nothing is going to get better. It's not.
The Lorax
by Dr Seuss (Theodor Geisel)
David Brin,
"Star Wars Despots vs. Star Trek Populists"
Attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (and women) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Here
Insurgents.
(They were, too.)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
quoted in 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution :
Ideas and Resources for Self-Liberation, Monkey Wrenching and Preparedness
by Claire Wolfe. Page 165
Samuel Adams
quoted here
"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men (and women) who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle!
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857
here
Edward R. Murrow
here
Rabbi Tarfon
Pirkei Avot 2:21
A Phone Call to Noam Chomsky
by Michael Slaughter
"A PeaceWORKS Exclusive"
-- A page on this site on / Noam Chomsky /
1) Ecological WisdomAt that time (the late 1990s), it seemed apparent to me that the political culture in the USA had been headed in the wrong direction since at least the 1970s.
2) Grassroots Democracy
3) Social Justice
4) Nonviolence
and notably including:
Small government
Emphasis on human rights
The policies and actions of the George W. Bush administration, or if you prefer, of the Neoconservatives who have accompanied that administration, seem to me a enormous step in the wrong direction.
I now fear that matters will not adequately improve after George Bush's term of office.
It seems to me that there are four basic possibilities, as compared with a baseline in the Clinton administation:
1) The situation will improve.Looking at these possibilities, #1 seems pretty unrealistic at this point, and #2 seems unlikely but about the best we could hope for in the immediate term. I certainly don't think that we could rule out #4.
2) The situation will be roughly equal to that during the Clinton administration. (When, just to remind you,
I already thought that much improvement was necessary.)
3) The situation will be somewhat worse than during the Clinton administration (from say, what it is now
[late 2005] to slightly worse than during that the Clinton administration.)
4) The situation will deteriorate, compared with the current [2005] situation, with increased human rights violations, militarism, polarization of wealth and political power, authoritarianism, and environmental damage, i.e., something approximating Italy under Mussolini, Germany under Hitler, or the USSR under Stalin (though I think it's important to remember that history won't repeat exactly, and a new American version of authoritarianism will have its own historical and technological distinctions).
#3 seems to me probably the most likely, and in some ways the most insidious. This kind of "five steps toward authoritarianism, three or four steps back" is in fact what we've been seeing over the last few decades, and leads to the public accepting a reduced level of freedom as the ordinary state of affairs -- and indeed, a relief after a period of more severe oppression and misgovernment -- but the general trend is always toward a decrease in freedom and an increase in authoritarianism and plutocracy.
It's probably useful and reasonable to specify two different aspects of "Direct Action" -- one would be action against an existing authoritarian system ("get rid of it"), the other grass-roots syndicalist administration to supplement or replace existing institutions ("do it yourself").
"Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.
A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name of politeness or for the sake of being a good host; to show slavish, blind obedience and deference to a dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights-violating President.
That is not a patriot. Rather, that person is a sycophant. That person is a member of a frightening culture of obedience -- a culture where falling in line with authority is more important than choosing what is right, even if it is not easy, safe, or popular. And, I suspect, that person is afraid -- afraid we are right, afraid of the truth (even to the point of denying it), afraid he or she has put in with an oppressive, inhumane regime that does not respect the laws and traditions of our country, and that history will rank as the worst presidency our nation has ever had to endure.
In response to those who believe we should blindly support this disastrous President, his Administration, and the complacent, complicit Congress, listen to the words of Theodore Roosevelt, a great President and a Republican, who said:'The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole.'
Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.'
The Story of Mouseland was a story told first by Clarence Gillis, and later and most famously by Tommy Douglas, leader of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and, later, the New Democratic Party of Canada, both social democratic parties. It was a political fable expressing the CCF's view that the Canadian political system was flawed in offering voters a false dilemma: the choice of two parties, neither of which represented their interests.
The mice voted in black cats, which represented the Progressive Conservative Party, and then they found out how hard life was. Then they voted in the white cats, which symbolized the Liberal Party. The story goes on, and a mouse gets an idea that mice should run their government, not the cats. This mouse was accused of being a Bolshevik, and imprisoned."
"... every school child in the United States has had the direct action of certain non-resistants brought to his notice by his school history.(While this may have been true in 1912, I suspect that it no longer is.)
