Occupy, Radicals, and Elections

I recently read a post about the idea of running "Occupy" candidates in elections.. I like this idea. That is not because I think the Occupy movement is cohesive, or particularly vibrant at the moment. On the contrary I think it's a bit stalled. But what is great about occupy is it is so inclusive of everyone's politics. The fact that anyone is talking about that sort of model and applying it to elections is a breath of fresh air.

I think maybe we, as the American far left, have today an opportunity to change the way we relate to elections. Let us consider our recent historical experience with the things...

Propagandistic Campaigns

The Nader 2000 campaign was highly effective at turning a lot of people on to politics. If Nader had been elected, what would he have been able to do? Some things, yes, he could have done, but the president is not a dictator. There are three branches of government and the other two would have worked as hard as they could to prevent his substantive changes from taking effect. If you think the backlash against Obama is bad now, what do you think the Republicans would be doing if the president actually had had open socialists working on his campaign, or perhaps, as his vice president? An isolated, one term radical president would likely find that a lot of what he was able to do in four years could be undone by a subsequent Republocrat administration.

But I don't think the Nader campaign ever thought it could actually win. That wasn't the point. The point was to talk about serious issues that there was a media black out on, and a political conspiracy of silence about. The real aim of that campaign was, you might say, "propagandistic". To that end, I think it was very effective. Here's a few examples of the way bold ideas, advanced in a confident political way, can get taken up and spread around society:

Today you and I can't go out to eat at a restaurant without the menu and the servers telling you what is local and organic, what doesn't have pesticides in it, and how that restaurant is trying to be sustainable. Of course, if you're a smart person, you may recognize some of that is tragic, because the power your restaurant has to change things is really pretty small compared to what agribusiness is doing, or what the centrally planned, fossil fuel dependent transportation networks are like. But the point here is that the basic stuff we were saying about sustainability back in 2000 is now common parlance. In 2000 no one cared at all about that. Everyone was driving SUV's and dreaming of a 30 mile commute from some home in the ever expanding suburbs.

Do you remember how B.P. co-opted the Green Party's sunflower logo? Of course we know B.P.'s renewable program is marginal to their oil exploration, and the adoption of the logo was a flagrantly offensive example of "greenwashing." However, the fact that they felt it was good business for them to adopt that logo was because people are starting to care about things like peak oil and global warming. Today there are several hundred thousand American students every year taking Environmental Studies classes. There are a lot more engineering students learning about wind and solar power than there were 10 years ago. The Nader campaign doesn't take full credit for this, but the word "Green" is certainly well integrated into our vocabulary and the explosive growth of the Green Party's campaign that year certainly provided a major boost for emerging eco-consciousness.

Fair Trade coffee is a third example. If you were part of some revolutionary left wing of the Nader campaign, you might have scoffed at Fair Trade coffee. Doesn't it seem a bit naive, and utopian, and a drop in the pail to address issues of poverty and exploitation? Well, sure it is. But look at how widespread fair trade coffee is today. More important that the direct effect- real or imagined- that fair trade coffee has on coffee growers is the fact that now whenever we get our cups of coffee, we're thinking, and maybe talking to each other, and saying "Hey, it seems a lot of people who make the things we consume tend to get a hard deal with it. It's a good idea to try and get them a better deal." Maybe the more thinking among us might even go so far as to think about the hard deals we get at our own jobs, and even consider for a moment that one day we might be able to change that. Even Wal Mart is selling fair trade coffee now.

So that is what a successful propgandistic campaign can do. You can get innovative, cutting edge ideas out there and for years after that election ends, those ideas work their way among people's heads and get incorporated into their lives. The Green Party and the 2000 elections were partially successful in making an ideological shift, in winning a political debate. Considering how reactionary this country got after Sept 11th 2001, and how many political people started to abandon politics after protests failed to stop the Iraq War, it is remarkable how many things we talked about as Greens in 2000 and 2004 are things we take for granted today.

To finish off this discussion of propagandistic campaigns, let's just consider how much time and money it took for Nader to run his 50 state campaign in 2000. That's a huge infrastructure. Nader had a lot of good things to say. Were workers' councils, socialist revolution, or the closure of all foreign military bases part of his campaign positions? I don't think so. But the fact the he built his campaign as a broad left / far left venture meant he could get a lot more support and built a lot more infrastructure. As a radical socialist in country where creationists win elections and sit on school boards, I think being part of a campaign where 75% of the things I really care about are being talked about among millions of people is a lot more important than being part of a campaign where 100% of the things I really care about are being talked about by 1,000 or 2,000 people. Let's not forget that lesson.

