We're more alike than we are different...

Raha Iranian Feminist Collective has written an extraordinary article "Solidarity and Its Discontents," that should be read by every peace activist and anti-war group in this country. The article concludes with these words:

"There is no contradiction between opposing every instance of US meddling in Iran--and every other  country--and supporting the popular, democratic  struggles of ordinary Iranians against dictatorship. Effective international solidarity requires that the two go hand in hand, for example, by linking the struggles of political prisoners in Iran and with those of political prisoners in the US, not by counterposing them. Iranian dissidents, like dissidents in the US, see their own government as their main enemy. The fact that Iranian activists also have to deal with sanctions and threats of military action from the US only makes their work and their lives more difficult. The US and Iranian governments are, of course, not equal in their global reach, but both stand in the way of popular democracy and human liberation. US-based activists must not undermine the brave and endangered work of Iranian opposition groups by supporting the regime that is ruthlessly trying to crush them.

We are calling for a rethinking of what internationalism and international solidarity means from the vantage point of activists working in the US. Internationalism has to start from below, from the differently articulated aspirations of mass movements against state militarism, dictatorship, economic crisis, gender, sexual, religious, class and ethnic oppression, in Iran, in the US and all over the world. For activists in the US, this means being against sanctions on Iran, whether they are in the name of human rights or the nuclear issue. It means refusing to cast the US as the land of progress and freedom while Iran is demonized as backward and oppressive. Solidarity is not charity or pity; it flows from an understanding of mutual--though far from identical--struggle. It means consistent opposition to human rights violations in the US, to the rampant sexism and homophobia that lead to violence and destroy peoples lives right here. But we don t have to hide another state s brutality behind our complaints about conditions in America. We have to be just as clear in condemning state crimes against activists, journalists and others in Iran, just as critical of the Iranian versions of neo-liberalism and oligarchy, of attacks on trade unions, women and students, as we are of the US versions."

Homeland Security Coordinated 18-City Police Crackdown on Occupy Protest

http://alturl.com/hhqzg [Washington Blog]

Posted on November 16, 2011 by WashingtonsBlog

National Coordination Goes Against Protection of Local Accountability

According to Oakland Mayor Jean said that 18 cities coordinated police crack downs on Occupy protests.

Wonkette reports that Homeland Security likely organized the crack downs:

Remember when people were freaking out over the Patriot Act and Homeland Security and all this other conveniently ready-to-go post-9/11 police state stuff, because it would obviously be just a matter of time before the whole apparatus was turned against non-Muslim Americans when they started getting complain-y about the social injustice and economic injustice and income inequality and endless recession and permanent unemployment? That day is now, and has been for some time. But it's also now confirmed that it's now, as some Justice Department official screwed up and admitted that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated the riot-cop raids on a dozen major #Occupy Wall Street demonstration camps nationwide yesterday and today. (Oh, and tonight, too: Seattle is being busted up by the riot cops right now, so be careful out there.)

Rick Ellis of the Minneapolis edition of Examiner.com has this, based on a "background conversation" he had with a Justice Department official on Monday night:

Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict "Occupy" protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night's move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

[...]

According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.

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(And for those who are understandably doubtful about Examiner.com as a news source, here's an AP story from a couple hours ago that verifies everything except the specific mention of DHS coordination.)

Yves Smith notes:

The 18 police action was a national, coordinated effort. This is a more serious development that one might imagine. Reader Richard Kline has pointed out that one of the de facto protections of American freedoms is that policing is local, accountable to elected officials at a level of government where voters matter. National coordination vitiates the notion that policing is responsive to and accountable to the governed.

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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes.

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The Heretic

Missouri, United States of Amerika

Rural American Progressive

The Heartland Heretic

In Unity is Strength

The State of the U.S. Left and What We Can Do About It

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By Michael Albert and Gregory Wilpert

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Gregory Wilpert: What is the situation of the US left progressive forces, that is, left of the Democratic Party?

Michael Albert: I think the first honest answer is that we have no idea, that is to say, there's never been an accounting that I know of that is particularly revealing of the left, much less of what people are doing or are inclined to do. The problem is that my answer or anybody's answer is going to be a guess. My guess would be that there are a lot of people in the United States who are left of the Democratic Party, they might think the party is the lesser of two evils, but they are way left of any Democratic candidate. I think there are a huge number of people like that but they are completely separated from one another. They don't identify with any activism, they just comment on the day's events at the dinner table and are furious but are not part of an organized left.

