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"Freedom is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear." George OrwellZenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.comBlogger293125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-19434547244994574362012-02-09T23:12:00.000-08:002012-02-09T23:19:43.780-08:00Concerning the Violent Peace-PoliceIn response to <a style="COLOR: rgb(200,54,18); TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206/">“The Cancer in Occupy,”</a> by Chris Hedges.<br />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.<br />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.)<br />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.<br />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.<br />Let me just lay out a few initial facts:<br />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.<br />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.”<br />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.<br />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?)<br />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.<br />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.<br />I am appealing to you because I really do believe the kind of statement you made is profoundly dangerous.<br />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”?<br />1) they are not part of us<br />2) they are consciously malevolent in their intentions<br />3) they are violent<br />4) they cannot be reasoned with<br />5) they are all the same<br />6) they wish to destroy us<br />7) they are a cancer that must be excised<br />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.<br />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?<br />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.)<br />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.<br />The kind of rhetoric you are engaging in, if it disseminates widely, will ensure this kind of violence becomes much, much more severe.<br />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.<br />If I understand your argument, it seems to come down to this:<br />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<br />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<br />3. Therefore, the Black Bloc elements must be somehow rooted out.<br />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.<br />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.<br />The question is how one responds.<br />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.<br />All this will be true whether or not a Black Bloc is present.<br />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?<br />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?<br />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.<br />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!”<br />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.<br />Egyptian activists, in other words, understood what playing into the hands of the police really means.<br />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.”<br />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.<br />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.Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-15806367538099223832011-08-06T13:48:00.000-07:002019-06-07T23:23:20.563-07:00Radical Report<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SCA7Zlj2dAw/Tj2pukMXyQI/AAAAAAAAAYU/gUz_eALwSZU/s1600/Clone%2Bof%2BASH%2BRR.gif" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637848925992372482" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SCA7Zlj2dAw/Tj2pukMXyQI/AAAAAAAAAYU/gUz_eALwSZU/s320/Clone%2Bof%2BASH%2BRR.gif" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 320px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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I am experimenting with posting a podcast of my show.This is a catch up clip show on news of the last few weeks focusing on the austerity plans against Americans,the October 6th protest,the terrorist attacks in Norway,and other spectacles caused by and distracting from capitalism's effect on our lives.</div>
Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-53473216555800648372011-05-24T15:41:00.000-07:002011-05-25T00:33:28.521-07:00A Radical Analysis of the Tea Party by Zeno<strong>Understanding the Current Populism<br /></strong>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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br /><br /><strong>Peak Tea </strong><br /><strong><br /></strong><a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/147308/Negative-Views-Tea-Party-Rise-New-High.aspx">Gallup </a>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.<br />Tea Party influence:<br /><em>“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.</em>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.”<br /><br />Gender breakdown: <em>“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."</em><br /><br />More proof of Glen Ford’s contention there is no Tea Party in the South, just the same Southern rightwing politics:<br /><em>"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.”</em><br /><br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br /><br /><strong>Countering this rightwing populism<br /></strong>Another great point by Paul Street : <em>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. </em><br /><br />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.<br />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.<br />In closing I want to read this Tim Wise quote:<br /><br />“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. ”Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-4760698443976243502011-04-15T03:17:00.000-07:002011-04-29T01:23:53.658-07:00Authority Smashers Tampa/FL Loose "Manifesto"<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RyqS7dPWd7M/TagzqAUgNrI/AAAAAAAAAX8/5iL9KdJlKYE/s1600/ash_logo_fist2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 310px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RyqS7dPWd7M/TagzqAUgNrI/AAAAAAAAAX8/5iL9KdJlKYE/s320/ash_logo_fist2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5595779333741360818" /></a><br />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. <br /><br />In a statement on our Authority Smashing! Hour Facebook page,collective member Charngchi "Chomskyan" Way put it best:<br />"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<br /><br />Ron from Philly has started Deep Green Philly with a <a href="http://www.deepgreenphilly.com/">page </a>under construction. <br /><br />Deep Green Philly is a podcasting/news website focused on local and international environmentalism from a radical perspective <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /> <br /><strong>a)Peoples' Global Action Hallmarks</strong>1.A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism; all trade agreements, institutions and governments that promote destructive globalization.