Fighting for Power Both Political and Economic

Now, what is a whole lot better than being propagandistic?

Fighting for power.

There is a lot of places where power is. There is power in the workplace. There is power in a school board. Sherrifs have power. The federal budget is really really powerful. Court clerks who load the docket with cases likely to overturn aggressive and illegal police convictions for marijuana posession have power. If you've enjoyed a joint without being harassed in Northern California in the past decade you can thank a clerk.

A lot of American leftists are busy trying to build the power of the people "in the streets." Student power is another form of power that is easier to build because students are in a more intellectual environment than most people and they seem more willing attend meetings. And of course anyone who says they are for the working class is going to be all about economic power. You can build some form of working people's economic power by hiring yourself out as an organizer for a large, corrupt, but real union federation. Or you can try and build a small, struggling upstart one like the IWW. Or you can be a card carrying socialist in a workplace trying to figure out how to relate politics to your workers, and how to win small victories around the injustices where you work whether there is a union or not.

We seem to "get" the idea of fighting for economic power. Yet political power still seems like a many- headed hydra we're afraid of and perfer to keep at arm's length.

What I will first say about that is that fighting for political power is essential to the fight for economic power. Anyone who saw the numerous Democratic Party mayors send in the police to arrest and brutalize activists protesting the domination of Wall Street can probably tell you something about the way the political system is used as a tool of class rule. It's absurd to consider that you can build your class' power in one area while ignoring it in the other.

But, doesn't power corrupt? And aren't those capitalist courts and legislatures and congresses? Sure. Isn't everything?

Let's say you go on strike, you form your union, and then you defend your gains and your union while the powers of capital try to whittle you down. What is a contract negotiation? It's something usually done on hostile territory. Just like elections.

For starters, contracts are usually negotiated and signed in some office, which if you are the working class is a place you might not feel comfortable. Offices are where you go when you are in trouble. It's where you stand with your hat in your hand asking for a job or a raise. It's where people who get paid more than you sit and read facebook all day while you take out their trash. Even worse, most of the time when contract negotiations happen you are wearing a suit. That's right. The guy representing the steelworkers and the janitors is wearing a suit. Now it may be prudent, as that is just the rules, that when you are in offices and you want to be taken seriously you wear a suit. But it's still hostile territory that you are on. If you're actually a working class person representing yourself there you will probably feel uncomfortable. A contract itself is not a rational thing that you might understand. Legal contracts are about fine print, loopholes, and ways to get screwed. They require experts to review and scrutinize. They are something that bosses and people with money will always be better at than you, as long as the bosses are the ones with all the money.

I contend that is really no different than the problems ready to envelope an isolated leftist upon his obtainment of political power. Elections are also something that money and bosses are better at than you. State legislature and our Congress are not known to be welcoming of upstart outsiders. On the contrary they are places you should feel uncomfortable if you are at all a rational or warm hearted creature. There, as an elected leftist you will be at some disadvantages, and what you can accomplish will always be limited by arhaic rules and procedures put in place by the candidates of money. Yes. But despite all of that, there are still things you can accomplish. Trillions in spending hang in the balance. Health care plans are decided. Wars are funded. Civil rights are awarded, or taken away. Hearings and investigations are held.

Why should it be so strange to image a few, or even a majority, of socialistic or anarchistic congressmen? I think the idea that the people who work the hardest shouldn't be the poorest is a pretty rational one. I also think that if you are sick, you should go to the doctor, and get fixed, and you shouldn't be financially punished for that. I also like the idea of taking food, and bringing it to hungry people, and feeding them. I have no problem imagining that despite our prejudices and fears, we in America could one day elevate these perfectly respectable philosophies to all the chambers of power- as they exist now or perhaps as they get transformed. So why shouldn't participation in these elections be a normal part of an radical's political perspectives?