Suppose we ask what about people who have a critique of the electoral political system and are seriously left. Now the numbers go down, but I think they are still in the hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. But the numbers of those who then also have any significant ties to one another or do anything beyond perhaps reading and talking about politics around the dinner table is much, much, lower.

So now we get down to a much smaller group, perhaps a few tens of thousands. These are people who are involved in local activities and organizations of many sorts. Peace might be the biggest but also around economic issues, race issues, gender issues. These folks often have ties to other people around the same priority but very few ties to people outside of their priority.

Next, if you're asking about the ideological left, or people who identify around all of these issues and who have at least some working ties to people who identify with all of these issues, then the numbers go dramatically down. Yet that's the part on which any kind of comprehensive change depends. No matter how radical or revolutionary or focused around a single issue many folks may be, they are still focused around that one issue and there is no long-term future transition to a better society imbedded in that.

Now, we ought to ask, I think, what are the obstacles to having a whole lot of people who are a whole lot more committed and a whole lot more informed about the gamut of issues and who are intent upon new kind of social structure or society. I suspect this is mostly asking how do we get people into the first biggest group and from the biggest group into the smaller group and so on… I think the obstacles are many but unlike many other folks, I think the least important is the power of the state, fear of the police, things like that, which many people point to first. I suspect those things are real but relatively small in terms of preventing people from being part of the left. I think much more important are the attributes of the left. That is, the tendency of people who are in the Democratic Party and don't move beyond its goals, so that they are not even in that first biggest group, and then all the way down… the tendency to not to go another step is probably very substantially affected by the feeling that taking another step is taking a step into insanity. It's taking a step into aggravation, frustration, and pain, whether consciously or not. People are afraid of the next step toward greater commitment if they feel taking it gains little and costs a lot in terms of personal well-being and mindset and their ability to go about their daily business. So that's one obstacle. The only solution to that obstacle is to have movements and organizations with features that make people's lives better instead of worse when they take that extra step.

The next obstacle, which is related to the previous one, is a feeling of hopelessness and despair about going any further. So if around the dinner table someone asks you what you think of the attack on Libya or the events in Wisconsin, you have an opinion. But as far as acting on that opinion in any way, you feel it's a waste of time because nothing will be gained and it will take time and it may involve aggravation. That's in part because there's very little understanding of how you win change and of how possible it is to win change and, at the grandest level, of what it would be like to win change, not just on a single issue but toward attaining a whole new social system. There's little vision or strategy, people don't know it, people don't feel like what they are contributing to activism will somehow contribute to the desired outcome. So I think those are some the biggest problems.

Partly fear, partly time-constraints and structural things that have to do with the character of the United States. Some of these things we could help with, we could have movements that are more protective of their member and movements that as one of their demands free up people's time. The second part is people's expectation of alienation and frustration if they participate in another step to the left, the aggravation, etc., with no real gain. That can only be correcting by altering the nature of our movements. Finally there is the more general despair and hopelessness that there is no alternative and therefore even well conceived activism is a waste of time because "I don't want to be part of that, only crazy people do that."

GW: So it sounds like a vicious circle, if on the one hand you're saying people are resistant to getting more involved because of despair and because of their fears, and on the other hand, in order to become involved, some sort of organization is necessary, but then again we cannot have an organization without the people wanting one and contributing to it - so this is a vicious cycle, is that correct?

MA: Yes. And we have to find a way to break the circle. But this shouldn't surprise us. When we look at why the left isn't larger and more effective, after all, we should expect to see a serious and difficult problem because if we don't see that, then why hasn't the left at all those levels we talked about earlier, grown dramatically in the last four decades? There have to be serious obstacles - we would have overcome trivial ones a long time ago. If you look and you don't see serious obstacles, you are not yet seeing well. So I agree with you, yes it's a vicious circle. And yes, that's the problem to overcome.

One thing to wonder is why does the right seem to do so much better?

The tea party is appealing to a considerable degree – not only, since they also appeal to racism and fear-mongering and so on - but to a considerable extent they also say look, your lives are a mess, there is pain and suffering and there are rich powerful people who are benefitting from this and we need to get together and take back our country. It's asking people to "Step outside of the norms," which we ask, too. So why do they do better?