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />5.An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy.<br /><br /> <strong>b)the St Paul Principles:</strong><br /><br />1. our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the<br />plans of other groups.<br />2. the actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of<br />time or space.<br />3. any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement, avoiding any<br />public or media denunciations of fellow activists and events.<br />4. we oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance,<br />infiltration, disruption and violence. we agree not to assist law enforcement<br />actions against activists and others.<br /><br /><br />c)<a href="http://nymaa.org/">NYMAA: Purposes of Existence</a><br />A. General Propaganda: To increase the visibility and spread of basic anarchist ideas and information among the general populace through a variety of means.<br />B. Social Struggles: To establish an anarchist presence in social struggles against oppression and towards freedom.<br />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.<br />D. Coordination & Communication: To increase the level of joint activity, coordination, and face-to-face communication among already established anarchist and social justice organizations.<br />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.<br /><br />e)The <a href="http://redanarchist.org/">RAAN</a> and <a href="http://laff-experiment.org/">LAFF</a> models are also an influence for me.<br /><br />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.<br />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/<br />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":<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br />I also suggest principles similar to <a href="http://bringtheruckus.org/?q=about">these</a>.<br /><br />Any Florida anarchists and other anti-authoritarian radicals interested in strengthening a radical presence/community in Florida can reach me at ashcollective@gmail.comZenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-79988818757443196462011-02-09T13:51:00.000-08:002011-02-09T14:05:48.202-08:00Bizarre/Propaganda Comics<a href="http://generationexploitation.blogspot.com/2006/06/history-of-christian-archi_114951302719460209.html">Here</a> is an excellent blog describing and deconstructing a strange turn to propaganda for the notoriously safe Archie comics. Insanity and Bircher rightwing propagansa abound!<br /><br />And we are brought back to <a href="http://www.mysteryisland.net/hansi">Hansi</a> as well in this history of crazy Christian propaganda comics.Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-72755499832874296212010-06-19T00:58:00.000-07:002010-06-19T02:00:56.268-07:00Great Used Book Finds<div><br /> </div><div><div><div><br />I was very surprised when I ran across these titles at a neat local used <a href="http://www.mojotampa.com/">bookstore</a>. First I found a decent copy(there is some hightlighting inside) of Guy Debord's situationist masterwork <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_the_Spectacle">The Society of the Spectacle. </a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6WGZLwHrZk/TByDg0vkuCI/AAAAAAAAAWs/T3na3fVml0o/s1600/P6190014.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5484403046167656482" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 240px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6WGZLwHrZk/TByDg0vkuCI/AAAAAAAAAWs/T3na3fVml0o/s320/P6190014.JPG" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div>I found an infamous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazine">pulp</a> classic I have only read about. A winter 1947 quarterly issue of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_Stories">Amazing Stories </a>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.<br /><br /><br /></div><div>From Wikipedia:</div><br /><div align="center"><em>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, <span style="color:#ffff00;"><span style="color:#000000;">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."</span> </span>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.<br />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.</em></div><br /><br /><div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5484403679803776258" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 240px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6WGZLwHrZk/TByEFtOMnQI/AAAAAAAAAW0/A4PaJWjy2JE/s320/P6190006.JPG" border="0" /> The magazine I got itself.</div><div> </div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5484405062589463074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 216px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6WGZLwHrZk/TByFWMf_uiI/AAAAAAAAAXM/bUINf_wVCBA/s320/Amazing0647pd.jpg" border="0" /><br /><div> 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.<br /><br /><div></div><br /><div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5484403693299475058" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6WGZLwHrZk/TByEGff0onI/AAAAAAAAAW8/QcMd1CrRmCo/s320/P6190012.JPG" border="0" /></div><br /><div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5484403699006511746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6WGZLwHrZk/TByEG0wfGoI/AAAAAAAAAXE/17nXwZ_LgtY/s320/P6190010.JPG" border="0" /><br />This article on Devil's Tower caught my attention. Inspiration to Close Encounters of the Third Kind?<br /><br /><br /><br /><em>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.<br />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.</em></div></div><br /><br /><div>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. </div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div></div></div></div></div></div>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-53427034437227716452010-06-05T11:57:00.000-07:002019-06-07T23:19:47.360-07:00How to solve a problem like Israel?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 sovereign Palestine and refuses to be a single integrated 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.<br />