Our refusal to fight for political power because of the fact that elected positions are places were people without money or with sensible ideas are disrespected and generally unwelcome is an intolerable legacy we have inherited from decades of defeat. This is capitalism. Every institution is dominated by money. All security guards guard the rich and all guns are pointed at the poor. There is no institution or business freed from the corrupting effects of money. Likewise it is precisely political instutions just as it is businesses where all decisions that effect our lives are made. We have only two choices. We can either try and eek out an existence in some precarious off grid apolitical lifestyle. Or, we can set ourselves to seriously contest all forms of power where ever they exist. We can take over what institutions make sense to keep around and use them for good (I for one am rather fond of sanitation departments and post offices), and where we are obstructed, we can at least prevent them from being used for as much bad. In the long term, we can even dream about abolishing the ones that do nothing productive but only cause harm (such as the School of the Americans in Ft. Benning, GA, for example).

Two Party System as Accepted Fact: A Historical Legacy of Defeat

One problem with the American left is that it seems very few have figured out how to fight for power in a way that aligns daily activity with a long term goal. Now we might say we've got a long term goal, as well as daily activity, but I don't think anyone really has a plan. It seems there is is always this great disconnect, as mentioned in the article I linked to at the beginning of this one, between "A" and "X", "Y", or "Z". Selling socialist newspapers on a street corner once a week, as step one, with a lot of hazy steps between you and "victory", is kind of the radical equivalent of volunteering every week at a soup kitchen or donating cans to the food drive or biking to work or voting for a Democratic presidential candidate. You hope that if you just faithfully show up and do your one small concrete step, that some how, eventually, things will get solved somehow by someone.

Now is that a value judgement I have made? Of course not. It makes total sense if you look at things historically. If you are the American left over the past 10 years or 20 or 30 years you have probably come to realize that you are small and weak and isolated. The enemy is large, well funded, and entrenched. People are apparently passive, when they are not completely unreachable.

Weakness gets expressed politically in different ways. On the one hand you've got liberal support for democrats, which comes in the form of door knocking, financial donations, lawn signs, democratic speakers at protest rallies, etc... We all know what that is and where it goes. It's Hillary Clinton and Madeline Albright speaking at the Emergency March for Women's lives in 2004. It's NARAL giving John Kerry a "100%" pro-woman voting score on their website in that year when in 2003 he only showed up to vote on 3 of 11 abortion related bills. It's the 2006 immigrant's rights protests being channeled into support for Democrats in elections, who have proceeded to leave the undocumented in political limbo for another 6 years. It's the politics of sending in donations from your hard earned money to keep some unelected president of some "non profit" well paid, well housed, and in a nice Washington, DC office somewhere where they can talk to Democrats on your behalf.

It's Barack Obama holding his tongue and keeping the military aid flowing while Israel bombs the Gaza Strip.

The flip side of this is more "radical" approaches, which I believe all generally boil down to non-participation in elections or various other forms of ultimate submission to the two party system. This comes in the form of people who proudly don't vote, people who with great demoralization don't vote, people who vote for Mickey Mouse, people who protest against Obama's escalation of the Afghan war but then secretly vote for them anyway because they can't stand John McCain and Sarah Palin, and finally people who deliberately run far left candidates in propagandistic campaigns that are only supported by, say, the Socialist or the Socialist Workers Party.

These latter campaigns fall but little farther in their effectiveness than any of the other methods I've already mentioned. The problem with small, far left campaigns is that those candidates with all their good things to say never are able to reach a mass audience. This is because they don't try to, because they don't try to build a campaign larger than their own small party. Now I've got nothing but love for anyone brave or serious enough to walk around in America and invite strangers on the street to come see the socialist candidate speak tonight. But I also realize that these campaigns are tiny and ineffective. It's like if you wrote a great book and you're ready to be a famous author, and you send it to twenty publishers and you get twenty rejection letters. Maybe someone then suggests you self publish. Then you go out and pay a thousand dollars of your own money to fill your garage up with a bunch of books. It's like the socialist candidate on the ballot. It looks like a real book. It reads like a real book. And it feels like a real book. But the difference between you and guy who is in this 5th printing is that people know and care what that other guy wrote, and you're a guy with a garage full of books that no one is going to read because you have no way to promote or distribute it.

Both the liberal and the radical forms of not struggling for power against the two party system are really two sides of the same coin. They both happen because both the liberals and the radicals feel they can never escape from the two party system. People are too dumb. Money is too powerful. This is all we have. So accept it, and learn to transfer your long term hopes to "After The Revolution", Dennis Kucinich, or the second coming of Jesus. Now I would love to invite the aherants of each of these mythologies to a nice campsite a long a river somewhere with plenty of Colordao microbrews and increasingly legal pot to go around and allow everyone to debate the relative merits of each. As a political scientist, it is my hypothesis that if this experiment were to be repeated three different times, we would come up with three different most likely paths to our salvation.

