faith schools having the best reputation).
Effectively, people are forced to become human capital, little enterprises locked in competition with others – an isolated atom entirely responsible for itself. In this context accepting the individual ‘deal’ offered by neoliberalism made sense. Neoliberalism isn’t – or wasn’t – just about changes in global governance or how states should be governed: it is about the management of individuals, about how you should live. It set up a model of life, and then established mechanisms that shepherded you towards ‘freely’ choosing that manner of living. The dice are loaded. Today, if you want to participate in society, you have to behave as homo economicus.
In many ways it is this neoliberal coding, not just of public institutions and policy programmes, but of our very selves, that keeps us trapped in limbo. Neoliberalism is dead but it doesn’t seem to realise it. Although the project no longer ‘makes sense’, its logic keeps stumbling on, like a zombie in a 1970s splatter movie: ugly, persistent and dangerous. If no new middle ground is able to cohere sufficiently to replace it, this situation could last a while… all the major crises - economic, climate, food, energy – will remain unresolved; stagnation and long-term drift will set in (recall that the crisis of Fordism took longer than an entire decade, the 1970s, to be resolved). Such is the ‘unlife’ of a zombie, a body stripped of its goals, unable to adjust itself to the future, unable to make plans. A zombie can only act habitually, continuing to operate even as it decomposes. Isn’t this where we find ourselves today, in the world of zombie-liberalism? The body of neoliberalism staggers on, but without direction or teleology.
Any project that wants to slay this zombie will have to operate on many different levels, just as neoliberalism did, which means that it must be tied to a new manner of living. And it must start from the here and now, the current composition of global society, large parts of which are still in the grip of the neoliberal zombie. This is the greatest challenge facing those advocating a New or Green New Deal. It isn’t a case of simply changing elite thinking or dabbling with government spending: it requires a more fundamental change. Not just a change of consciousness at the head of society, but a transformation of the social body.
The middle and the common
We can detect many symptoms of the waning of the old middle ground. In a way, this is where the significance of the Obama phenomenon lies: a political project that comes to power on a tide of vague promises of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ speaks less of the strength of its own ideas than of the weakness of others. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, we have seen the collapse of the parliamentary left in a number of recent elections. Whether in or out of power, Europe’s centre-left parties have been punished at the ballot box, while the vote for the right has generally held up better. Many have been mystified as to why the centre-left has taken the blame for the economic crisis, but the left that embraced neoliberalism became the truest of believers: it was they who came to see it as a progressive force that could bring development even to the world’s poor. (There is never a greater zealot than a convert.) It is the obliteration of this illusion that has led to the neoliberal left’s collapse.
So does that mean that the many left-wing critics of neoliberalism (and, sometimes, capitalism), from the radical left parties to the alter-globalists of Seattle and Genoa, can now simply bask in a self-satisfied glow? They can now claim to have been right all along in opposing not only the neoliberal triad of financialisation, deregulation and privatisation, but also the Blairite Third Way? We count ourselves amongst these critics, and we have certainly been right about some of these things – the instability of the neoliberal credit system, say. But one of the worst mistakes we could make right now would be to assume that old answers and certainties are still valid. With the disappearance of the old, anti-neoliberal common ground, and the emergence of new struggles, we must not only revisit the question of who ‘we’ are (or were). We must also construct a new ‘we’. We need a new attentiveness to emerging responses to the present conjuncture. We need a capacity to recognise at what levels these responses communicate and an active effort to identify the points where they overlap and reinforce each other. In other words, we need – collectively – to create, identify and name new common grounds.
The work of naming a common ground is for the most part analytic: it seeks to identify the components and directions of different trajectories, and to act back on them to strengthen commonalities, work through tensions that can be resolved, recognise the sources of those that can’t. Of course, the act of naming something as a common ground always entails proposing a partial synthesis; but this synthesis can only be as effective as the depth of the analysis that underpins it. It only works to the extent that what it names means something to those to whom it speaks.
Common grounds, like middle grounds, have a double character. On the one hand they have an ‘objective’ side: diverse practices, subjectivities, struggles and projects may share common aspects, or even resonate with one another, even if the one is unaware of the other. On the other hand, common grounds may have a subjective side, which requires a certain self-awareness and the ability to recognise what’s common in other struggles or projects. The ‘one no’ rejection of neoliberalism is an obvious example of a self-aware, subjective common ground. It takes an active effort to identify common grounds, but identifying and maintaining them helps make them more effective. This self-awareness creates a feedback loop that can allow the common ground to gain consistency and exceed the established middle ground’s ability to contain it. Common grounds contain an element of autonomy, asking their own questions on their own terms.
This leads to the next question: how do common grounds affect middle grounds? To begin with, this often occurs in ways that are invisible, as centrifugal forces countering the middle ground’s centripetal pull. They are new practices and ways of living and thinking that deviate from the synthesis; they spread out without necessarily becoming a visible challenge to the middle. Think of the many hidden struggles of factory or office workers that slow down the pace of work without organising a strike; the impact on society of gays and lesbians carving out of niches for their desires; of the syncretic religions of Latin America and Africa, where indigenous and slaves practised their traditions right under the nose of the colonisers. Think of the advent of the pill and the way it gave women more power over their own bodies, producing mutations in sexual relations, in social roles and identities.
Such phenomena become visible when they rub up against the middle ground, coming into conflict with existing institutions and practices. Common grounds problematise the way that the middle ground has composed the world, posing problems that it can’t get to grips with. The effects of such unnamed common grounds and the mutations they produce can still be limited, and are often accompanied by some form of disqualification or repression. Common grounds become more powerful and their effects more pronounced when they are made both visible and named. This is when their centrifugal force is turned into open antagonism.
But this antagonism is not simply an end in itself. During the 1990s, when the neoliberal middle ground was at its strongest, its most ‘hegemonic’, it was necessary to name and maintain an antagonism that remained at a distance to the middle ground precisely because one of neoliberalism’s dogmas – the ‘end of history’ – had proclaimed the end of all antagonism. Today, the situation is different. Globally, the left appears to be weak, but the simultaneous and equivalent weakness of the middle ground gives ‘us’ a unique ability to intervene into the shaping of the new middle ground. The work of naming new common grounds is at the same time the work of increasing our power to shape the outcome of the many global crises, by influencing the way they are dealt with.
We should be aware, however, that the emergence of a common ground that unsettles a middle ground is not necessarily a good thing. We could think here of the genesis of neoliberalism itself. The Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947, studied free-market ideas throughout Keynesianism’s ‘golden age’, as did that circle of admirers that gathered around Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand in the 1950s. The Mont Pelerin Society’s members included George Shultz and Milton Friedman – Shultz went on to serve in the Nixon and Reagan administrations and, at the University of Chicago, both men trained the ‘Chicago boys’ who liberalised Latin American economies in the 1970s and ’80s. The young Alan Greenspan, who later became Chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a member of Rand’s circle. These free-market thinkers and activists articulated a common ground that profoundly unsettled the Keynesian/Fordist middle and went on to destroy it.
Towards new common grounds?
But while we might appear to be trapped in limbo, history is still being made. In the last few years we have seen the irruption of a multiplicity of struggles, some more visible than others. In parts of the global North a direct action movement against climate change and for climate justice has emerged and grown rapidly. There’s been an increase in political activity around universities – such as the wave of occupations and strikes across Italy against the country’s Education Reform Bill, and mass protests against the raising of tuition fees and job losses at the University of California. In some cases, protest movements have emerged around issues directly connected to the financial crisis, for example, in Iceland, Ireland, France (remember ‘bossnapping’?); or, as in Greece, they have tapped into the widespread social malaise concerning the lack of prospects for the ‘700-euro generation’. In Latin America, surely the part of the world where left forces are most ascendant, there have been explosive indigenous struggles around the control of natural resources. Indigenous people in Peru successfully confronted the government and its army to prevent the destruction of forests and livelihoods in the pursuit of new sources of oil. Elsewhere, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has fought the Nigerian army to a standstill and disrupted several of Shell’s operations in the area. In South Korea, sacked workers occupying the SsangYong car plant in Seoul fought pitched battles with the police and army, only to be dislodged after a massive security operation.
While the list could go on and on, it is hard to avoid the impression that these struggles have remained relatively separate from each other. By and large, they have not resonated sufficiently to constitute new common grounds. But: we can be certain on a few points and, from here, it may be possible to identify some emergent tendencies. First and foremost, we know that in an epochal crisis such as this one, both new middle and new common grounds will initially have to emerge around the problematics that brought the old era to its knees.
Take again the crisis of Fordism. By the 1970s, not only had persistently high wages led to a crisis of profitability, there were also widespread fears that unions had become too strong, the state too expansive and too bureaucratic, life too uniform. The success of the neoliberal project, at least in its Anglo-American heartlands, lay partly in the fact that it effectively tackled these problems, that it captured previously ‘deviant’ desires, discourses and practices by promising individuals the ability to realise them. When neoliberalism crushed the unions, shrank the welfare bureaucracy, ended stagnation and beat inflation, it on the one hand effectively addressed the problems that brought the old New Deal to its knees, and on the other, laid the groundwork for a new set of systemic problems to emerge.