Well, they do better partly because they have a lot of money, because they have a lot of resources, because when you align with them you do not look like you are from Neptune to everyone else – by joining them you only look odd to us. We think it's weird, but for the mainstream joining them you seem just angrier at something that everybody's angry at, because you're not taking the left stance, which is ridiculed. The nice thing about a vicious cycle, however, is that it can work both ways. Once you get going it can have the opposite effect. So once the tea party gets going, now there's some hope, some momentum, and so it grows.

The same thing with Egypt. They went from relatively little, to huge, very quickly. It's because they're overcoming a lack of hope. It isn't as if everybody all of a sudden became fantastically smart or fantastically more knowledgeable. They all knew what they thought of Mubarak ten weeks earlier, too. That isn't what happens. What happens is that hope rises, and the feeling of efficacy rises. People start to feel, if I go out on the streets of Cairo something may happen, we may win.

In contrast people here feel, if I go out on the streets in Washington, then I lose a day I may get hit, I may look like an idiot to my friends. I become more alienated. So why should I do that? It is easier for me to ridicule the people who do it than it is for me to endure the ridicule. So for a while a vicious circle of hopelessness is very hard to overcome.

But consider the Vietnam War era. Back then it was not a question of a lack of vision that bred hopelessness, a lack of generalized hope, it was that to be against the war was so discordant, was so different from the mainstream, so contrary to common sense belief in America, that that alone made you a pariah. So in the beginning there was a Catch-22, since you didn't have a movement, people had to go out and do the hard work of talking to an anti-war audience that was six people, two of whom were hecklers. That was the early days. But some years later, not too many years later, it became a movement that was sweeping the country. What happened was the assumptions, the beliefs were countered and overcome. That was a different task than we face now, because it is different beliefs at work.

GW: That actually gets me to my next question, which asks you to take a historical look back. How would you say has U.S. activism evolved in the last 50 years? If there was a surge of activism in the late 60's and early 70's, why did it collapse since then?

MA: First of all, why did it get going? People are going to say different things. There were certainly many factors, but the one I want to point to is that people got angry. Why did they get angry? They got angry because they discovered that everything was a lie. If you go back and look at the songs and the music, or you interview people who really were there, and are objective about it - that's what happened. People discovered they'd been tricked, hoodwinked. They discovered that it was all a lie, that it was all hypocrisy.

There were revelations about racism, about the war, about poverty, about sexism. In every case people were finding that some injustice that they sort of knew was there, was much worse than thought. So, for example, you might know that you were being abused by your husband, but you didn't know the number of people who were in that same position, and you didn't know that it was so pervasive, that that it wasn't just a bad guy you got stuck with, but something bigger, more systemic. You knew that there was racism, of course, but you didn't quite get the scale of it, and you didn't realize the extent to which it was, again, systemic. The war was another massive revelation that touched the whole society. You thought that the United States was a positive international actor, caring, freedom loving, but then you found out that the United States was a horrible international actor, that the United States was doing this horrendous stuff and you got pissed and that's when the youth movement just exploded in anger. Couple it with a rejection of the lifestyle of the times - and it added up to what is called the Sixties.

Now, the difference between then and now is that it's absolutely impossible to replicate that any longer. The reason it's impossible to do it in the same way is because nothing surprises anyone anymore. We were surprised, indeed shocked, by the revelations of injustice, back then. Now, in contrast, no matter what you reveal, the response is, "OK, uh huh, yeah, sure they do that, I get it." Everybody now knows, at some level, what we had to work incredibly hard in '67, '68, '69, '70, to get people to even notice. And when they realized, "Oh my God, this is horrible," they went berserk. But now, there is no revelation, they know, already.

Nowadays, that is, everybody knows the situation is horrible, at some deep level. You can see it all over popular culture. You can hear it at every dinner table. So movement can't happen the same way. There is nothing dramatic to reveal. What happened in the Sixties was that it got big, got angry, people thought they were going to change the world but it didn't turn out to be that easy. So after a while people started to get worn out, frustrated, started to have doubts about what they were doing, at least about changing society. In fact, much was changed. The war ended, tremendous gains were made in civil rights, around gender, even around poverty… Huge advances, but at the same time, very little structural lasting movement apparatus emerged. Getting back up to that big scale of mobilization and organization proved to be very difficult. The number of people who were involved in the no-nukes movement, about ten years later, or in Nicaragua or El Salvador, in the labor movement, in gender and race movements, these numbers were very high, but the difference was that people didn't have the anger, the spirit, or the inclination to want it all and to want it now, that characterized the Sixties. So it became movements that were trying to win important things, but at the same time as the people in those movements were trying to live their life normally. In the Sixties one was trying to win important things quickly, yes, but at the same time presuming that life was not going to go along in the way it was before. It was going to be fundamentally altered.