River beers aside, all of these intangible pipe dreams are what you develop when you are hopeless. There's nothing wrong with hoping for something that will never happen if the hope you get from it is going to allow you to deal with another day. But lying to yourself to be able to deal with another day is not exactly the road to power.

Occupy Changed Everything

Occupy did change everything. But the Zuccotti Park organizers can hardly claim all the credit. What is behind Occupy is many years of neo-liberal assaults on living standards. That was sustained by an elaborate apparatus of deception and denial, cheap credit, and racism. What the recession did was to finally convince everyone that things were wrong. It didn't matter if you were endowed with certain skin color, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, work ethic, or disposition to fair dealing. You were still thrown out on the curb because some rich banker or stock broker you have never even met decided to screw you so he could make more money. As you looked around you began to notice these same people had near total control of the government, and you began to think that that fact might be behind a lot of our problems.

The logic of capitalism is to never end the search for more money and more power. If you don't get it someone else will. The search for money and power has extended so far that it not only controls the government (it has done this, pretty much, for ever), but it has begun to dismantle a consensus between the classes, long known as "the American Dream." Domestic imperial over reach occured. The recession laid bare for millions of people in brutally personal terms what the balance of power in this country had in fact become. The second thing that happened was the Arab Spring. Suddenly, the people we've been bombing and funding the torture and oppression of for decades have started to rise up and teach us some very basic lessons on civics and participation in a democratic society.

Occupy was the political expression of these changes. If the planners of the Zuccotti occupation had flaked out and backed off, someone else would have planned something similar, and it would have caught on as wide spread as Occupy did. A certain level of understanding had been reached and a certain level of confidence, inspiration, and anger existed to break through the walls of our alienating society and act in a collective, political way.

Occupy is organizationally confused right now. But the people are still there, their problems are not going away, and we are waiting and learning and talking to each other and thinking. For the far left, the Anarchism of Occupy taught everyone else a very powerful lesson: that when we stop worrying about the purity of our politics, when we actually come together and join our voices, we can get a lot accomplished and we can connect radical, progressive ideas with mass activity among the disenfranchised classes. That is a very, very powerful lesson.

New Formations

The idea of running "Occupy" candidates is right. But the idea of isolated activists, in different cities, not talking to each other, each with their own fundraising and publicity campaigns, each with their own uphill battle against the corporate media blackout, that is not a winning idea.

What is different now that didn't exist before is that the far left has learned when it works together, it can connect its message and its politics to millions of "ordinary" Americans who have a basic understanding that the problem is, indeed "the 1%". That didn't exist before. What used to be of little more value than theoretical gymnastics about the roles of radicals in elections we now have an opportunity to actually implement.

There have been some attempts to cobble together some national formations out of the different Occupys. So far I hear they have not met with universal success. That is good. If something coherent and productive came out of it immediately there would have had to have been some shadowy group running the show, and we wouldn't have been able to trust it. Our intellectual inheritance as American leftists involves high degrees of mutual distrust, and little practice in working together across tendencies. We grew up, politically, in our own, isolated "holes" of localism. It didn't matter before if we couldn't work together, because we rarely had a mass audience to connect our politics to anyway. The fact that it has been difficult so far to congeal anything tangible or official out of Occupy is proof that we are dealing with real leftists- bless their hearts- inexperienced and fractious as they are.

This is the human material our historical legacy has bequeathed to us. Our primordial and challenged characteristics need not be fatal if we can realize two things. The first is that we have a real opportunity right now to connect radical left politics to millions of American people. The second is that we can only do this when we work together across sectarian barriers. For people who casually throw around such an impossibly inclusive slogan like "the 99%",  I cannot believe it is impossible for my fellow leftists to come to these same conclusions. Perhaps to unite we need not demand that all abandon what all have learned from their own adventures in political theory. Rather, it may be more useful to start from an understanding that theoretical correctness is very much less important than is practical effectiveness. If we were to judge the validity of each others' theories on the basis of what they have been able to concretely accomplish (rather than how they clash with our own preconceptions) we might all be a bit better off.