The first, most immediately obvious, problematic apparent in the crisis of neoliberalism appears very different, depending on where you are standing. What from the top looks like an ‘economic crisis’ (not enough growth, not enough profits, not enough demand) is experienced, from below, as a ‘crisis of social reproduction’. Unemployment is soaring and national deficits are placing ever-greater constraints on social security. The zombie-liberal response has been ultimately self-defeating: bail out the banks and some well-connected industries (but at huge cost to governments, increasing deficit spending), try to re-inflate the bubble of cheap credit, and hope that someone will borrow the money that is made available. Alas, there is no source of mass demand, no consumer of last resort, no new large-scale investment opportunities. Along this road lies nothing but future ruin.
These two perspectives on the same crisis obviously call forth two different ‘logical’ responses. While the reaction of zombie-liberalism makes sense according to its own (undead) logic, the logical response to the crisis of social reproduction is perhaps a strategy of commoning. This would be a defence, creation and expansion of resources held in common and accessible to all: expanding public transport, socialising health care, guaranteeing a basic income, and so on. This type of strategy would achieve two linked and essential goals. First, it would address our immediate fears of losing our livelihoods – because it would create spaces where social reproduction becomes possible outside the crisis-ridden circuits of capital. Second, it would counter the atomisation caused by three decades of neoliberal subjectivation in markets – just as engaging in market-based interactions tends to create market-subjects, engaging in commoning tends to create ‘commonistic’ subjectivities. And if another, equally ‘logical’, response to the economic crisis is the attempt to exclude certain people from collective resources, then the creation of open commons as a response to the crisis of social reproduction would counteract this, too. Open commons would undermine the nativist, racist politics that are gaining ground, certainly in Europe, and in parts of Africa and Asia.
A second central problematic is that of the biocrisis, of the many socio-ecological crises that are currently afflicting the world as a result of the contradiction between capital’s need for never-ending growth and the fact that we live on a finite planet. Again, the biocrisis has two faces. From the perspective of governments and capital, it looks like an emerging threat to social stability. Climate change is undermining livelihoods, which increases the number of people forced to secure their reproduction through extra-legal means. Large-scale movements of ‘climate refugees’ are feared by many governments. Piracy is a response by Somali fisherfolk and others to over-fishing off the Horn of Africa. But states and capital also perceive precisely these threats to social stability as opportunities to relegitimise political authority, to expand government powers and to kick-start a new round of ‘green’ economic growth, fuelled by uranium and austerity.
But the biocrisis, as the name implies, is one that threatens life; and disproportionately the lives of those who have done the least to cause it. Increasingly, the movements coalescing around this contradiction – between capital and life, growth and limits – are doing so around the notion of climate justice: the idea that responses to the crisis should undo rather than exacerbate existing injustices and imbalances of power, and that their construction should involve the direct participation of those affected.
Of course, we cannot be sure that new middle and common grounds will emerge around either of these issues – the economic crisis/crisis of social reproduction and the biocrisis – but we are convinced that any successful new project will need to address both.
From commons to constitutions
Allowing a new common ground to emerge involves a moment of grace, a stepping back from the assumptions, tactics and strategies of the anti-neoliberal, counter-globalist protest cycle of the turn of the century. The common ground constructed and maintained from that period must be recomposed through the prism of our contemporary situation.
The counter-globalisation movement was suspicious of – often even opposed to – institutions per se, constituted forms of power. This suspicion was obvious, for example, in the tension within one of its most institutionalised forms, the World Social Forum (WSF). The reason for the counter-globalisation movement’s scepticism was, of course, well founded: the result of the generalised recognition that neoliberal ideology had successfully colonised most social democratic parties and trade unions.
But when the crisis of neoliberalism irrupted, it became apparent that this mistrust of institutions had translated into an inability to consistently shape politics and the economy. Antagonism against institutions as an end in itself is a dead end. The power to vacate institutions leaves a void that politics, which abhors vacuum, tends to cover up with the calculations of piecemeal cooptation. Moments of antagonism are either part of ongoing processes of building autonomy and constituting new forms of power, or they risk dissipation, or even worse, backlashes. Today, it is necessary to have more than the sporadic show of strength: we need forms of organisation that start from the collective management of needs, that politicise the structures and mechanisms of social reproduction, and build force from there. What form could these take in the present climate? Campaigns against foreclosures, around the cost of utility bills, private debt, energy resources…? In any case, what is needed are interventions that start from shared life and acquire their consistency there; that employ moments of antagonism in order to increase their constituent power, rather than as ends in themselves.
If a decade ago, with the neoliberal doctrine at the height of its power and most institutional roads well and truly blocked, outright rejection was a credible tactic, the brittle ground of today presents us with very different problems.
We do, in fact, have some present examples of important transformations that have managed to inscribe themselves in institutional forms. The most remarkable are undoubtedly the constituent processes in Bolivia and Ecuador, which have resulted in political constitutions that represent radical innovations not only in relation to the countries’ histories, but to constitutional law itself. First of all, because they give a form to a new arrangement of forces in which, for the first time in their history, the vast majority of the population actually has a voice, and some degree of representation. More than that, however, in instituting pluri-nationality as a principle of the state, both of them signal a remarkable break with modern notions of sovereignty by recognising multiple, autonomous sovereign forms within the state itself, as well as acknowledging the historical debt of the colonisation process. In the case of Ecuador, in fact, it is not only pluri-nationality, but also the indigenous concept of ‘the good life’ (sumak kausay) and the ‘rights of nature’ that are made into principles. The latter, a unique invention in legal history, follows directly from the former: ‘the good life’ necessarily involves the environment in which one lives – not as the source from which, but as the medium in which, one subsists. The idea that, in the modern parliamentary state, the world had found a definitive, non-perfectible form, was central to the ‘end of history’ doctrine. While emphatically opposing the doctrine, the alterglobalist cycle seemed to accept the premise in inverse form: institutions were not subject to change. But rejecting institutions as such does not follow necessarily from rejecting institutions-as-we-know-them.
But these constitutions can only be a beginning, and in a certain way, it is after they are written that the real constituent process begins: that of filling the letter of the text with real transformation. This, indeed, is the real test that the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ will have to confront very soon: it is not so much in an increasingly organised backlash (see Honduras), but in the future of its own most-vaunted ‘success’ stories, that the question mark lies. Of course, this is also a matter of new middle and common grounds: a question of how far from the old middle ground these processes can move, and what new common grounds will have to be constructed in order to affect them. The recent experiences in Latin America have been, and remain, contradictory: the recognition of ‘the rights of nature’ and ‘the good life’ goes hand-in-hand with a resurrection of ‘developmentalism’, increased exploitation of natural resources, and a renewed emphasis on primary commodity exports. The question is: has the constituent power of existing movements been entirely spent in this process? Is the coming time one of consolidating gains instead of raising the game – of tactical rearguard manoeuvres rather than strategic movements? In Brazil, as in Bolivia, Venezuela etc., will new dynamics below the state level rekindle the transformative energy that created the present situation, or will we see its cooling off and crystallisation?
*****
How relevant are these processes, and these questions, to those of us outside Latin America? In many ways the continent, with institutional actors responsive to social movements’ common ground, seems like an anomaly. Indeed its anomalous status is perhaps a symptom of neoliberalism’s breakdown. Most of the world faces very different symptoms and a different set of questions: If zombie-liberalism is an ongoing form of governance, then how can social movements affect the wider world? If there is no dominant middle ground for emergent common grounds to rub up against then how are struggles made visible? How do we form an antagonism against an incoherent enemy? If neoliberal subjectivities continue to be reproduced then how do we interrupt this process and create new subjects with expanded horizons?
However, many current struggles are also premised on the idea that zombie-liberalism won’t persist and a new middle ground will emerge. Just think of the movements around climate change where the battle is not only against inaction but simultaneously against the manner in which the problem is being framed and the solutions being offered. From this perspective the Latin American anomaly can seem like an outpost from a potential future and its problematics can suddenly seem timely. This is the true difficulty of acting in a crisis. When the future is so unclear we must operate in many different worlds at once. We must name a common ground, while keeping it open to new directions. We must look for institutional interlocutors while accepting that, in part, we will have to create them ourselves. We must set the conditions for a new middle ground to emerge while not getting trapped by it.
These are all, of course, difficult tasks but it is how a new ‘we’ is constructed. The smallest step may seem near impossible now, but we should remember that once a new common ground begins to take shape, things can move very quickly. Such is the fragility of the current state of things that a little movement could have a dramatic effect. It may not take too much to tip a world gripped by entropy into a world full of potential.