To get back to that transformative mentality, which leads to real solidarity and militancy, requires, nowadays, since we are now feeling that everything is hypocritical, that people come to know that everything is not just bad but grotesquely criminal and especially unnecessary because there is an alternative. As long as people think that there is no alternative, why should they get angry? You don't get angry at cancer or at aging – maybe a little bit, but you don't form a social movement about those things. When you don't think there is any alternative to the world as we know it, except perhaps in some small area where you can make some modest gain, mostly at the expense of someone else in some other area, then you don't work incredibly hard to create a type of movement seeking to change the whole society, because you think there is no such thing as changing the whole society. So, it's that absence of vision and associated hope that is a very big part or the difficulty, I think.

But then there are also some important structural things. For example, in the Sixties the campuses blew up and to a considerable extent it was initially at elite campuses. If you look at campus activism more recently, however, the elite campuses were largely quiet. It was working class colleges that were most involved. Why? Well, the system realized that it was a big mistake to give people a whole lot of resources and confidence at elite schools and not to be very careful to be sure that they would be compliant. So a lot was done in terms of raising fees for elite schools and making people indebted, and they did a pretty good job at that, when you see the relative quiescence at elite campuses, it was sought and attained. The downside is that in places where people have more access, more freedom to move, they don't move, so it's harder to get a youth movement going. However, the upside is, once it gets going it will be led by poorer students, by working class students, and so therefore it will be more substantial and more important to the future of the country.

Basically, the difference between now and the Sixties is that back then we could form a militant revolutionary movement that saw itself as being very aggressive, that saw itself as planning a new society, that became the focal point of the lives of its participants, but it really wasn't any of those things, in the end, because it had no lasting structures, it had no coherent ideology or vision for doing those things. Now, we have a situation where we can't even have a really big and militant and angry movement unless it really is a movement that wants to change the whole society and really believes in doing that. If that's true, then it means that the task for the U.S. left now is not to keep crying out about the injustice of particular things – not that we shouldn't do that somewhat – but the reason why that isn't as high a priority as before is because everybody knows the hundreds of specific reasons that things are bad. Speaking and writing about that is trying to convince people of something they already know. at least broadly. Even the right knows! It's just that people think the suffering is inevitable; it's a necessary evil, in their view.

The real task, instead, is to show that there is a different way of operating, and that here are short-term gains we can win now and here is a long-term changed circumstance that illuminates our problems and that is the end point of these endeavors and is worth our time. If we can convey that, vision and strategy, then we are conveying information that can sustain anger, commitment, and passion all in a rich diverse and broad movement that could make people's lives better and that could win gains and move on to change society. But without being able to convincingly and inspriationally communicate vision and strategy - if we only tell people this hurts, that hurts, this is unjust, that is unjust, then I think we won't get far.

GW: What does this mean in terms of concrete organizing? What would be the role of electoral politics, for example? What kind of organizing are you talking about?

MA: Whether one is moved by a revolutionary vision of a new society and a lifelong commitment to attain it, or just by being upset about a particular situation, one still organizes around wars, poverty, ecological calamities, continuing sexism and racism. So the focuses remain. The difference is in what you do.

One thing that is different when you organize around these things strategically in light of a long term vision is that you talk about them and make demands about them in ways that challenge the whole system, in ways that move forward people's commitments and thinking toward a broad attachment. You connect these different short-term aims. You have movements around each contribute to movements around the others. You fight for the short-run gains in ways that would be different than if you fought for them when all you have your eye on is the particular thing you are fighting about. The difference is how you talk about your short term aim, the kinds of ideas that emerge in the discussion and that lead to further demands and to keeping fighting instead of going home. That's how you build an organization that isn't oriented only to achieving one thing and then dissipating, but that is dedicated to bringing about a new society and that in winning something simply becomes stronger and more adept and more able to win more, rather than going home. That is all a little vague and would take a lot of time to give specific examples. It is a different mindset and a different approach.