Elections would be a convenient thing around which to congeal a unifed, left, anti-wall street and anti-two party political formation. Should such a formation one day come into existence, it will have to deal with elections anyway as our class rises from its slumber to take increasingly confident steps to victory. We might as well learn to relate them any way, and I think national elections offer a great opportunity to reach people politically. With great excitement I look forward to the emergence of other "Occupy" candidates, if not even some sort of "Occupy" ticket.

Whether it would be under that or another name I have no idea and in fact I do not particularly care. But I am pretty sure complete ecological collapse will set in before any one of our "three letter" organizations wins a national election on the basis of its own, unique political purity.

My Book of Poems is Out

Long awaited, and finally out...

For you the reader here is my book of poems. Poems of rivers and life, the world, justice, difficulty, love, betrayal, death, hope and struggle. Prose of the desert and the ghost towns and the wild places. Voices of myself, snap shots of moments in time, travel, and observation.

As you may understand, a lot of poetry is narcissistic fluff most people have little patience for. Honey sweet words with no substance of life to them. My poems are not like that. My poems are true works of life. They are for people and the world. The are not soothing lullabies to put you to sleep, or to tell you that everything is beautiful and perfect. They are here to wake you up and prod you and reach out a hand to you. Take from them what you will. And pass them on if they are found to be useful.

Walking Away From Dixie has been self published and printed at the Canyonlands Copy Center in Moab, Utah. Awaiting national distribution, it can currently be purchased by using pay pal to send payment + $3.50 S&H to cawright2007@yahoo.com . Current asking price is $10, which can be raised or lowered depending on the purchasers' needs and generosity. All proceeds benefit my food and gas budget as I spend the fall writing a book on Utah's Ghost Towns, a book on the solo duckie run of the Grand Canyon, and a book about living, working and traveling around the Colorado Plateau during the recession. It is 45 pages long of concentrated experience and observation, and is my first book.

Index:

The Ripping of the Rivers' Tears
There was a river
Activate the Emergency Response System
Red Velvet Cafe
Head for the Hills
The One Who Travels Alone
The Winter
Me Too, Love
Outer Suburbia

11.11
That's About Enough of That
Ghetto Blues, DC
Late Night Re-Runs
Of What Standards Fall Short?
Walking Away From Dixie
Sleepwalking Through the Days of Cotton
The Deception Years
State Highway
Could it be?
I run

America Dawns Malicious
Gunslinger Punk
The Revolutionary that waits
Foreign Fighters
Unbeatable Wall Street
Smacked in the Face
National Forecast
Life Pushes Down
Plenty of Ways

Take Life
Tour
When You're Homeless
Servants
Banks Pay the Tab
Insight
River Character
The Ghost Towns
Occupy SLC
The Interviews

Anti Imperialism in Libya and Syria

Taking a moment from the Canyons and the Rivers, I was invited by a friend to consider a recent post about politics, intervention, and revolution is Libya and Syria. I don't know everything about those countries and I am not an expert in them. But I did feel I had something useful to contribute.

Here is that rather interesting article.

Below is a contribution I submitted to the comments section.

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I like this article, and I am glad it is written.

The American left barely exists. The self consciously “Anti-Imperialist” American left, in a country of 300 million people, can probably be housed in its entirety in one of our smaller to middle- sized sports areas. It’s influence is marginal, but unfortunately this rarely translates into approaches of humility. Gazing into the darkness of our political life, often from the vantage of a dingy apartment in some gray, overcrowded, stressful, expensive city of hostile, preoccupied strangers, many of our Anti-Imperialist leftists comfort themselves with dogmas and rigidity. This is understandable. Why do you think Mormon missionaries forego reading non-Mormon literature during their missions? Why do they pray so hard at night and spend so much attention on the neatness of their uniforms? It is difficult to be a missionary, a barer of truth in an apathetic, sinful, and oft unfriendly world. Insulating oneself within the mother-bosom of dogma, icons, and sacred writ is a useful way to strengthen oneself, regardless of how well it retards one’s own development as a critically thinking individual.

I think the “hard left” in the US picked its sides and stuck with them before, and independently of, any facts or developments in Lybia. If you believe certain dictators are better than others, and ought to be supported, despite their authoritarianism, because they have nationalized such and such a resource, or initiated such and such a social program to try and win popular support, you are going to have a hard time finding the right side to be on when one day the people tire of their dictator’s rule. The US “Hard Left” is a collection of aged and unsuccessful revolutionaries who developed politically in the 1960s and 70s. They grew up with a view that authoritarian one party states, and charismatic third world dictators, ought to be supported as liberators because they were fighting against capitalistic exploiters. Long after the capitalistic exploiters had been chased away, and the new emperors began developing their own ways of exploiting people, the fawning and dictator-worship remained. So what if Ghadaffi’s kids were entertained on Caribbean islands by American pop stars while they guzzled cases of Champagne? Their dad has said the word “socialist” before! Therefore he deserves our support. Of course!