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Along with their nation-long 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 retaliation they have bombed Lebanon several times (losing the last "war"), massacred Gaza--continues bombing Gaza again and starves the population with an illegal blockade, threatening to bomb Iran and now moving nuclear subs into Iranian waters.<br />
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Israel has roughly 150 nukes and refuses to acknowledge them, sign on to the weapons treaties, or allow inspectors in. 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, ethics, 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.<br />
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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 apologized, 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 lands back, and if Israelis want to stay, they can, but should share a country with everybody else as equals not just as first class citizens over others. 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 risk of disappearance 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 and borders. Pakistan was a creation of the West as well. It is not unfeasible to "end a country". Maybe the people of Israel/Palestine and the world community can come to a consensus of how to dissolve this settler colony in a way that is fair to all involved and lays the foundation for a peaceful tomorrow. That's a tall order, but a first step that could happen without 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 illegal settlements and accept a real Palestinian state. That has been doable for decades. Let's see what the lunatic state does.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLB8DfhnJD0&feature=related">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLB8DfhnJD0&feature=related</a><br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?">http://www.youtube.com/watch?</a><br />
v=ruPRRyBh_G0&playnext_from=TL&videos=t7SXk30jCi4&feature=sub<br />
<a href="http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2010/06/video-proof-israeli-commandos-shoot.html">http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2010/06/video-proof-israeli-commandos-shoot.html</a><br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident</a>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-2568226572365247422010-05-28T12:23:00.000-07:002010-05-28T14:41:20.713-07:00Imperial Citizen:Why I don't fret over Fundementalist Islamic terrorismIt'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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster">did</a> 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.<br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH2T6a_2gBo">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH2T6a_2gBo</a><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boBzrqF4vmo&feature=related">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boBzrqF4vmo&feature=related</a><br /> 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 <a href="http://trueslant.com/allisonkilkenny/page/3/">http://trueslant.com/allisonkilkenny/page/3/</a> and only hype the ones that point to Muslims.<br /><a href="http://trueslant.com/allisonkilkenny/2010/05/27/us-to-focus-on-non-white-homegrown-extremists/">http://trueslant.com/allisonkilkenny/2010/05/27/us-to-focus-on-non-white-homegrown-extremists/</a><br /><br />The Manichaean Necessary Lie known as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations">Clash of Civilizations</a> 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".<br />:<br />Noam Chomsky on The "Clash of Civilizations"<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT64TNho59I&feature=related">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT64TNho59I&feature=related</a><br /> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ObJF6KbWEU&feature=related">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ObJF6KbWEU&feature=related</a><br /><br />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.<a onmousedown="'UntrustedLink.bootstrap($(this)," href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Roy" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Roy</a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boobquake">Boobquake</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everybody_Draw_Mohammed_Day">Everybody Draw Mohammed Day </a>was in reaction to a recent South Park cartoon addressing the tabbo on visual representations of the prophet receiving veiled threats from an American <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_Muslim">radical muslim website </a>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.<br /><br />YouTube is full of racist demagogues embraced for their "daring" atheism in criticising islam, as is the case with bigoted cranky Brit <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM2dC1iWzww&feature=related">Pat Condell</a>. Jon <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24crySmq7AY">responds</a> quite appropriately to the scam he is trying to pull using atheism as a cover. Chomsky also puts it <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7nHJ8sDRRY&feature=related">best</a>. I recently made similar arguements on Facebook:<br /><em>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?</em><br /><br /><br />These videos made the points I am trying to verbalize politely quite well and I mostly agree:<br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Wnq2F-bU8">Why I Refuse to Draw Muhammad </a><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Wnq2F-bU8">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Wnq2F-bU8</a><br /> 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.