Some people think that when you're fighting for X you should only talk about X, you should never talk about Y or Z. Their logic is, if you only care about getting X you should talk only about that one issue so you don't upset anybody. But what if you care about sustaining X once you get it, and what if you care about getting Y, W, and Z as well? Then the logic begins to falter and what you need to do is fight for X in a way that talks about X leading beyond that one issue. So you talk about higher wages, say, as the one issue, but while you are fighting for higher wages you talk about it in a way that that leads to an understanding of what a truly just income would be and that would lead to the next demands, to make income more just.

The second thing you do is you tie these things together and develop real solidarity. Let's say we had a national movement around a shorter workweek with no change in income for those at the low end. In other words, those with low incomes now work less but get the same income as before, despite working many fewer hours. And at the high end people work less too, but they get propostionately less income. So it's a redistribution of income from the top. If we are fighting for this campaign, which I think would be a fantastic campaign to fight for, not only because it redistributes income and prevents unemployment, but because it creates a situation in which it is easier to win more gains because people have more time – itself also a very, very important gain. But then I think you fight for it in a way that says what is actually really just is that people should be remunerated for how long they work, for how hard they work, and for the onerousness of their work. Not only should the poor be getting an increase, but they should be getting more than the people who have very cushy jobs. Do you still have strikes? Sure. Do still have rallies? Sure. You do all those things, however, with a criterion that in doing them you should attract more people, not less. With a criterion that you should make life in the movement better not worse for those who are in it. And also with a criterion that you should raise social costs to win the demands you are trying to win.

So then you ask, what is the role of electoral politics? Honestly, I have no idea. I don't think anybody does. The idea that there is a principled reason why it has no place on the left makes no sense to me. The idea that there is a principled reason why it should have a primary place also makes no sense to me. The question is whether electoral politics can be used now or in the future as part of a broad array of approaches that the left employs to win more and more gains, to win more and more power, to win more and more people, while becoming ever more capable of still more victories.

Some might think that we can use electoral politics in a way that will raise consciousness, that will give us access to resources and power strengthening our prospects, and that will lead to great changes in the long-run. Others might think, no, it's a dead end because the dynamics of electoral politics and the implications of seeking to win elections for our agendas and thinking are to diminish our abilities, to diminish our capacity to win changes, to distort our consciousness, to weaken our prospects.

The really big question isn't which view do you believe, but what do you do if two such views exist? I think the answer is, it doesn't make any sense to fight this out. The people who think electoral politics is a bad idea should be ecstatic if someone shows it to instead be a good idea. They should not think it's a bad idea and want to be right that it is a bad idea. They should think it's a bad idea want to be wrong because every good idea for change is beneficial for their agenda.

The people who think it's a good idea should hope that they are right but not feel that they cannot acknowledge being wrong. If they are wrong, they should feel grateful for finding it out, so that they can put their efforts to better means.

The minute we have these mindsets, actually, I think it is a single mindset that places success over ego, where the goal is to win and not to be right about a particular choice, then the idea of exploring more than one choice makes sense. Those who think it is important to use some approach should try it, even as others doubt it will help or even fear it will hurt. We can respect each other. The same thing goes for almost all tactical choices, but not all. Some tactical choices are so detrimental, so harmful, that a political organization would have to say not only that it is a bad idea, but that we cannot be involved in that and that no one involved in our organization should be involved in that. But that's not true for most decisions. I don't think these questions have to be resolved in advance for everyone, they just need to be resolved for some. We do not have to have unanimity, which is impossible and is not a good idea in any case because diversity is vastly better.

Suppose it was the case that we had a big movement in the United States. Suppose we have a 20,000 person revolutionary organization mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people. We aren't about to win tomorrow, but we are getting bigger. Suppose in the organization 80% think electoral politics is stupid and a distraction. Should they annihilate the 20% and have nobody do it? No, that's not the right answer. The 20% will not be good at something else if they really believe in electoral politics. You shouldn't have to duke it out. You discuss and debate, of course. But we are trying to create a new and better society and unless we are Stalinists, we don't think that there should be one approach to every issue in a whole society. So we shouldn't have one approach to every issue inside the movement either.

GW: You talked about the objectives of such an organization, but I would like to get a little bit more specific. For example, you said such an organization would have to be oriented around multiple issues embody a vision for new society. However, I'm wondering if there's any issue that stands out that would serve as a vehicle for elaborating that kind of vision. Is there any issue that is particularly pressing right now?