I don’t care what the “correct” anti-imperialist line is and I don’t care to try and rank the nation’s countries on a “socialistic” hierarchy where individual freedoms and political rights can be exchanged for social services or a cut of the pie. I also don’t care whether or not a third world dictator is able to buy the support of some of his people by putting gas and oil profits back into infrastructure, because guess what? Global warming is real and Ghadaffi and Chavez’s development of their national resources is, globally, a step in the wrong direction that will contribute to catastrophic changes in weather patterns and sea levels.

If you want to be a usefully political citizen you have to learn to be a critical thinker first. This is a world that is being destroyed ecologically by powerful people who make comfortable living for themselves by keeping the majority of people politically and economically powerless- and more importantly- confused. You can’t trust anyone or any group to do your thinking for you, you have to do it for yourself. That is a practice the hard left organizations in the United States generally (not always) do not train their members in.

Our left does not know what it means to fight to win. They have won little, over my life time. They have been very adept at fighting loosing battles and spouting slogans into the air. If you’re not expecting to win anything anyway, it’s pretty easy to say whatever you want. Being “right” and letting other people know it becomes more important than being effective. Like college sophomores trying to impress one another in a dorm with their knowledge of obscure subjects, our domestically unsuccessful revolutionaries are quite vocal in their instructions to people actually fighting revolutions abroad. These instructions are not usually helpful, but of course, why would they be? There is fundamental disagreement about who “the enemy” is. It is my opinion that most of the allegedly Marxist American organizations thought Ghadaffi was closer to socialism than a post-Ghadaffi Lybia would be. After that point the case was closed. They would have preferred to see Benghazi leveled than to see the different classes, individuals, and parties within that country decide for themselves what political policies their nation should adopt.

People who fight to win, and actually win, often prioritize effectiveness over the integrity of principles. When the people you are fighting have tanks and bombers and snipers and are shelling and bombing you and you can expect to be murdered within a few hours, days, or weeks, at that point military efficiency and effectiveness, not intellectually correct political positions, will be of great value.

Those whose conception of a revolution anywhere today involves a self consciously Marxist, feminist, grass roots network of democratically functioning workers’ councils, with its own movement controlled independent media and accountable leaders, and, heck, commitment to non-violence and secularism to boot, can expect to be disappointed by what actual revolutions actually look like. This even more so in the Middle East. Revolutions are not academic exercises in political correctness. They start with the humans we have today, whose political development has been determined by the real world and the legacy of past victories, failures, promises, and betrayals, and whose resources, allies, and agendas are confused, vacillating, and often contradictory.

Al-Jazeera has been criticized on this page for being controlled by the Qatari monarchy. Hence, I suppose, it must be incapable of ever telling the truth or functioning independently. It must have been illusion then, when I noticed in 2010 and 2011 that Al-Jazeera supported the Egyptian Revolution wholeheartedly from Day One to the great distress and embarrassment of that governments’ principle military sponsor, the United States of America.

I also noticed someone in this discussion posted a link to a Huffington Post article, but no one here then criticized the Huffington Post. Did you know the Huffington Post is run by member of the bourgeois class? Did you know they like to not pay their writers, and that many left writers recently stopped writing for them in protest of its policies? Did you know that the Huffington post website is getting paid by Sears to advertise a new grill they are selling, and while the capitalistic owner of the Huffington Post is being paid by sears for the use of their site, Huffington Post writers are themselves often not paid? Isn’t that a terrible example of capitalistic exploitation? They are even supporting Barack Obama for God sake! So why is a link to their website posted here, and no one points this out, and no one says that everything on the Huffinton Post cannot be believed because it is obviously controlled by a member of the ruling class?

That is because we know the Huffington Post continues to post many useful and relevant articles, despite its short comings. The Huffington Post likes gay people having rights too, and has news about that. The Huffington Post directs scrutiny against the misdeeds of Wall Street. The Huffington Post likes people being able to have health care and thinks Wal Mart workers get a raw deal and that they deserve a better one.