<br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJh5rGL-la4">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJh5rGL-la4</a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aei.org%2Fscholar%2F117&h=addbd" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" __untrusted="true">http://www.aei.org/scholar/117</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08EYqwyns-k">This </a>sophist neocon slimeball's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z82C10myBmM&feature=related">fraud </a>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. <a onmousedown="'UntrustedLink.bootstrap($(this)," href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson</a> <a onmousedown="'UntrustedLink.bootstrap($(this)," href="http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/02/and_you_thought_dating_was_har.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/02/and_you_thought_dating_was_har.html</a><br />Her establishment-funded propaganda <a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/time-magazines-sneaky-way-of-muffling-the-message-of-an-afghan-peace-activist-by-malalai-joya">attack </a>on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malalai_Joya">Malalai Joya</a>--- 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.<br /><br />ZenoZenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-22702487671782241942010-04-08T22:57:00.000-07:002010-04-08T23:11:02.915-07:00The ASH Thursday, 4/8/2010<a href="http://authoritysmashers.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/s02_week02_thurs/">http://authoritysmashers.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/s02_week02_thurs/</a><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><strong>Zeno's Kyrgyzstan Transcript:</strong><br /><br />A lot of Americans probably haven’t heard of this country or think it’s where Borat’s from. <br /> 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.<br /><br />They have been destitute since the fall of the USSR and have been an unsuccessful lab for the Western investors like the IMF,WTO.<br />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’.<br /><br /> 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.”<br /><br />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<br />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 .<br /><br /> Bakiyev,who fled the capital Bishkek on his plane, is now in hiding refusing to surrender as<br /> “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.<br /><br />From what I’ve read the masses were against the corruption, Manas base ,the lack of democracy, and unfair utilities rates.<br /><br />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 .<br />For instance, anti-US and anti-Russian meddling sentiment is debatable in spite of anger over base leasing.<br /><br />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<br />violence has continued .<br /><br />There are rumors of security forces loyal to Bakiyev exchanging fire with the riot police.<br /> 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<br />their rights. There is a media clampdown there, so it’s hard to get the full picture .<br /> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /> 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<br />doing.<br /><br /><strong>How long until real revolutions rise up against us in all of these countries?</strong>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-57823503819691449472010-04-06T21:29:00.000-07:002010-04-06T22:48:32.130-07:00The Authority Smashing! Hour Tues. 4/6/2010Mr1001Nights 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.<br />Paul shares what he experienced in D.C. Tonight's caller was <a href="http://propagandalalaland.blogspot.com/">Julia Riber Pitt</a>,who also protested.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <em>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?<br /></em><br />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.:<br />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. <a href="http://authoritysmashers.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/s02_week02_tues/">http://authoritysmashers.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/s02_week02_tues/</a><br /><a href="http://www.blogtalkradio.com/tash">http://www.blogtalkradio.com/tash</a>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-27084457360255965532010-03-13T01:59:00.000-08:002010-03-13T02:13:35.640-08:00Part II: Michelle Alexander on “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”<a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/12/part_ii_michelle_alexander_on_the">Part II: Michelle Alexander on “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”</a><br />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.<br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underclass">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underclass</a><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_lower_class">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_lower_class</a><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><em>"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</em><br /><em></em><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><em>PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: <span style="color:#ff0000;">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.</span></em><br /><br />AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander, “no excuses.” Can you respond to President Obama?<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: <strong>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 <span style="color:#ff0000;">huge percentages of the people residing in those communities have been branded felons, and therefore discrimination is perfectly legal against them.</span> <span style="color:#ff0000;">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.<br />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.<br /></span><span style="color:#ff0000;">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.</span> <span style="color:#ff0000;">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.