Slavoj Žižek - Living in the End Times (6/6)

2010-03-03T00:51:00.001-08:00

Ciao democracy!

Slavoj Žižek - Living in the End Times (5/6)

2010-03-03T00:48:00.001-08:00

I have to disagree strongly with Zizek about Afghanistan. I was receptive to hear an alternative solution after his strong critique of the left,but he just moves on to the next subject. Odd.

Fareed Z.,seen in this clip, recently floated authoritartian capitalism on CNN. Neocon twerp.
The right's almost post-modern ability to "reclaim" language is part of their nihilsm. Words lose meaning and cease to carry ideas to debate. Social democrats dug their own grave once they embraced neoliberalism and now everybody in those countries must suffer.

Slavoj Žižek - Living in the End Times (4/6)

2010-03-03T00:39:00.003-08:00

Slavoj Žižek - Living in the End Times (3/6)

2010-03-03T00:39:00.001-08:00

Authoritarian capitalism may be our near future. China was showing off this new way to the neoliberal nations of the West during the Olympics.

Slavoj Žižek - Living in the End Times (2/6)

2010-03-03T00:35:00.001-08:00

Lessening/ending consumption is not enough and there is no green capitalism. Capitalism cannot be reformed or redeemed. We need to fundamentally change how we live and relate to eachother. The first step is to admit the system is broken and cannot be fixed using means grounded in the problem. Avoid the chocolate laxative and take the red pill.

Slavoj Žižek - Living in the End Times (1/6)

2010-03-03T00:26:00.001-08:00

Abandon Hope All Ye Who Watch

The End Of Free Speech On The Internet?

2010-02-26T04:19:00.000-08:00

Holy shit. Yet another radical retructuring of society and economies. The internet is going to be forcibly regulated into something not unlike television so tradtional media companies can squeeze every dime out of all the information on the web.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/leaked-acta-draft-treaty-reveals-plans-for-internet-clampdown

The US, Europe and other countries including New Zealand are secretly drawing up rules designed to crack down on copyright abuse on the internet, in part by making ISPs liable for illegal content, according to a copy of part of the confidential draft agreement that was seen by the IDG News Service.It is the latest in a series of leaks from the anticounterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) talks that have been going on for the past two years. Other leaks over the past three months have consisted of confidential internal memos about the negotiations between European lawmakers.

Why the lack of transparency? What are the corporations/governments trying to pull with ACTA?As mentioned in this cautiously forward looking article:http://anarchism.pageabode.com/jacobian/acta-and-intellectual-property

The public has not been allowed to view any of the candidate treaties. Not only is it secret, but it also is being negotiated without congressional oversight. The justification for it being negotiated in secret by the executive is ostensibly that it does not change any existing domestic law in the United States.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/21/acta-internet-enforc.html

Insane Society

2010-02-21T23:57:00.000-08:00

Been looking for this quote: "A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves. " — Erich Fromm

The Authority Smashing! Hour with Mr1001NIghts and Zeno

2010-02-18T11:21:00.000-08:00

This the ASH show for Wednesday, Feb. 17th, 2010.

The Authority Smashing! Hour (ASH) on Ash Wednsday with Mr.1001Nights and guest co-host Zeno. In this episode we talk about Intellectual Property and South Carolina's brilliant subversive registration law. Mr.1001Nights does yeoman's work being the on-air voice of this show.
Links related to this show:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_monopoly_privilege

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Austin

http://rawstory.com/2010/02/south-carolinas-subversive-activities-registration-act-force/

http://www.zcommunications.org/what-do-empires-do-by-michael-parenti

http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-womens-rights/aclu-challenges-patents-breast-cancer-genes-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NET_Act

Tune in live weekdays Mon-Fri at 8 PM.

Terrorism Derangement Syndrome By Dahlia Lithwick

2010-02-17T21:31:00.000-08:00

Dahlia Lithwick paints a scary picture of the American post-9/11 zeitgheist that is equally baffling given that we are in no more danger of terrorist attacks than before 9/11.

http://www.slate.com/id/2243429/
"We're terrified when a terror attack happens, and we're also terrified when it's thwarted. We're terrified when we give terrorists trials, and we're terrified when we warehouse them at Guantanamo without trials. If a terrorist cooperates without being tortured we complain about how much more he would have cooperated i...f he hadn't been read his rights. No matter how tough we've been on terror, we will never feel safe enough to ask for fewer safeguards."

We live in a failing country of cowardly mental children that hide behind one of the largest(overfunded) combined armed forces armed to the teeth with tanks,jets,guns,bombs,and countless nukes and shit our pants at scary sounds. This is more pathetic than the Cold War. We've gone from a commie under every bed to a terrorist in every closet. Why are we so scared?

Truly scary: "But here's the paradox: It's not a terrorist's time bomb that's ticking. It's us. Since 9/11, we have become ever more willing to suspend basic protections and more contemptuous of American traditions and institutions."

More Bizarre/Propaganda Comics

2010-02-17T21:25:00.000-08:00

http://oddee.com/item_96960.aspx

"Hansi The Girl Who Loved The Swastika" is one of the funniest Christian propaganda comics outside of Chick Tracts I have ever read.

Compare that to this gem of propaganda used for good:

http://www.bookpatrol.net/2010/01/libraries-keep-kings-crucial-comic-book.html

Zeno co-hosts The Authority Smashing! Hour with Mr1001Nights

2010-02-16T02:06:00.000-08:00

http://authoritysmashers.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/week21_mon/

For this hour of authority smashing,we speak about news,Avatar coming to life, PARECON,the new international,pacifism,imperialism,American right libertarianism, conspiracy theories,tea baggers and drugs in Afghanistan.

Through music, we learn that liberals are spineless and that there are aparently five million ways to kill a CEO.

Thanks to caller and folks on the boards.

Countdown Special Comment - Racial discrimination inherent in the Tea Party movement

2010-02-16T01:51:00.001-08:00

Can the movement seperate itself from the racists within or are they all lost?

A New Socialist International?

2010-02-16T01:46:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Comradeshaw for covering this subject and alerting me to Michael Albert's proposal.

Link to the proposal:
http://www.zcommunications.org/newint...

Link to Michael Albert's piece: http://www.zcommunications.org/a-new-...

Noam Chomsky on right wing Tea Party protests, " People with real grievances"

2010-02-05T01:17:00.001-08:00

Talk of potential left-right alliances are all over right libertarian and anarchist sites as people across the political spectrum see the true enemy we all share-the corporations absorb our government. Even progressives are contemplating it as illustrated by Jane Hamsher and Grover Norquist's alliance.
I think Chomsky's take is correct, but I cannot deny that some of these people are total authoritarian personalites,Nazis,and psychos that are just lost. We should mock them mercilessly when they are racist/fascist etc. We should NOT write off the sane people on the right. We should share our commonalities and explain to them we would be on the same side until they get like the crazy/fascist ones. I don't see why it would be impossible to fight on the same side against the corporations with right-libertarian minded people. I don't see why both sides cannot agree to disagree on the incompatible ideas and unite on anti-imperialist/anti-oligarchy etc. Left radicals of all people should not smack of elitism when interacting with other working class people. I blame the liberals/Dems more,not radicals for the saner of these working class folks drifting right with no good analysis to grab onto. We know why there is no solidarity among Americans and we have to try all that much harder.