The case which everyone instantly recalls is that of the early Quakers who came to Massachusetts. The Puritans had accused the Quakers of 'troubling the world by preaching peace to it'. They refused to pay church taxes; they refused to bear arms; they refused to swear allegiance to any government. (In so doing they were direct actionists, what we may call negative direct actionists.) So the Puritans, being political actionists, passed laws to keep them out, to deport, to fine, to imprison, to mutilate, and finally, to hang them. And the Quakers just kept on coming (which was positive direct action); and history records that after the hanging of four Quakers, and the flogging of Margaret Brewster at the cart's tail through the streets of Boston, 'the Puritans gave up trying to silence the new missionaries'; that 'Quaker persistence and Quaker non-resistance had won the day.' "
"There is a natural tendency for uncritical acceptance of claims we want to believe. In the long run, however, I believe that this causes more harm than good, because we lose support from people who have come to realize that we are not objective, and we miss chances to convince people who are inherently skeptical. Furthermore, most people are looking for some reason to dismiss us. Thus, it is imperative that we present information the public won’t regard as ludicrous and from sources that they won’t dismiss as partisan."
"As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are (assumed to be)saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem .... Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong. They should have challenged, and they should have resisted; and if we were only there, we would have showed them. Even in Stalin's Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these herdlike people. ...
What we are trying to do, I assume, is really to get back to the principles and aims and spirit of the Declaration of Independence. This spirit is resistance to illegitimate authority and to forces that deprive people of their life and liberty and right to pursue happiness, and therefore under these conditions, it urges the right to alter or abolish their current form of government -- and the stress had been on abolish. But to establish the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we are going to need to go outside the law, to stop obeying the laws that demand killing or that allocate wealth the way it has been done, or that put people in jail for petty technical offenses and keep other people out of jail for enormous crimes. My hope is that this kind of spirit will take place not just in this country but in other countries because they all need it. People in all countries need the spirit of disobedience to the state, which is not a metaphysical thing but a thing of force and wealth. And we need a kind of declaration of interdependence among people in all countries of the world who are striving for the same thing."
My italics -- ed.
"The system has a big bag of dirty tricks and isn't afraid to use it. Engaging in direct action may mean you will be harassed, intimidated, threatened with death, beaten, tortured, arrested and locked away. For hanging a banner, you could be convicted of a felony. For speaking out against police brutality, you could be sent to death row. (???) But this shouldn't deter you if you are committed. That is why it is so important that we not forget those people who are behind the iron bars for taking a stand -- because it might be me or you some day."
"The political process is morally bankrupt. Both the Republican and Democratic parties neglect the interests of poor and working people and cater to the large business interests who fund their campaigns. These interests have used the parties to block environmental initiatives and roll back people's welfare programs while increasing corporate welfare programs. Average citizens who have suffered the consequences of these changes realize that they have less access than ever to the political process. ... Protesting this convention is a demand for political accountability, radical democratic action and an end to policies that hurt people and the environment."
"What's hardest to swallow after reading the book is not that the counterculture has been ripped off yet again, with no royalties paid, or that the determination of environmentalists is presented as inspiration for corporations seeking to extend their dominance over the planet. The tough part is considering the possibility that there's something in here for progressives to steal back and profit from."
"This relentless attention to individual sacrifices seems almost unique to environmental issues. Other human troubles -- shootings in schools, intoxicated drivers on the highway, cigarette addiction among teen-agers -- are widely understood as political problems requiring political solutions. Thus, a million moms march on Washington to demand changes in handgun regulations, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers pushes for lower legal limits on blood alcohol levels, and tobacco advertising is restricted. We somehow understand that inviting individual citizens to just say no to firearms, liquor and cigarettes isn't the total solution. (Steingraber is obviously speaking from a stereotypically left-of-center position here. The right wing argues that government regulation of such issues is not in fact appropriate and in some cases that it is actually immoral.)Personally, I think that such consumer selection is extremely important. The buggy-whip industry is now the faintest shadow of its former self, not because of massive pressure for government intervention, but because people stopped buying the things.
In contrast, we pretend as if we can all live safely in a toxic world if we as individual consumers just give up enough stuff: stop eating meat, stop eating fish, stop drinking tap water, stop swimming in chlorinated pools, stop microwaving in plastic, swear off dairy products, remove shoes at the door so as not to track lawn chemicals into the living room, handwash silk blouses rather than drop them off at the dry-cleaners. Or worse yet, we pretend we can shop our way out of the environmental crisis: buy air filters, buy water filters, buy bottled water, buy pesticide-removing soaps for our vegetables, buy vitamin pills loaded with anti-oxidants to undo whatever damage we can't avoid. It's as though we all aspire to become the ecological equivalent of the boy in the bubble. No wonder people feel depressed."