<br /></span><span style="color:#ff0000;">What is the system designed to do? The system is designed to send you right back to prison</span>, which is, in fact, what happens to the vast majority of people who are released. <span style="color:#ff0000;">About 70 percent of former prisoners are returned within three years.</span> 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.<br /><span style="color:#ff0000;">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.</span></strong><br /><strong><span style="color:#ff0000;">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.<br /><br /></span></strong><strong><span style="color:#ff0000;"></span></strong>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.<br /><br /><em>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.</em><br /><br />AMY GOODMAN: Your reaction to Governor Schwarzenegger’s newfound concern about the situation with the prison system in his state?<br /><br />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.<br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: <strong>That’s right. <span style="color:#ff0000;">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.</span> 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.<br /></strong><br />AMY GOODMAN: And then, explain, Michelle Alexander, what—<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: The pressure to plead guilty is overwhelming.<br /><br />AMY GOODMAN: Explain then what that means, once a person is a felon, in terms of the rights they lose for life.<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: <strong>Yes, well, <span style="color:#ff0000;">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.</span> <span style="color:#ff0000;">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.</span> 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.</strong><br /><br />AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander—<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Our prison population has quintupled.<br /><br />AMY GOODMAN: To what, in terms of the world, comparing our prison population to the rest of the world?<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: <strong>Yes, well, our prison population has <span style="color:#ff0000;">quintupled</span>. We’ve gone from about <span style="color:#ff0000;">300,000 people behind bars in the 1970s</span>—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 <span style="color:#ff0000;">more than two million today</span>. <span style="color:#ff0000;">And the vast majority of that increase has been due to drug offenses.</span> 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.<br /></strong><br />AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Michelle Alexander, for one sec—<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Now, in fact, if we had to go back—<br /><br />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.<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes. <strong><span style="color:#ff0000;">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.<br /></span></strong><br />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.<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Thank you for having me.Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-47683992415144143142010-03-13T01:29:00.000-08:002010-03-13T01:45:19.590-08:00Legal Scholar Michelle Alexander on "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness"Democracy Now! Video<br /><a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/11/legal_scholar_michelle_alexander_on_the">Legal Scholar Michelle Alexander on "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness"</a><br /><br /><em>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.</em><br /><br /><em>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.<br /></em><a title="Ellen Willis" href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ellen_Willis"><em>Ellen Willis</em></a><em>, </em><a class="external text" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/0543,50thwillis,69282,31.html" rel="nofollow"><em>"Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs"</em></a><em>, The Village Voice (September 19, 1989)</em><br /><br /><br />"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." - <a title="Bill Hicks" href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Hicks">Bill Hicks</a><br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/11/”http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175215/tomgram:_michelle_alexander,_the_age_of_obama_as_a_racial_nightmare/">tomdispatch.com</a>. 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.<br />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?<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: <span style="color:#000000;"><strong>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.</strong></span><br /><br />JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you mention that the—in the war on drugs, four out of five people arrested have <strong>actually been arrested for use of drugs, not for—or possession or use of drugs, not for the sale of drugs.</strong> Could you talk about how the—both political parties joined in this increasing incarceration around drug use?<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: <strong>That’s right. <span style="color:#ff0000;">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. </span>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.<br /><span style="color:#ff0000;">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.<br /></span>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.<br />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.<br />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.<br /></strong><br />AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander—<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: President Clinton—<br /><br />AMY GOODMAN: Yes, I just wanted to bring it up to President Obama, because this piece you wrote, very interesting, at <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/11/”http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175215/tomgram:_michelle_alexander,_the_age_of_obama_as_a_racial_nightmare/">tomdispatch.com</a> called <strong>“The Age of Obama as Racial Nightmare.”