The Huffington Post is an ally of justice, and of oppressed people. At the same time, it functions as an imperfect entity, containing within itself relations of injustice and oppression. Often it sides with oppressors, and is content to celebrate the charity of exploitative billionaires at the same it laments the condition of poverty in America. It is contradictory and imperfect.

As is everything. Everywhere.

Navigating our political world, we must pledge our allegiance to genuine principles, not to organizations, presidents, or parties. All of these can, have, and will fail us. All of them can be corrupted. You can make use of some of them by doing so critically, and you must constantly evaluate what you get from something, verses what potential bad thing might happen later if you get involved with it. By reading the above Huffington Post article, I contributed to advertising revenue and market share of an exploitative and capitalistic news agency. I did so because I felt it was worth it to understand this discussion.

It disappoints, but does not surprise me, that an individual here found a problem with the idea that, “the international left base its positions regarding imperialist intervention on what the 0.2% of the world’s population who lived in Libya might have wanted.” Is this not, then, revealing?

I believe whole heartedly that Libyans and no one else had the right to determine how a revolution in Libya should proceed.

A revolution is made by a people. When you have a movement, and the power structure represses it, you have to decide whether to retreat, re-organize, and try again later, or whether to respond and escalate and accept the consequences of that escalation. Revolutions are highly escalated political dialogues between rulers and ruled people. The right to determine when to risk that escalation, and when to open the pandora’s box of armed conflict, is the right of free people everywhere. When a people decides to have a revolution, it is done not through a ballot box or through an online internet survey. There are those ahead of the game, and those who lag behind it. There are those who lead and those who follow. There are hotheads who invite premature and catastrophic oppression. There are conservatives who mask the protection of their own vested interests and positions behind concerns for “peace” and “orderliness.” Politically “Combined and Uneven Development” is the rule. It cannot be otherwise.

I might also take this opportunity to remind our laptop revolutionaries that an actual revolution is a bloody awful and horrible thing. If you embark on a revolution you know that you are going to risk everything and everyone that you love and that is important to you. You may even loose yourself, and you may find yourself doing terrible things in order to prevent them being done to you.

If and when a revolution is necessary, that is to be determined by an internal dialogue among the people waging it. When it does occur and you find yourself in a military engagement, you are no longer fighting on moral terms. You may have to make compromises and temporary allegiances with untrustworthy, and even politically suspect allies. May I remind you that we in the United States are no longer ruled over by a monarch because of our alliance with the reactionary, slave holding, French aristocracy in the 1770s and 80s? Should black Americans in the 1860s have opposed the intervention of the North in the civil war that freed them because the North was ruled by capitalists?

Were the Viet-Minh wrong to accept the help of the Americans in their fight against the Japanese during World War Two?

Certainly, the Americans later betrayed them. Cold war politics led them to side with the French, and assist their re-conquest of their former colony in exchange for French anti-communist political support. In doing so they turned their backs on their old allies. The Americans ultimately behaved dishonorably and against the goals of the Viet-Minh in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Still, if it was 1943 and you were in Vietnam fighting the Japanese, even if you could see in the future that the Americans might betray you, would you still refuse their gifts of arms and the military training OSS officers were willing to provide for you?

A revolution has the right to choose its own allies, make its own mistakes, and succeed or fail as it will. I support the right of Libyans, Syrians, and everyone else who can expect to be murdered by a dictator’s henchman to secure whatever military support they can from where ever they can get it to support their cause. I’ll leave the long term consequences of such alliances for them to determine the potential benefit, or liability of. No one is going to shoot me tomorrow or shell my house if I fail to win. As such I am not about to substitute my own uninformed and distant opinion for the decisions made by actual revolutionaries actually fighting a revolution.

Against the Tea Party and the Scapegoating of Welfare Cheats

In response to some rather ignorant and hateful remarks posted on a page of mine...

I understand there is a great lack of intelligent political organizations and ideas where you live. But if you really think that welfare cheats are this biggets problem this country has, I think you are really letting some whackos do your problem defining for you.

The economic collapse did not happen because of welfare cheats.

Banking deregulation that resulted in several million Americans loosing their jobs and homes did not happen because of welfare cheats.

The $4 a gallon gasoline you are buying is not that expensive because of welfare cheats.

We did not spent over a trillion dollars invading and occupying a country that never threatened us because of welfare cheats.