Living Downstream : A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment
by Sandra Steingraber
"Give 'em enough rope and they'll hang themselves."
(It's even funnier when they commission the rope.)
"When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just "dime-store economics" -- intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don't really need to know much about economics to understand it. They certainly don't. It all gets down to two simple words.
"Cheap labor". That's their whole philosophy in a nutshell -- which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well, they're "cheap-labor conservatives".
"Cheap-labor conservative" is a moniker they will never shake, and never live down. Because it's exactly what they are. You see, cheap-labor conservatives are defenders of corporate America -- whose fortunes depend on labor. The larger the labor supply, the cheaper it is. The more desperately you need a job, the cheaper you'll work, and the more power those "corporate lords" have over you. If you are a wealthy elite -- or a "wannabe" like most dittoheads – your wealth, power and privilege is enhanced by a labor pool, forced to work cheap.
Don't believe me? Well, let's apply this principle, and see how many right-wing positions become instantly understandable. ..."
"Corporate feudalism. Variants include industrial feudalism or "neo-feudalism". In fact, it is a new name -- a more accurate name -- for "less government". It enables you to re-define conservatives -- virtually anywhere you go. Whenever you hear the words "less government", it is a simple matter to correct the speaker. "Oh, you mean 'corporate feudalism'".
Because that is exactly what the conservative is talking about. Feudalism -- the original version -- divided control of the land of a nation among a noble elite. A handful of such elites governed as landlords over a peasantry who owned nothing "but their bellies", but worked in service to the lord of the manor. Feudal serfs were "bound to the land" and considered an "appurtenance" to the land, like its streams, timber and minerals. Not unlike today's industrial workforce, they were nothing more than assets to be exploited. "Freedom" was for "freed men" or "gentlemen" as they came to be known. It wasn't -- and isn't -- for serfs.
Today's conservative sees things much the same way. His corporate neo-feudalism is about a new world of "privitized tyranny". He is talking about a world where the government is the agent for private corporate power. The "public good" or "public interest" have no place in this new world of "corporate feudalism". Private ambition, private profit, private fortunes, and of course "pivate property" are the only legitimate concerns of government. Even the uses of the US military have been subverted to the uses of "corporate feudalism". What else is the coming "oil war" but a war to allow the US to distribute the oil wealth of Iraq to private oil companies to exploit for profit? Do you really believe that the US government is going to establish any sort of democracy that doesn't "know its place"? "
"... Paul Wolfowitz is now being promoted in a secret, opaque, closely held process that freezes out most of the world. Of special note, the selection of the new World Bank head freezes out the 1 billion people who live on less than $1 per day, and the 3 billion who live on less than $2 per day. It freezes out the entire Southern hemisphere: Africa, Asia, South America. In fact, it freezes out everyone who is not a Bush loyalist in the U.S., or a nervous European elite. ...
But why? Why should the world’s poorest people be excluded from the process of selecting one of the most important leaders who will affect their lives? Why are the nations most controlled by World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies not allowed to nominate, or even participate in any meaningful way, in the selection of new leadership?
Is Nelson Mandela less qualified to run the World Bank than Paul Wolfowitz? Or how about one of the Brazilians behind the Lula government’s innovative proposal to eliminate hunger by taxing international arms sales? Or, since we know that the most direct route to fighting world poverty is to empower and educate poor women, why not a woman from the South to lead the World Bank, say, Arundhati Roy of India, or Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya, two women who actually know something about helping poor people? ...
That nominee should have a program, a “4-D” platform:
Democracy program, to open up the WB/IMF systems to the whole world;
Development program, to move from big energy projects to micro-, women-centered projects, with an emphasis on renewable technologies;
Disease-fighting program, to battle AIDs and malaria, and the other dread diseases which ravage the Southern hemisphere;
Debt cancellation program, to completely eliminate the debts of Africa and Latin America, to bring the “Jubilee” described in the Bible to the world’s poorest people. 100% debt cancellation, with no conditions, no tricks, no limitations, no restrictions -- the single most useful step we could take to fight world poverty."
"(Gary) DeMar's vision for America, and his widening influence in the Christian Right in Georgia, and nationally, is disturbing. DeMar is a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement, which believes that the U.S. should be governed by a harsh theocracy and impose what they call "Biblical law."Emphasis and some of the links are mine -- ed.