</strong> Explain.<br /><br />MICHELLE ALEXANDER: <strong>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, <span style="color:#ff0000;">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.</span><br /><span style="color:#ff0000;">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. </span><span style="color:#ff0000;">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.</span> 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.<br />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.<br /></strong><br />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.Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-36321986844319712702010-03-13T00:49:00.000-08:002010-03-13T00:49:48.073-08:00Study: Median Wealth for Single Black Women: $100, Single Hispanic Women: $120, Single White Women: $41,000From Democracy Now!<br /><a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/12/study_median_wealth_for_single_black">Study: Median Wealth for Single Black Women: $100, Single Hispanic Women: $120, Single White Women: $41,000</a>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-72917805892788362432010-03-12T02:57:00.001-08:002010-03-12T02:57:28.698-08:00Dennis Kucinich Takes on Democratic Leaders with Call Public Option, Afghan Withdrawal 2 of 3<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p><object height='350' width='425'><param value='http://youtube.com/v/nDt8Lh_Q7ZA' name='movie'/><embed height='350' width='425' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://youtube.com/v/nDt8Lh_Q7ZA'/></object></p><p>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.<br />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.<br />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. <br />Why are so many incumbant politicians quitting?<br />We ignore the canaries in the coal<br /> mines and rats jumping ship at our peril.</p></div>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-16505490179676070732010-03-12T02:37:00.001-08:002010-03-12T02:37:17.107-08:00Dennis Kucinich Takes on Democratic Leaders with Call Public Option, Afghan Withdrawal 1 of 3<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p><object height='350' width='425'><param value='http://youtube.com/v/sfSDpehsfhU' name='movie'/><embed height='350' width='425' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://youtube.com/v/sfSDpehsfhU'/></object></p><p>Motivations aside, his reasoning is sound.</p></div>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-56297190995315106202010-03-11T03:29:00.001-08:002010-03-11T03:29:10.398-08:00The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with Worlds Worst Polluters 3 of 3<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p><object height='350' width='425'><param value='http://youtube.com/v/vPeKB80jkpU' name='movie'/><embed height='350' width='425' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://youtube.com/v/vPeKB80jkpU'/></object></p></div>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-27676578806007446672010-03-11T03:26:00.001-08:002010-03-11T03:26:16.016-08:00The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with Worlds Worst Polluters 3 of 3<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p><object height='350' width='425'><param value='http://youtube.com/v/vPeKB80jkpU' name='movie'/><embed height='350' width='425' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://youtube.com/v/vPeKB80jkpU'/></object></p></div>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-36160760636673207762010-03-11T03:18:00.001-08:002010-03-11T03:18:34.447-08:00The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with Worlds Worst Polluters 2 of 3<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p><object height='350' width='425'><param value='http://youtube.com/v/9s3Msqxi490' name='movie'/><embed height='350' width='425' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://youtube.com/v/9s3Msqxi490'/></object></p></div>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-39293119460301623912010-03-11T02:58:00.001-08:002010-03-11T02:58:22.843-08:00The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with Worlds Worst Polluters 1 of 3<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p><object height='350' width='425'><param value='http://youtube.com/v/Z2QgI7cIqEk' name='movie'/><embed height='350' width='425' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://youtube.com/v/Z2QgI7cIqEk'/></object></p><p>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] <br /></p></div>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-63942850144557192622010-03-09T03:53:00.000-08:002010-03-09T03:54:59.056-08:00Life in Limbo? : turbulence<a href="http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-5/life-in-limbo/">Life in Limbo? : turbulence</a><br /><br />Life in Limbo?<br />By Turbulence<br />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.<br />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.<br />Crisis in the middle<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />Crisis of the common<br />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.<br />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.<br />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?<br />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.<br />SHIFTING GROUNDS<br />From madness to mainstream?<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />Zombie-liberalism<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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).<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />The middle and the common<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />Towards new common grounds?<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />From commons to constitutions<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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?<br />*****<br />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?<br />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.<br />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.Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-53960187921036005082010-02-26T04:19:00.000-08:002010-02-26T04:31:20.954-08:00The End Of Free Speech On The Internet?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.<br /><br /><a href="http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/leaked-acta-draft-treaty-reveals-plans-for-internet-clampdown">http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/leaked-acta-draft-treaty-reveals-plans-for-internet-clampdown</a><br /><br /><em>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 </em><a href="http://sites.google.com/site/actadigitalchapter/acta_digital_chapter.pdf" target="_blank"><em>a copy of part of the confidential draft agreement</em></a><em> 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.</em><br /><em></em><br />Why the lack of transparency? What are the corporations/governments trying to pull with ACTA?As mentioned in this cautiously forward looking article:<a href="http://anarchism.pageabode.com/jacobian/acta-and-intellectual-property">http://anarchism.pageabode.com/jacobian/acta-and-intellectual-property</a><br /><em></em><br /><em><blockquote><em></em></blockquote>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. <blockquote></blockquote></em><br /><br /><a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/21/acta-internet-enforc.html">http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/21/acta-internet-enforc.html</a>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-6927945571370985832010-02-21T23:57:00.000-08:002010-02-21T23:59:57.942-08:00Insane SocietyBeen 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 FrommZenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-25318203442570471492010-02-18T11:21:00.000-08:002010-02-18T11:41:01.073-08:00The Authority Smashing! Hour with Mr1001NIghts and Zeno<img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5439668148208697522" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 208px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 220px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6WGZLwHrZk/S32VXDX8gLI/AAAAAAAAAWc/bY-UenP2_ms/s320/anarcho-heart.jpg" border="0" /><br /><div> <img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5439668157790267378" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 167px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 142px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6WGZLwHrZk/S32VXnEXp_I/AAAAAAAAAWk/MRMRPX0s9D8/s320/copyleft_logo.bmp" border="0" /><br /><br /><div><a href="http://authoritysmashers.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/week21_wed/">This the ASH show for Wednesday, Feb. 17th, 2010.</a><br /><br />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.<br />Links related to this show:</div><div><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_monopoly_privilege">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_monopoly_privilege</a></div><div><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Austin">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Austin</a></div><div><a href="http://rawstory.com/2010/02/south-carolinas-subversive-activities-registration-act-force/">http://rawstory.com/2010/02/south-carolinas-subversive-activities-registration-act-force/</a></div><div><a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/what-do-empires-do-by-michael-parenti">http://www.zcommunications.org/what-do-empires-do-by-michael-parenti</a></div><div><a href="http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-womens-rights/aclu-challenges-patents-breast-cancer-genes-0">http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-womens-rights/aclu-challenges-patents-breast-cancer-genes-0</a></div><div> </div><div><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act</a><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NET_Act">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NET_Act</a><br /></div><div><br /><a href="http://www.blogtalkradio.com/authoritysmashers">Tune in live weekdays Mon-Fri at 8 PM.<br /></a><br /></div><a href="http://authoritysmashers.wordpress.com/"></a></div>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-32335982005216585332010-02-17T21:31:00.000-08:002010-02-17T21:39:18.077-08:00Terrorism Derangement Syndrome By Dahlia LithwickDahlia 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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2243429/">http://www.slate.com/id/2243429/</a><br /><em>"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."</em><br /><br />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?<br /><br />Truly scary: <em>"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."</em>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6479673849384430298.post-6351629101502277572010-02-17T21:25:00.000-08:002010-02-17T21:30:59.651-08:00More Bizarre/Propaganda Comics<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6WGZLwHrZk/S3zQSOL0z7I/AAAAAAAAAWU/f83xa-5PODg/s1600-h/king_comic_cover_english.gif"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5439451461420634034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 217px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6WGZLwHrZk/S3zQSOL0z7I/AAAAAAAAAWU/f83xa-5PODg/s320/king_comic_cover_english.gif" border="0" /></a><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6WGZLwHrZk/S3zPx6ScVpI/AAAAAAAAAWM/iKtijSIdmk8/s1600-h/a96960_a595_4-hansi.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5439450906323867282" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6WGZLwHrZk/S3zPx6ScVpI/AAAAAAAAAWM/iKtijSIdmk8/s320/a96960_a595_4-hansi.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="http://oddee.com/item_96960.aspx">http://oddee.com/item_96960.aspx</a></div><br /><div>"Hansi The Girl Who Loved The Swastika" is one of the funniest Christian propaganda comics outside of Chick Tracts I have ever read.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Compare that to this gem of propaganda used for good:</div><br /><div></div><br /><div><a href="http://www.bookpatrol.net/2010/01/libraries-keep-kings-crucial-comic-book.html">http://www.bookpatrol.net/2010/01/libraries-keep-kings-crucial-comic-book.html</a></div></div>Zenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976196344959564517noreply@blogger.com0