MA: In a particular moment in time one thing or another will be pressing. Suppose the nuclear power plant outside of New York City melts down tomorrow. That would be pressing and would be on everyone's mind in the country. Everybody would be paying attention to it. So any rational movement would pay very very close attention to it. But that's different than saying the movement should focus around one issue. Also, we don't know what that's going to be.

GW: But what do you think is a pressing issue right now?

MA: I don't think that there is one. There is what is happening in Wisconsin. It wasn't war, and it wasn't climate, it was some economic and political changes that would affect collective bargaining and it was powerful enough to yield one of the most important activist upsurges that we have seen in a long time. So someone could say, well, that is the issue. But others could say the war is the issue. After all, people are dying and we are blowing people up and certainly that motivates lots of people. Or climate change is the issue; after all, the future is at stake.

It is a dumb debate, I think. My feeling is, suppose you want to win on budgets, or on war, or on climate change, what does it mean? It means you want to win some gains now, and eventually you want to win a society that doesn't generate pursuit of profits, or war making, or a use of energy and an allocation of goods and resources that destroy the environment.

Suppose you want to organize around the economy and to change income distribution, or around foreign policy and to end war, or around nuclear power and to win green policies. In any of these things what you are trying to do is big. You are  trying to win something major that elites in power care a lot about. So you have to ask, why would they give in? On any issue that galvanizes lots of people over a longer period of time, you're going to be fighting about something that matters to elites, such as in the case of these issues. Otherwise they would give in right away. So why would they give in on something they don't want to give in on?

The answer is because the movement raises costs and creates a specter or threat, due to which they say to themselves, "If we don't give in, then this threat is going to grow and it's going to be more damaging to us than giving in is." That's the calculus that they use. If they give in to a budget movement, or antiwar movement, or global warming movement, it's because they feel that to not give in is going to hurt them more. And what hurts them enough to be more is a threat that the whole system will change.

When you get to the level of wars and the treatment of the whole ecology and income distribution, then elites have to feel that to persist with what we're seeking to end risks too much. What will convey that message to them?

If we turn out 100,000 people against a war in Washington, it's a cost but it's a relatively small cost because all they have to have to clean up the park. Even if we do it month after month, so? The demonstrations are only a real cost if there is the threat that the movement will get bigger and bigger. It is only threatening if it seems likely to change the mindset of the population and even more, if it threatens to address not just the war, but all of foreign-policy and beyond foreign-policy, domestic policy. If it threatens any of these things, in a growing way, it is raising the costs. But if it's just going to stand pat after 100,000 people or even 250,000 people, then it's no cost at all. The minute that it is not growing, the movement is no longer a cost, no longer a threat, because elites can just wait it out. The movement threat resides in growing numbers. The movement threat resides in growing relevance. And the movement threat resides in the growing diversity of demands.

Do the demands move from a particular focus toward changing the system? If they do, that's scary for elites. Same with the movement growing. In the Sixties the reason the antiwar movement was such a big threat was that a) it was growing and b) it included a spectrum from: against the war gently, to against the war moderately, to against the war militantly, to against foreign policy, to against the whole damn system. What you saw at each level was a growth of the broader level leading to growth of the more committed level as well. There was a continuing process, which in time said to the government, "You want to defend the war in Vietnam in order to enlarge your power and wealth and to maintain the system the way it is. What happens when the day comes when you realize the pursuit of this war, while it is in your interest in the sense of holding back change in Indochina, is not in your interest in the sense that it is polarizing and organizing the U.S. population in such a way that pretty soon they will be challenging your wealth and power across the board."

If you go back and look at the point at which elites started changing sides on the war, such as senators and business leaders, you see that they said not that it's immoral and our people are dying. No. They said, "Our streets are in turmoil and we are losing the next generation, society's fabric is being torn asunder." In other words, they were saying, "I got into this war in order to increase my wealth and power, but now it seems that if we continue to pursue the war it will risk my wealth and power even more than giving in to the demands to end it, so now I'm against the war."