Howard Zinn Tribute on Democracy Now! with Naomi Klein (5/5)

2010-01-29T01:23:00.001-08:00

We did lose a favorite teacher. He was a teacher and mentor I and many others never met. We should heed Howard Zinn's lesson and not give up the fight. We are not powerless, We cannot count on politicians and elections to make the change. It's time to organize and never stop.

Howard Zinn Tribute on Democracy Now! with Anthony Arnove (4/5)

2010-01-29T00:53:00.001-08:00

Howard Zinn Tribute on Democracy Now! with Noam Chomsky (3/5)

2010-01-29T00:26:00.001-08:00

Howard Zinn (1922-2010): A Tribute to the Legendary Historian on Democracy Now 2 of 4

2010-01-29T00:05:00.001-08:00

Continued.

Howard Zinn Tribute on Democracy Now! (1/5)

2010-01-29T00:04:00.001-08:00

Howard Zinn was like a cool grandpa I liked to listen to who I never met in person. I'm devastated beyond words and wish peace and condolences to Zinn's family.
Charngchi "Chomskyan" Way puts it better( and more personally) than I can.:

"Howard Zinn passed away suddenly at the age of 87 yesterday.

He was an inspiration to many. His passing is a great tragedy for all peace loving people in the world.

I had the good fortune to know him personally in his last few years, he was always encouraging and kind and helpful. I will miss him deeply."

Charngchi Way

"I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past fugitive moments of compassion, rather than the solid centuries of warfare. " --Howard Zinn

Jonathan Turley on Countdown Talks About USSC Decision on Unlimited Corporate Money in Campaigns

2010-01-23T23:18:00.001-08:00

I need to become a corporation so I can enjoy limited liability.

Supreme Court Sanctioned Murder Of Democracy! Keith Olbermann Special Comment pt.2

2010-01-23T23:09:00.001-08:00

The United Corporations of America

2010-01-23T22:46:00.000-08:00

Corporatism/Fascism just ramped up big time in the ole U.S. of A. Listening to liberal TV host Keith Olbermann's 'Special Comment', I wondered how much one could say about this ruling that would venture into wild,paranoid hyperbole. I can't say.
We were pretty fucked before this.

Randall Robinson on US's historical role in Haiti, DN 1/15/2010 (2/2)

2010-01-18T18:44:00.003-08:00

Randall Robinson on US's historical role in Haiti, DN 1/15/2010 (1/2)

2010-01-18T18:44:00.001-08:00

Martin Luther King, "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam"

2010-01-18T01:06:00.001-08:00

"Speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. against the Vietnam War. Audio.

This speech was released by Black Forum records, a subsidiary of Motown, and went on to win a Grammy in 1970 for the Best Spoken Word Recording.

Excerpts of a Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967."

Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2010

2010-01-18T00:58:00.000-08:00

Martin Luther King, "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam"
Video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U
From:The Pacifica Radio/UC Berkeley
Social Activism Sound Recording Project

Martin Luther King,
"Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam"

April 30, 1967, Riverside Church, New York
"The sermon which I am preaching this morning in a sense is not the usual kind of sermon, but it is a sermon and an important subject, nevertheless, because the issue that I will be discussing today is one of the most controversial issues confronting our nation. I'm using as a subject from which to preach, "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam."
Now, let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see this war as an unjust, evil, and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. "Ye shall know the truth," says Jesus, "and the truth shall set you free." Now, I've chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing, as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we're always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony. But we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for in all our history there has never been such a monumental dissent during a war, by the American people.

Polls reveal that almost fifteen million Americans explicitly oppose the war in Vietnam. Additional millions cannot bring themselves around to support it. And even those millions who do support the war [are] half-hearted, confused, and doubt-ridden. This reveals that millions have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism, to the high grounds of firm dissent, based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Now, of course, one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It's a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against the best in our tradition.

Yes, we must stand, and we must speak. [tape skip]...have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam. Many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. And so this morning, I speak to you on this issue, because I am determined to take the Gospel seriously. And I come this morning to my pulpit to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation.

This sermon is not addressed to Hanoi, or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Nor is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in a successful resolution of the problem. This morning, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans, who bear the greatest responsibility, and entered a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

Now, since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is...a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed that there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hope of the poor at home. It was sending their sons, and their brothers, and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportion relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with a cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school room. So we watch them in brutal solidarity, burning the huts of a poor village. But we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago or Atlanta. Now, I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years--especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, "So what about Vietnam?" They ask if our nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent. Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our total movement; they've applauded me. America and most of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, we can't do it this way. They applauded us in the sit-in movement--we non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, Be non-violent toward Bull Connor;when I was saying, Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark. There's something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, "Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children. There's something wrong with that press!

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964. And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was not just something taking place, but it was a commission--a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of Man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances. But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men, for communists and capitalists, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative. Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that he died for them? What, then, can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao, as a faithful minister to Jesus Christ? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life? Finally, I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be the son of the Living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. And because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come today to speak for them. And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak not now of the soldiers of each side, not of the military government of Saigon, but simply of the people who have been under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution until some attempt is made to know these people and hear their broken cries.

Now, let me tell you the truth about it. They must see Americans as strange liberators. Do you realize that the Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation. And incidentally, this was before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. And this is a little-known fact, and these people declared themselves independent in 1945. They quoted our Declaration of Independence in their document of freedom, and yet our government refused to recognize them. President Truman said they were not ready for independence. So we fell victim as a nation at that time of the same deadly arrogance that has poisoned the international situation for all of these years. France then set out to reconquer its former colony. And they fought eight long, hard, brutal years trying to re-conquer Vietnam. You know who helped France? It was the United States of America. It came to the point that we were meeting more than eighty percent of the war costs. And even when France started despairing of its reckless action, we did not. And in 1954, a conference was called at Geneva, and an agreement was reached, because France had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu. But even after that, and after the Geneva Accord, we did not stop. We must face the sad fact that our government sought, in a real sense, to sabotage the Geneva Accord. Well, after the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come through the Geneva agreement. But instead the United States came and started supporting a man named Diem who turned out to be one of the most ruthless dictators in the history of the world. He set out to silence all opposition. People were brutally murdered because they raised their voices against the brutal policies of Diem. And the peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States influence and by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown, they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace. And who are we supporting in Vietnam today? It's a man by the name of general Ky [Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky] who fought with the French against his own people, and who said on one occasion that the greatest hero of his life is Hitler. This is who we are supporting in Vietnam today. Oh, our government and the press generally won't tell us these things, but God told me to tell you this morning. The truth must be told.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support and all the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps, where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women, and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the towns and see thousands of thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the United Buddhist Church. This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Oh, my friends, if there is any one thing that we must see today is that these are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. They are saying, unconsciously, as we say in one of our freedom songs, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around!" It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo, we shall boldly challenge unjust mores, and thereby speed up the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing, unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of mankind. And when I speak of love I'm not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of John: "Let us love one another, for God is love. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us."

Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are bothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State--they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America's strayed away, and this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.

It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on." I call on Washington today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America today. I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, "You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God."

Now it isn't easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand, sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened heart. Sometimes it means losing a job...means being abused and scorned. It may mean having a seven, eight year old child asking a daddy, "Why do you have to go to jail so much?" And I've long since learned that to be a follower to the Jesus Christ means taking up the cross. And my bible tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear, there is the cross that we must bear. Let us bear it--bear it for truth, bear it for justice, and bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning with that determination. And I have not lost faith. I'm not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven't lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I can still sing "We Shall Overcome" because Carlyle was right: "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: "Truth pressed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet, that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the bible is right: "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid because the words of the Lord have spoken it. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all over the world we will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we're free at last!" With this faith, we'll sing it as we're getting ready to sing it now. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And nations will not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I don't know about you, I ain't gonna study war no more".