There are not tens of thousands of American veterans missing their arms and legs today who are going to live the rest of their lives with spinal damage, TBIs, or PTSD because of welfare cheats.

Welfare programs are a small part of the total federal and state budgets. I find it disturbing you would lash out against the most desperate and degreded people while ignoring, say, the military industrial complex, or perhaps the prison-industrial complex, which at great tax payer expense houses hundreds of thousands of non-violent drug offenders.

Wealth inequality is the worst it has been in this country since the 1920s. When that happens you get poor people doing desperate things and leading miserable lives. However, if you were paying attention at all, you would know that welfare rolls nationally have not gone up significantly during the recession. Food stamp benefits, however, have gone up several times, mostly to people like myself who work hard, get laid of, and spend a short amount of time on food stamps while they are looking for another job.

The greatest donors to charity, in my opinion, are the working class, who work long hours, multiple jobs, for low pay and no benefits, and donate the great wealth they create to the companies they work for.

The tea party is controlled by rich republicans who started the wars and who crashed the economy and who live in Mcmansions while their employees live in hovels with no health insurance. These people are trying to scapegoat the poor and minorities for things the rich have done. They are not a solution to our problems, and they are not on the side of working people. The represent upper middle class haters, attempting to mobolize the middle class behind the rich. No one who works hard for a living need spend any time near them.

My $0.02. And by the way, I am not a Democrat either.

The Problem With Atlanta...

... is that it doesn't really want to be a city. It hasn't in decades and it has no sign of changing this attitude. For purely logistical and geographical reasons not of its own choosing, the status of a city was thrust upon it. Today, as I return, I see it continues, ever futher, to unravel.

The great disintegration perhaps began just after the civil rights movement as whites fled the city limits for tax havens and whites-only school districts in the suburbs. The newly independent status of Sandy Springs as its own city consumates the success of this process, which began long ago. Yes, the whites still drive to town because they also like making money and having jobs. Yet to a disturbingly large extent, they don't seem to care about most of the people who live elsewhere in the city, particularly if their skin is a darker color. They vote with their dollars and their feet and these things consistantly choose to keep train tracks and highways and distance in between their neighborhoods and black neighborhoods. Cheap gas prices in the 1980s and 1990s allowed a completely unsustainable, and absurd infastructre of roads, highways, interstates, perimeter interstates, strip malls and big box stores to develop and serve this idea, of seperate and thuroughly unequal Atlantas.

Now the gas prices are crashing it all down. Flight of any kind is difficult at $4 a gallon. MARTA planners struggle with decentralized and spread out population centers just as much as they do with budget shortfalls and operating costs. But no technocrat elected or otherwise will be able to wave a wand and solve the transportation- or any other problems- of this place. Not while people have their present mind set.

Because the present mindset is not that of citizens in a city thinking about how they ought to live and structure their affairs. The mindset is a blend of selfishness and apathy. Absurd monuments to unproductive wealth are constructed to house the well to do while the less well to do struggle along with dead end, low paying, and unfullfilling jobs, as well as completely inadequate education. The city does not look itself over in a mirror for blemishes in need of a remedy. It deliberately conceals its sepsis. It spends millions hosting the olympics. It builds the largest regional aquarium in the midst of a water famine. It plants grass, then burns fossil fuels to mow this grass. And then fertilizes the grass so it will grow faster. And it allows 65 year old men who have worked all their lives building the city to spend their golden years begging fellow riders on a late and broken down train for spare cash to help pay for their heart medicine.

Religious hyprocrisy of the most disgusting and abominable sort blares from the radio, news, and print. Emotional appeals to hate and condemn, wage war, punish, and imprision has completely taken the place of journalism, much less humanity. Lungs choke on idled engines. Teeth rot from Sweet Tea and Coca Cola. Humidity bears down oppressively soaking the skin, driving all away from public centers of gathering, citizens stumbling back for their own private air conditioning.


Until this changes, until enough people around here are able to stick their heads far enough above ground, over the oaks and poplars and pines and past the smokey haze of ozone and carbon monoxide, beyond the reach of the hate preachers and the flag wavers the billboards, liqour stores, cigarettes, and overpasses, until people voluntarily drag themselves from their private suburban asylums and reach this lofty height and see, yes, we are all one city... until they are convinced that it is a good idea to actually go to one another's neighborhoods and learn for themselves what problems, needs, talents, and resources, actually exist there... Atlanta will in all its glory, continue to burn.