So to come back to your point, suppose there is that meltdown or the war on Libya expands and gets much, much, bigger, or states across the country are doing what the governor of Wisconsin did, and it becomes a focal point. Or even there is a big ecological calamity. What I am saying is to win any one of them, it is incredibly advantageous that all of them are being sought. For example, that's why Seattle worried elites a lot. Honestly, it wasn't all that big. But the threat was that it was not just about globalization. It carried the threat of the labor movement, the green movement, the antiwar movement, the women's movement, everyone working together. So many in the elite sectors felt, "Our policies are creating the mess that we are trying to avoid." That was the threat. So sure, if there is a focus that attracts everybody's attention, okay, by all means, addressed sensibly, that can help us, but to get caught up in one focus, to make the mistake of thinking that everything should be geared to that one focus and we should set aside everything else, misses the point of how you win even short-term, much less long-term gains.

This is the first of a series of interviews on the state of the U.S. left. You can find this and more at zcommunications.

Rural American Progressive

In Unity is Strength

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Fundamentalism Kills

Tuesday 26 July 2011

by: Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed

The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik.

This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas.

The battle under way in America is not between religion and science. It is not between those who embrace the rational and those who believe in biblical myth. It is not between Western civilization and Islam. The blustering televangelists and the New Atheists, the television pundits and our vaunted Middle East specialists and experts, are all part of our vast, simplistic culture of mindless entertainment. They are in show business. They cannot afford complexity. Religion and science, facts and lies, truth and fiction, are the least of their concerns. They trade insults and clichés like cartoon characters. They don masks. One wears the mask of religion. One wears the mask of science. One wears the mask of journalism. One wears the mask of the terrorism expert. They jab back and forth in predictable sound bites. It is a sterile and useless debate between bizarre subsets of American culture. Some use the scientific theory of evolution to explain the behavior and rules for complex social and political systems, and others insist that the six-day creation story in Genesis is a factual account. The danger we face is not in the quarrel between religion advocates and evolution advocates, but in the widespread mental habit of fundamentalism itself.

We live in a fundamentalist culture. Our utopian visions of inevitable human progress, obsession with endless consumption, and fetish for power and unlimited growth are fed by illusions that are as dangerous as fantasies about the Second Coming. These beliefs are the newest expression of the infatuation with the apocalypse, one first articulated to Western culture by the early church. This apocalyptic vision was as central to the murderous beliefs of the French Jacobins, the Russian Bolsheviks and the German fascists as it was to the early Christians. The historian Arnold Toynbee argues that racism in Anglo-American culture was given a special virulence after the publication of the King James Bible. The concept of "the chosen people" was quickly adopted, he wrote, by British and American imperialists. It fed the disease of white supremacy. It gave them the moral sanction to dominate and destroy other races, from the Native Americans to those on the subcontinent.

Our secular and religious fundamentalists come out of this twisted yearning for the apocalypse and belief in the "chosen people." They advocate, in the language of religion and scientific rationalism, the divine right of our domination, the clash of civilizations. They assure us that we are headed into the broad, uplifting world of universal democracy and a global free market once we sign on for the subjugation and extermination of those who oppose us. They insist—as the fascists and the communists did—that this call for a new world is based on reason, factual evidence and science or divine will. But schemes for universal human advancement, no matter what language is used to justify them, are always mythic. They are designed to satisfy a yearning for meaning and purpose. They give the proponents of these myths the status of soothsayers and prophets. And, when acted upon, they fill the Earth with mass graves, bombed cities, widespread misery and penal colonies. The extent of this fundamentalism is evident in the strident utterances of the Christian right as well as those of the so-called New Atheists.

"What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?" Sam Harris, in his book "The End of Faith," asks in a passage that I suspect Breivik would have enjoyed. "If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe."

"We are at war with Islam," Harris goes on. "It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been 'hijacked' by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and teachings of the Prophet."

Harris assures us that "the Koran mandates such hatred," that "the problem is with Islam itself." He writes that "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death."

A culture that exalts its own moral certitude and engages in uncritical self-worship at the expense of conscience commits moral and finally physical suicide. Our fundamentalists busy themselves with their pathetic little monuments to Jesus, to reason, to science, to Western civilization and to new imperial glory. They peddle a binary view of the world that divides reality between black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. We are taught in a fundamentalist culture to view other human beings, especially Muslims, not as ends but as means. We abrogate the right to exterminate all who do not conform.