US Policy in Haiti Over Decades, DN 3/3

2010-01-15T15:04:00.001-08:00

US Policy in Haiti Over Decades, DN Part 2

2010-01-15T14:51:00.001-08:00

Pat Robertson's claims are refuted. I agree with what is said,but real Vodun is a legitimate traditional polytheistic religion of West Africa, having nothing to do with "Satan". It was carried with the African Diaspora to the "New World" by slavery. Neoliberal capitalists see disater in Haiti as opportunity to open up new markets. Naomi Klein @ 3:36

US Policy in Haiti Over Decades, DN 1/14/2010 (1/3)

2010-01-15T14:28:00.001-08:00

How We and Haiti are intertwined.

Gaza One Year Later: Update with Norman Finkelstein on The Authority Smashing! Hour

2010-01-07T23:44:00.000-08:00

I blogged this on Wednesday, January 14, 2009:

Came by these articles on Alternet that help place the Gaza conflict in a broader context further illuminating growing evidence that not only was the violence avoidable,but is a partof larger machinations by Israel to grab more land.Why bust up illegal settlements while allowing others to spread? A faked pullout to disguise a big push to expand and cement their homeland? It is well documented that Israel has turned down and sabotaged their own chances for peace intentionally on several occasions.Why? The proof is becoming very damning. Now they seem to no longer care how they are seen, as propaganda becomes increasingly difficult. Israeli Arabs have now been refused the right to be represented with the banning of Arab parties in the Knesset. Will their supreme court knock that down as unconstitutional? The view of Israel as South Africa is further cemented with this further alienation and disenfranchisement of its second class citizens. Israel clearly doesn't care how that looks. Will other rights be removed from Arab Israelis? Will the Arab Israelis and surviing Gazans share the same fate as oppressed minority subjects of a racist,fascist state----to be expelled or exterminated to purify a truly Jewish-only Israel? There is talk that PNA president Abbas may be overthrown. Could a collapse of that government be on the way? Are we witnessing the Final Solution to the "Palestinian Problem" for Zionism? How Israel Used Deception to Justify Its Gaza Aggression by Ira Chernus:All of the suffering in Gaza -- indeed, all of the suffering endured by Palestinians under Israeli occupation for the last eight years -- could have been avoided if Israel negotiated a peace agreement with Yasser Arafat when it had the chance, in 2001.What chance? The official Israeli position is that there was no chance, "no partner for peace." That’s what Israeli leaders heard from their Military Intelligence (MI) service in 2000 after the failure of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David. Arafat scuttled those talks, MI told the leaders, because he was planning to set off a new round of violence, a second intifada.Now former top officials of MI say the whole story, painting Arafat as a terrorist out to destroy Israel, was an intentional fiction. That’s the most explosive finding in an investigative report just published in Israel’s top newspaper, Ha’aretz, by one of its finest journalists, Akiva Eldar. http://www.alternet.org/audits/119488/how_israel_used_deception_to_justify_its_

gaza_aggression_/?page=1 Israeli Militants Poised to Resettle Gaza After AssaultBy Linda Mamoun:Settler activists are counting on their historically strong ties to the Israeli military, with some units composed entirely of settlers, to help in their fight. Indeed, some soldiers and reservists currently in Gaza were there three years ago living in cherished settlement communities. On Monday, an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described the bittersweet reactions of soldiers who had lived in Gaza settlements and are now back in uniform, noting, "Some see it as a first step toward returning to their former homes." With world opinion,accusations of war crimes,WMD's,possibility of charges to go to the world court,their status with the EU,what could Israel's end game possibly be?

One year later, horiffic state terror,naked ethnic cleansing,1400 Palestinians dead(13 Israelis dead), and the Goldstone Report are an elephant in the room in America as international activists are oppressed by Egypt. Fmr. Pres. Jimmy Carter has pussed out and backed away from apt criticisms of Israel and obvious comparisons to S.African Apartheid. Further bombings by Israel are currently underway.

My comrades in the Authority Smashers Collective pulled together a phenomenal show with Norman Finkelstein as their guest for the hour. He dropped some knowledge on us and

I asked him about how far Israel is willing to take this. Thank you Mr1001nights and Chomskyan doing a great show and thank you Dr. Finkelstein for coming on and answering our questions.

This is what Noam Chomsky had to say about the subject recently:

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2009/12/24/noam_chomsky_gaza_one_year_later
Speaking in Watertown, Massachusetts on December 6, 2009, linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky delivered a talk entitled “Gaza: One Year Later.” Source Democracy Now!

Beware "Color Revolutions" or Why I Wont re-post News of Protests on Iran Blindly

2010-01-02T12:46:00.000-08:00

People who struggle against their repressive governments should be supported in any way we can, but we---and they should be skeptical of who throws support behind their struggle. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend and just because paths align,doesn't mean goals are compatable. When America,the CIA,the Neocons,and Israel support this movement,they and we should be alarmed. The West is pushing a fraud that this is a fullscale revolution that will topple the theocrats any day now. The internal politics of Iran are being meddled with at the peril of those legitimate protestors and true reformists. Don't get started on the reformist messiah Mousavi who once oppressed his people as bad as Ahmadinejad. "The Green Path of Hope" sounds like the same PR gurus that brought us Brand Obama are trying to work their magic rebranding a autocrat as a democrat.

No good can come out of their true expressions of greivences being co-opted and seen as co-opted by the repressive regime. Everyone on those streets becomes a defacto American agent against their consent and the state gets to treat them as Fifth Columnists.

Now matter how sincere the people in the movements, many of these "color revolutions" allow themselves to be willing stooges of the CIA etc, through front groups: USAID,Freedom House(Neocon),National Endowment for Democracy(Neocon),Soros Foundation,and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs(Neoliberal/Neocon)-- look at what countries these NGOs are active in and how the Washington Consensus is enforced through them. Why would Iran and this "Green Revolution" be any different? US media treatment of the story clinches most suspicions.

Our support for the protestors makes us riper for the conning of our governments' and Israeli propaganda. A war against Iran has been in the planning stages since W was in office and Obama is carrying that over. Forged nuclear documents have already circulated(deja vu) and the war drums get louder as Obama recently told China he may not be able to hold back Israel from striking much longer in order to pressure China(and Russia) to get with the program. The project to "rebuild the Muslim world" is stepping up it's intensity. We are now at war with five Muslim countries with the ratchetting up of attacks on Yemen.

Look at how a questionable aborted Christmas attack has been spun into justification for keeping GITMO open(and rejailing released Yemeni prisoners),more calls for torture,indefinate and preventative detention,restricting freedom/privacy in travel,and further intervention into Yemen. We are being prepared for a war with Iran with all this media coverage and bullshit "humanitarian" pleas for intervention are coming out of the right and "left" press/blogoshpere.

Everybody is suddenly pro-protest? Interesting. I'll remember that next time protestors are brutalized and oppressed here and people twittering about it get arrested, like during the recent G20 protests. Where was the compassion for protestors when police used eardrum rupturing sonic weapons on non-violent protestors and college students? Where was the press' sympathy? How about the Olympics protests in Canada right now? Or the brutality of the police in Copenhagen? Honduras? It's no coincidence the U.S. MSM,Twitter,Youtube are alive with coverage that aids said interests while giving the illusion they are helping "get the truth out".

Solidarity with all people in the streets.