I happen to have written a great deal about DeMar and his fellow theocrats in my book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy (Or here at amazon.com). Here is a sample: 'Gary DeMar in his book Ruler of the Nations wrote that "The law that requires the death penalty for homosexual acts effectually drives the perversion of homosexuality underground, back into the closet...". The longterm goal, he adds, 'should also be the execution of abortionists and the parents who hire them. If we say that abortion is murder, then we must call for the death penalty". ' ...
Here is the good news. The answer (to the problem of "beating the Christian Right") lies in what the theocrats themselves are doing to gain power. Electoral politics. Yup. Electoral politics. ...
It is time to get our priorities straight. Less talk, more action. Less entertainment, more citizen involvement. Less TV and sports. More electoral politics. Do we want the theocrats to win? More electoral politics."
"George Bush wants to create the new criminal of "disruptor" who can be jailed for the crime of "disruptive behavior." A "little-noticed provision" in the latest version of the Patriot Act will empower Secret Service to charge protesters with a new crime of "disrupting major events including political conventions and the Olympics."
The Secret Service would also be empowered to charge persons with "breaching security" and to charge for "entering a restricted area" which is "where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting." In short, be sure to stay in those wired, fenced containments or free speech zones."
" 'WikiLeaks is part of an honourable tradition that expands the scope of freedom by trying to lay "all the mysteries and secrets of government" before the public,' writes Assange, who compares WikiLeaks to the pamphleteers of the English civil war and the radical press of the early 20th century. 'We are, in a sense, a pure expression of what the media should be: an intelligence agency of the people, casting pearls before swine.' "
"I know you will agree that as a country we are obscenely wasting billions of dollars every week in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration is hard-pressed to explain why.
A few weeks ago, journalist Chris Hellman, writing for Tomdispatch, calculated that the real annual military budget is $1.2 trillion -- an astounding number. This is an amount that would solve virtually every fiscal problem we have -- state budget shortfalls, health care, education, environmental protection and retirement for many, if we ever found the will to emphasize human priorities, instead of making war and dominating the globe.
We at AlterNet think this is the highest priority work we can do, and of course it affects all other issues and challenges.
Will you help us by donating to support our work?"
"Psychologist Philip Zimbardo has seen good people turn evil, and he thinks he knows why. ...
Zimbardo conducted a now-famous experiment at Stanford University in 1971, involving students who posed as prisoners and guards. Five days into the experiment, Zimbardo halted the study when the student guards began abusing the prisoners, forcing them to strip naked and simulate sex acts. ...
(Zimbardo summarizes the orders governing procedures at Abu Ghraib : )
We want to believe that if I was in some situation [like that], I would bring with it my usual compassion and empathy. But you know what? When I was the superintendent of the Stanford prison study, I was totally indifferent to the suffering of the prisoners, because my job as prison superintendent was to focus on the guards.
As principal [scientific] investigator [of the experiment], my job was to care about what happened to everybody because they were all under my experimental control. But once I switched to being the prison superintendent, I was a different person. It's hard to believe that, but I was transformed....
Wired: You've said that the way to prevent evil actions is to teach the "banality of kindness" -- that is, to get society to exemplify ordinary people who engage in extraordinary moral actions. How do you do this?
Zimbardo: If you can agree on a certain number of things that are morally wrong, then one way to counteract them is by training kids. There are some programs, starting in the fifth grade, which get kids to think about the heroic mentality, the heroic imagination. (I think that this is actually a big problem in contemporary society, because what we're actually teaching kids [and adults too for that matter] is that "to be a hero" is "to be brave enough to use violence against the 'bad guys', even when this entails personal risk." I don't know if I can think of any exceptions at all to this, except for Gandhi, whose tale is after all as exceptional in real life as in art.
To be a hero you have to take action on behalf of someone else or some principle and you have to be deviant in your society, because the group is always saying don't do it; don't step out of line. ...
Heroes have to always, at the heroic decisive moment, break from the crowd and do something different. But a heroic act involves a risk. If you're a whistle-blower you're going to get fired, you're not going to get promoted, you're going to get ostracized. And you have to say it doesn't matter.
Most heroes are more effective when they're social heroes rather than isolated heroes. A single person or even two can get dismissed by the system. But once you have three people, then it's the start of an opposition.
So what I'm trying to promote is not only the importance of each individual thinking 'I'm a hero' and waiting for the right situation to come along in which I will act on behalf of some people or some principle, but also, 'I'm going to learn the skills to influence other people to join me in that heroic action.' "
The Lorax
by Dr Seuss (Theodor Geisel)
The Lorax
by Dr Seuss (Theodor Geisel)