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/2846

http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/SRR/Volume14/kgs3.html

The Road to Serfdom:Oysters a la Obama

2009-12-27T13:08:00.000-08:00

I wasn't surpised by Obama the politician until the War-is-Peace prize, that finally gave me my answer to how imperial he is, but now the stakes/costs of "his" lies keep elevating. Amid ever-expanding wars, we are teased with reform of our broken sickcare system.We do not deserve this cruel hoax, too many people are dying and going broke. Those deaths are on the heads of insurance fatcats,the status quo,and now the Democrats and Obama for playing a political game instead of fixing a lethally broken system. The Republicans share their blame for being obstructionists, but they really weren't a real threat to any true reform. They're off navel-gazing in the wilderness. Not only should this awful bill be killed, but that albatross must be hanged around his neck as his haunting failure to hand us over to the insurance companies like the oysters in Alice in Wonderland.
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/12/15/president-obama-tells-bald-faced-lie-about-health-care-reform-cost-control/

I've made this arguement myself before,and its made quite well here matching my righteous indignation with lots of facts as well. I notice how quiet the Republicans/teabaggers/Fox are on this topic and I think the reason is twofold: Their insurance company overlords want it and they can attack Democrats/Obama with creating a truly unjust new tax on citizens (they would be right for once). http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/12/15/with-out-a-public-option-the-individual-mandate-is-unacceptable-for-moral-political-and-policy-reasons/

People across the U.S. political spectrum shouldn't be able to go along philosophically or morally with government/corporate coercion of this type. This mandate policy is not liberal or conservative, it's corporatist. As a radical looking in from the outside, I find this horrible and dangerous. If I were a right wing conservative, libertarian, or a liberal/center-left/progressive to democratic socialist I would find the same objections. This is the "road to serfdom" as free marketeer Friedrich von Hayek called it. He "missed" that corporations would be our masters not welfare state bureauocrats/technocrats and totalitarian central planning. We are witnessing, like under Bush, the death of our rights---to private tyranny. We officially have no parties to represent our interests and the political system is broken and corrupt beyond past bad instances. Our republic/democracy as it were is in crisis, just like our healthcare, economy and the environment. Most reform is pretty much impossible at this point. Like with our traitorous "leaders" who have doomed us to extinction in Copenhagen, our "leaders" here have shown themselves for what they really are.
Well put:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgKLMhk2m1Y

People are smarter than they are taken granted for:
Would you favor or oppose requiring all Americans to buy health insurance — the so-called mandate — even if they find insurance too expensive or do not want it?FAVOR OPPOSE NOT SURE38% 51% 11%
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/12/18/poll-people-hate-the-mandate/
Again,this is not American "Left vs. Right" as it is understood here.These mandates are immoral and should be resisted across the U.S. political spectrum. This bill and what spawned it is corporatocracy and corporatism-AKA fascism.

We are being scared and threatened(even guilted) into passing this garbage bill much like Wall Street scared us into forking over OUR money. That is extortion and this bill if made law would legalize another form of extortion.
And as of Christmas Eve, as if this "Healthcare bill" wasn't an horrific enough present, Barack Orwell slips this by while we are spending time with our loved ones:
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/12/treasury-more-support-for-fannie-and.html

Unlimited money for Fannie and Freddy,no jobs for Americans. We should all remember this generosity when the government tells us there's no money for our needs.

This article by Naomi Klein sums it up for me right now:http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/23423

Barack Orwell

2009-12-27T12:59:00.000-08:00

A troubling phenomenon began to occur once Barack Obama became president;the Orwellian speak began. Rather than changing his positions/explaining his process,he began to speak/act as if he never said the first thing he later disagrees with. Of course his tabula rasa effect was to blame for some people's expectations,but in many cases he's been lying out his ass and pretending he never said/promised things.You did not imagine this. Obama was against mandates before he was for mandates.
http://news.firedoglake.com/2009/12/17/video-of-obama-making-the-case-against-mandates/

2009-12-27T12:54:00.000-08:00

In response to President Barack Obama’s announcement on Dec. 1 to deploy 30,000 additional troops to the occupation of Afghanistan, the organization March Forward!, comprising both veterans and active-duty members of the U.S. military, has called on all soldiers to refuse their orders to deploy.

Congress declares wars,not Bush,not Obama. It is the duty of Obama and the soldiers to preserve,protect,and defend the Constitution. Obama is a constitutional scholar and he is violating the separation of powers under the United States Constitution by claiming the unilateral "right" to declare wars. The Executive branc...h :"Executes the instructions of Congress when it declares war or makes rules for the military." Like Bush,he is abusing power. That makes any wars they declared illegal. This is another reason why that war-is-peace speech is dangerous.

Avatar Micro-review:

2009-12-20T21:54:00.000-08:00

Just saw Avatar.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)
Though I agree wholeheartedly with the premise of this following article,it was a cool movie. It was a recombination of cool SF ideas reorganized into an entertaining movie,nothing deep. The literal animism is nifty.James Cameron needs other writers to help him with dialogue IMO. It's so hard to be original or beat others to ideas in SF. This movie was hardly original in its themes/situations and you can find many existing concepts that clearly inspired Cameron if you look. If the feline aliens(nothing new in SF) in my first novel were blue I'd be pretty pissed and change them, but my blue elf-eared amphibian warriror aliens kept popping in my head as I watched Avatar. Why are blue aliens so cool?
Dances with Smurfs indeed:
http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar?skyline=true&s=x

Possible inspirations:
http://io9.com/5426120/did-prog-rocks-greatest-artist-inspire-avatar-all-signs-point-to-yes/gallery/
http://io9.com/5427104/avatars-neytiri-has-a-striking-comic-book-twin/gallery/

Zeno on The Authority Smashing! Hour

2009-12-17T22:31:00.000-08:00

After some technical difficulties involving a feedback echo, I called in. Blog Talk Radio,why do you taunt me with glitches? Because I missed the opening I missed subjects other than Copenhagen were going to be discussed. Sorry for being redundant Mr1001Nights! Great conversation though we are fucked.:(
Great discussion on Marxist-Leninists vs. anarchists. Can't we all get along? We're all socialists! Great speech clip of a guy from the Transformative Studies Institute at the end. The collapse is happening and current institutions cannot be counted on.
We,the citizens of Earth must help eachother.

http://authoritysmashers.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/week11_thurs/

Iconoclast Komix: Closing Credits Stinger

2009-12-13T04:28:00.000-08:00

Iconoclast Komix: Twilight Spoof

2009-12-11T22:18:00.000-08:00

India, Pakistan and a regional solution

2009-12-10T01:41:00.001-08:00

Afghan war not about self-defence

2009-12-10T01:25:00.003-08:00

US no business in the middle of Afghan civil war

2009-12-10T01:25:00.001-08:00

Obama's Vietnam-lite

2009-12-04T08:35:00.001-08:00

Obama's "empire" Pt.2

2009-12-04T08:10:00.001-08:00

Obama's "empire"

2009-12-04T08:09:00.001-08:00

The Stimulator VS Alex Jones Part 2

2009-12-02T02:55:00.001-08:00

I love The Stimulator's debunking of conspiratorial thinking. YouTube is overrun with this Alex Jones/Davis Icke, NWO/Bilderberg/Freemason/Illuminait,2012, bullshit rotting the brains of Americans.

the stimulator vs alex jones part 1

2009-12-02T02:46:00.001-08:00

The More Things Change: Interesting War Comic I found

2009-11-02T23:46:00.000-08:00

I was at my friendly neighborhood comic store today and checked out the bargain bins.
I found a really old war comic called "Battlefeld Action" by Charlton Comics for 50 cents. What was really interesting inside this propaganda comic was a short about warfare in the future. Ideas haven't updated much in this era of Full-spectrum dominance
and Future Soldier
plans that have come out of the military-industrial complex.

Fly The Geek Flag:Comics

2009-11-02T21:52:00.000-08:00

What I'm currently reading:

I am really enjoying Poe from Boom! Studios.
from website:"Everyone knows that Poe created the detective genre, but did you know he was a detective himself? Finally the secret can be revealed for the first time! Enter the world of POE and follow the famous author of darkness as he tracks the killer of his brother’s friend. Supernatural adventure for fans of books like HELLBOY!"
http://io9.com/5267646/detective-poe-quoth-the-raven-the-game-is-afoot
Great art.

Ghostbusters:Displaced Aggression
Summary:The father of Gozer has scattered the guys across time and space.In the first issue Peter Venkman is busting ghosts steampunk style in the old west and we are introduced to a new female Ghostbuster.Starting out much better than the last
series that started well but treaded on unoriginal material(at least in the context of the Real Ghostbusters.Done better in the cartoon)In the same way Ghostbusters:The Video Game utilized unused ideas from the original script treatment and the unfilmed Ghostbusters 3 script(about the ghostbusters crossing over to Hell/new recruits),this new comic mines some of those unused ideas about the GB's fighting ghosts across time and space.This book is light and fun,rather than dark and humorless. I hope this series doesn't peter out in the same fasion.

SPOILER-filled minireviews:
Ghostbusters:The Other Side-
Some clever bits,but the premise was wasted and rushed to a conclusion via LITERAL deus ex machina. Ghosts of famous mobsters go after the Ghostbusters for hurting their ghost smuggling racket.
Seeing the Ghostbusters whacked by mobster ghosts and thrown in the East river (in Ecto-1),possssed Peter screwing hookers and slapping Janine was disturbing and disrespectful to the characters in an attempt to be cutting edge. We meet Winston's tragically dead girfriend for no reason. The choices for the identities of the ghosts I thought was cool.It could have worked,but the execution was weak.

I thought Toyko Pop's manga-stye "Ghost Busted" was superior in story and creative in different manga artwork(6 chapters done by different artists). The theme of ghost getting revenge was the same,but handled better. The mayor's assistant from Ghostbusters 2 returned and the boys in grey fought Gozer's fashionista concubine and an army of clothing-possessed supermodels.
I would like to see more of this if IDW is going to put out weak books like The Other Side. I'm liking the tone of Displaced aggression. IDW also made an upcoming
x-mas issue that retreads a classic RGB episode where they caught the Christmas Ghosts for Scrooge and killed Christmas.
http://www.tokyopop.com/product/2656/Ghostbusters/1

Whedonverse(Darkhorse & IDW):
Buffy Season 8(I read the first couple of storylines.waiting for collected graphic novels)
Angel:After The Fall(On the second TBP)
Spike:After The Fall(fucking awesome!)
Will somebody make more Serenity books?!
Waiting for Dr. Horrible comic.

Just read Batman:Mad Love(terrific lives up to critical acclaim) I highly recommend it! I love anything Bruce Timm/Paul Dini,but this is them at their best.
Summary:(SPOILERS!)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Love_(comics)

Was trying to complete the IDW Star Trek movie related comics,but I think I'll wait until they are all collected(Countdown,Nero,Spock) The background these comics give the recent shiny movie give it the missing character/story depth. Sillyscience about using "red matter" to create a blackhole to stop a supernova aside. Nero comes across as a three dimensional villain and total badass.
Summary:(potential SOILERS)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_trek_countdown

Going back and reading Black Dossier so I can follow Leaue of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Summary:(potential spoilers)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_League_of_Extraordinary_Gentlemen,_Volume_III:_Century
A few months ago I got very cool steampunk graphic novel The Five Fists of Science from the library. Very remnicent of Ghostbusters in all the best ways.
Summary:(No SPOILERS) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Fists_of_Science
I have never seen Thomas Edison portrayed as so evil!Love the take on Tesla(OCD) and Twain.

Read the first Farscape series by Boom! Studios.(pretty cool!)I'm going to wait for the different series to be collected.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farscape
Possibly the best show The SciFi Channel cancelled.
Summary: Picks up after events of Peacekeeper Wars tv movie. Alot has changed.

A favorite series I read this year was "Indiana Jones and the Tomb of the Gods". Great yarn with twist ending,but the art changed in the last issue from great to meh.
Summary:(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Tomb_of_the_Gods(SPOILERS)

Ellsberg: From Vietnam to Afghanistan

2009-10-29T02:01:00.007-07:00

Pt3 The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

2009-10-29T02:01:00.005-07:00

Pt2 The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

2009-10-29T02:01:00.003-07:00

The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex Pt1

2009-10-29T02:01:00.001-07:00

Post-racial America:Racial Attacks in Phoenix

2009-10-10T23:01:00.001-07:00

More signs of the social disintergration of Arizona.

Great commentary

2009-10-07T23:39:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Mission Creep

2009-09-28T02:09:00.000-07:00

The weapons used on the empire's brown victims abroad are being turned on us at home for great profit. Weapons of torture have come home to silence dissidents as this system creates more vocal critics refusing to go along with the pillaging of our wealth by Wall Street.

As described in this article:SONIC WEAPONS USED IN IRAQ POSITIONED AT CONGRESSIONAL TOWNHALL MEETINGS IN SAN DIEGO COUNTY
“It’s very concerning,” Kevin Keenan, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said. “ It is fine for the Sheriff’s Department to have new less-than-lethal weapons, but for their interactions with individuals these still-dangerous weapons need to be used only as substitutes for firearms. They can’t be used as just another tool on the tool belt. As we’ve seen with tasers and pepper spray, these types of weapons are being used to subdue people even though they pose the risk of serious physical harm.”
http://eastcountymagazine.org/?q=node/1874

It also looks like the drones are coming here as well,based on this 2007 article.
http://www.clickorlando.com/news/10795937/detail.html

G-20 riot police take trophy photo with prisoner

2009-09-28T01:21:00.000-07:00

http://iwitnessvideo.info/blog/115.html

State Terror in Police State Amerikkka

2009-09-26T00:58:00.000-07:00

The full story behind the infamous "military kidnapping of activist" spreading across Youtube like a brushfire is shaping up and actual facts are coming in.
Compare the dress of the cops in Pittsburgh.This appears to be an incident of state terror aimed at protestors to terrorize them from practicing their 1st Amendment rights. How can one not feel the chilling effect of such an action? Where were the Darth Vader swat cops when men brought automatic weapons to raucus town halls and events attended by the President? Why are they needed against unarmed protestors. The I-Witness video blog has the story:
http://iwitnessvideo.info/blog/114.html

G20 Demonstrations in Pittsburgh today, unpermitted march

2009-09-26T00:37:00.001-07:00

We don't need no stinkin' permits!

Arrest at G20 Demonstrations, September 24, 2009

2009-09-26T00:29:00.001-07:00

Is this real or a staged event by the current incarnation of COINTELPRO?

CNN report shows new weapon being used on civilians, Militarized police using Sonic Weapons

2009-09-26T00:27:00.001-07:00

How ethical of the Nazis,they read the warning symptoms of their new "less lethal" weapons before using them on peaceful protestors and bystanders.

G 20 Pittsburgh Pa Police Using Sonic Weapons Against American Citizens

2009-09-26T00:20:00.001-07:00

g20 protesters blasted by sound weapon LRAD

2009-09-26T00:17:00.001-07:00

Urban pacification via Spice Girls.

Obama School of NegotiatingTM

2009-09-24T03:40:00.000-07:00

Complete freezing of all Israeli settlements to restraint on settlements? Want to know how Obama does it? Learn 5 easy steps from the Obama School of Negotiating:
step 1:pretend to be only reasonble party.
step 2:show all your cards.
step 3:negotiate away options with yourself.
step 4:give away all your carrots and throw away stick.
step 5:accept anything and claim victory.
Follow these easy steps and you too can fail at bank re-regulation, Healthcare reform,Middle East Peace Talks,and more!

It's the ENd of the World as We know it And I feel Fine Season 3 Episode 15

2009-09-23T02:17:00.001-07:00

Grace lee Boggs sees opportunity in the current financial crisis- 2/2

2009-09-23T00:44:00.003-07:00

Grace lee Boggs sees opportunity in the current financial crisis- 1/2

2009-09-23T00:44:00.001-07:00

Democrats Crumble to Joe the Heckler For No Reason

2009-09-12T01:55:00.001-07:00

Americans Observing 911 By Trying Not To Masturbate

2009-09-12T00:41:00.001-07:00

Obama's insurance option

2009-09-11T10:47:00.001-07:00

JOHN PILGER: OBAMA IS A CORPORATE MARKETING CREATION- (Thanx to Wakeymedia2)

2009-09-11T00:40:00.001-07:00

Star Wars - The Environmentalists Version

2009-09-11T00:34:00.001-07:00

GRITtv: Chris Kromm: Katrina Four Years On

2009-09-03T23:37:00.001-07:00

The more things change the more they stay the same. The phenomena troubling me much lately is that Obama will preside over some of the greatest economic upheavals to face African Americans in decades putting a black face on the system fucking them. It is such a spit in the face to the black experience,that it taints the occurance of the first black American president--something to be celebrated,but it's totality is horrific. I also don't envy the people of Africa either as he heads a new colonialism set to rape the motherland.

http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/katrina%E2%80%99s-legacy-poor-blacks-have-no-right-%E2%80%9Cbe%E2%80%9D

Crazy Secessionist At Texas Rally

2009-09-01T23:25:00.001-07:00

Talking cow chips. I can't imagine someone speaking venom like this under W's reign of terror. He just bragged about hating America and calls for the disintergration of the union. I'd fight for his right to speak,but I can't imagine that be returned to me back then--or now. Talk in general lately has been pretty scary as all this fascism mainstreams,but these people want death and chaos,what we anarchists get accused of.They celebrate anomie.This country's fucked.

Countdown - Obama Administration Change: hires The Rendon Group

2009-08-25T22:50:00.001-07:00

Sure,the contract predates Obama's admin.,but their owner's failure has no affect on the continued contracts to these frauds? How does anything Chalabi-connected still have credibility in our government? This and news about Bernanke cement the true bipartisanship.
He could have broken the prexisting contract w/ Rendon,but that only happens to auto workers huh? Disgusting.

Obama Gives Up On Healthcare Public Option

2009-08-18T14:32:00.001-07:00

Great points,including the rant by Cenk. He calls the Republican obstructionists "anarchists",but otherwise a great video. They are minarchists,not anarchists. Careful not to sound like republicans with their missusing socialism/fascism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minarchists
These obstrcuctionists literally believe nobody has a right to healthcare and the rich should not have to contribute to society.
Cenk hits it on the head:Obama and the Democrats are weak and stupid for even trying to "compromise" with a party that will not. I'm afraid the larger truth is that they never sought any real reform and it's sinking in to America.

Man Shows Up With Gun at Obama's Town Hall Event

2009-08-12T02:09:00.001-07:00

Cenk hits it. Look at the 08 RNC/DNC conventions. Peaceful protestors brutalized and rounded up by overarmed militarized cops. People charged with terrorism for riots they may incite! Fucking precrime. Look what happened to Amy Goodman and her people. I'm not saying the police should treat these crowds the same,but they aren't and it's a choice from up high.

Gun-Toter At Obama Town Hall: 'Who'd Be Silly Enough To Carry An Unloaded Firearm?'

2009-08-12T01:59:00.001-07:00

Imagine if this guy were from the left and the president at the event was Bush.

SOMETIMES THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL IS A FUCKING TRAIN

2009-08-08T01:20:00.000-07:00

As a libertarian socialist looking in, I am disgusted because the novelty of our first black president is not enough to hypnotize me from overlooking some horrible decision making by the current president. I knew what I was getting actually taking part in our corrupt elections and I voted with no illusions,but this b.s. is still frustrating to be aware of because healthcare is important to me. I'm finding my disgust is too hard to keep to myself.
Did Pres.Obama just give away the right to bargain drug prices down and import Canadian drugs? My ears perked up at news of a deal by the drug industry to "help" Obama's reform plans. Appears so as reported by the AP:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090808/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_health_care_drugmakers
and Ryan Grim(awesome name) at Huffpost: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/07/white-house-confirms-deal_n_254408.html
Earlier in the week, there were reports that Obama had promised to oppose any
congressional attempt to exact further money from the massive pharmaceutical
industry, which would include allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prices or
import cheaper drugs from Canada -- two major priorities for congressional
Democrats. In a Thursday meeting with Senate Democrats, some of those present thought the White House backed off that deal. The administration has
now stepped in to clear up its position: Congress can vote to do those things --
just not as part of the health-care overhaul legislation. The White House said on Friday that drug price negotiations did not specifically come up in talks with Big Pharma. Because such negotiations would take the deal past $80 billion, however, they're off limits, as is reimportation of cheaper drugs from Canada.
That doesn't sound too good and neither does the sound/prospects of this;
The White House said on Friday that drug price negotiations did not
specifically come up in talks with Big Pharma. Because such negotiations would
take the deal past $80 billion, however, they're off limits, as is reimportation
of cheaper drugs from Canada.

Or this:
Of course, as the White House acknowledges, senators are free to push for
drug-price negotiations or reimportation, but they may have to do so without
administration support and, certainly, in the face of Big Pharma opposition.
Plans for an upcoming ad campaign are loosely detailed in this article about phRMA's "change of heart" to help Obama. Is this yet another divide and conquer move?
How can we trust these people:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-horrifying-hidden-sto_b_251365.html
I was willing to potentially tolerate a public plan as long as it covered everbody like medicare or as close as possible without the industry sabotaging,allowed for bargaining/negotiating down drug prices,reimported Canadian drugs,and limited cuts to medicaid/medicare at the bare minimum if not single payer. If we had to settle for that and get single payer later okay. That should be the limit of any compromise in my take. None of this co-op bullshit. My first instinct to not compromise on single payer is proven correct the more reform is compromised to the status quo or worse with "reform" stamped on it. We shouldn't settle for crumbs when it comes to our rights and healthcare is a human right. America has denied us our right long enough and the excuses don't hold much water. What was Obama thinking making healthcare reform a main policy goal of his first term,only to throw it under a bus? He opened Pandora's box by activating,mobilizing,promising the citizenry about something so important that the majority supports only to pull it away? It's too late:people want healthcare reform.
As BAR's Glen Ford has pointed out about Obama's lashing out at progressives for targetting obstructionist Blue Dogs,Allison Kilkenny wrote in her July 5 blog titled Barack Obama immediately regrets asking for your help :

Now it seems President Obama only meant he needed help raising money to
get into the White House, and all of those suggestions for progressive reform
included in monetary support from liberal groups are really superfluous annoyances, and not the kind of “help” President Obama had in mind.
She reminds:
“We shouldn’t be focusing resources on each other,” Obama said, “We ought to be focused on winning this debate.” But winning the healthcare debate for whom? If the American people, including the cursed “liberal advocacy groups” that helped get President Obama elected, demand a public option (72% favor a government-run healthcare program,) why is the public option not a serious goal in the healthcare debate?
I was just listening to a best of show for Kilkenny's Citizen Radio where she and Jamie Kilstein interviewed Noam Chomsky. It struck my attention when he referred to Obama's post-election "movement"/Organizing For America as authoritarian-like. This is too similar to the right wing grassroots base that slavishly served Bush's agenda with the message control from Rove and no room for dissent. Behind the scenes he sics enforcer Rahm onto any that deviate from plans. Like that of the health lobby mobilizing astroturf thuggery and confusion against him,he cynically sees grassroots organizing as a top down machine to deploy. I sense a paternalistic,passive-aggressive tone to Mr. Obama when he speaks to his progressive supporters like he is blaming them for his lack of clarity or a plan.
Why doesn't he blame the Blue Dog minority to holding things up? Why was the job put in their hands with baucus in the first place? This is very telling:
Furthermore, why are so-called Democrats like Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Max Baucus (D-MT) not fair targets for angry Progressives, who see the representatives as private healthcare cronies? Ben Nelson has called a public option a “deal-breaker” because such a plan would threaten private insurers, and Max Baucus has raised $2.6 million from the private health care industry and now serves as a prominent figure for policy debates over health care reform. Yet, instead of attacking Nelson or Baucus for putting the interests of corporate donors above the interests of their own constituents, President Obama is attacking groups like MoveOn.org.
I hear contempt for progressives and for what people really want. He wants his 'followers' to shut up,march lockstep and carry out his political agenda. But that agenda for healthcare is ill-defined and debate is being drowned out by corporate-backed mob intimidation/violence. What does Obama want help passing? Healthcare reform that everybody was behind is now health insurance reform and its becoming less public by the minute.
Kilkenny ends her article:
With this kind of treatment of the public option (ranging from
lukewarm to outright hostile,) it’s no wonder many Americans feel as though the
government isn’t representing their interests. Most Americans, including the
dreaded “liberal advocacy groups,” that helped get President Obama elected, want a public option and yet the president has fallen into the role of private
healthcare industry spokesman. Instead of representing the interests of citizens, President Obama has interpreted democracy to mean taking citizen cash and then telling them to shut up when it comes time to hear their feedback.
It should be abundantly clear that Rahm is not some free agent gone off the reservation going against Obama's agenda to side with Blue Dogs. Progressives need to wake up to the realisation that Barack Obama is a Blue Dog, he has admitted to being a DLC New Democrat. We already can't trust fair coverage in the press and with "progressive" leaders like Pelosi who has admitted to betraying her own Progressive Caucus(and a real chance for single payer) to the interests of the Blue Dogs/big health,Obama's dealings really warrant extra scrutiny. And possible resistence. That cannot be achieved if progressives allow themselves to be a co-opted arm of the Democratic Party. And like Bill Maher has said,"He isn't your boyfriend,he's the president." He comes awfully close to a dreamy abusive boyfriend many progressives make excuses for after he abuses and attacks them. The honeymoon is over and it's time to end the codependant battered follower syndrome and be a real movement.