Fundamentalists have no interest in history, culture or social or linguistic differences. They are a remarkably uncurious, self-satisfied group. Anything outside their own narrow bourgeois life, petty concerns and physical comforts bores them. They are provincials. They do not investigate or seek to understand the endemic flaws in human nature. The only thing that matters is the coming salvation of humanity, or at least that segment of humanity they deem worthy of salvation. They peddle a route to assured collective deliverance. And they sanction violence and the physical extermination of other human beings to get there.

All fundamentalists worship the same gods—themselves. They worship the future prospect of their own empowerment. They view this empowerment as a necessity for the advancement and protection of civilization or the Christian state. They sanctify the nation. They hold up the ability the industrial state has handed to them as a group and as individuals to shape the world according to their vision as evidence of their own superiority. Fundamentalists express the frustrations of a myopic and morally stunted middle class. They cling, under their religious or scientific veneer, to the worst values of the petite bourgeois. They are suburban mutations, products of an American landscape that has been perverted by a destruction of community and a long and successful war against complex thought. The self-absorbed worldview of these fundamentalists brings smiles of indulgence from the corporatists who profit, at our expense, from the obliteration of moral and intellectual inquiry.

Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's "Ulysses" acidly condemned all schemes to purify the world and serve human progress through violence. He said that "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Dedalus in the same passage responded to the schoolmaster Deasy's claim that "the ways of the Creator are not our ways," and that "all history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God." A soccer goal is jubilantly scored by boys in the yard outside the school window as Deasy expounds on divine will. God, Dedalus tells Deasy as the players yell in glee over the goal, is no more than the screams from the schoolyard —"a shout in the street." Joyce, like Samuel Beckett, excoriated the Western belief in historical teleology—the notion that history has a purpose or is moving toward a goal. The absurdity of this belief, they wrote, always feeds fanatics and undermines the possibility of human community. These writers warned us about all those—religious and secular—who call for salvation through history.

There are tens of millions of Americans who in their desperation and insecurity yearn for the assurance and empowerment offered by a clearly defined war against an external evil. They are taught in our fundamentalist culture that this evil is the root of their misery. They embrace a war against this evil as a solution to the drift in their lives, their economic deprivation and the moral and economic morass of the nation. They see in this conflict with these dark forces a way to overcome their own alienation. They find in it certitude, meaning and structure. They believe that once this evil is vanquished, an evil that extends from Muslims to undocumented workers, liberals, intellectuals, homosexuals and feminists, they can transform America into a land of plenty and virtue. But this fundamentalism, which cloaks itself in the jargon of scientific rationality, Christian piety and nativism, is a recipe for fanaticism. All those who embrace other ways of being and believing are viewed, as Breivik apparently viewed his victims, as contaminates that must be eliminated.

This fundamentalist ideology, because it is contradictory and filled with myth, is immune to critiques based on reason, fact and logic. This is part of its appeal. It obliterates doubt, nuance, intellectual and scientific rigor and moral conscience. All has been predicted or decided. Life is reduced to following a simple black-and-white road map. The contradictions in these belief systems—for example the championing of the "rights of the unborn" while calling for wider use of the death penalty or the damning of Muslim terrorists while promoting pre-emptive war, which delivers more death and misery in the Middle East than any jihadist organization—inoculate followers from rational discourse. Life becomes a crusade.

All fundamentalists, religious and secular, are ignoramuses. They follow the lines of least resistance. They already know what is true and what is untrue. They do not need to challenge their own beliefs or investigate the beliefs of others. They do not need to bother with the hard and laborious work of religious, linguistic, historical and cultural understanding. They do not need to engage in self-criticism or self-reflection. It spoils the game. It ruins the entertainment. They see all people, and especially themselves, as clearly and starkly defined. The world is divided into those who embrace or reject their belief systems. Those who support these belief systems are good and forces for human progress. Those who oppose these belief systems are stupid, at best, and usually evil. Fundamentalists have no interest in real debate, real dialogue, real intellectual thought. Fundamentalism, at its core, is about self-worship. It is about feeling holier, smarter and more powerful than everyone else. And this comes directly out of the sickness of our advertising age and its exaltation of the cult of the self. It is a product of our deep and unreflective cultural narcissism.

Our faith in the inevitability of human progress constitutes an inability to grasp the tragic nature of history. Human history is one of constant conflict between the will to power and the will to nurture and protect life. Our greatest achievements are always intertwined with our greatest failures. Our most exalted accomplishments are always coupled with our most egregious barbarities. Science and industry serve as instruments of progress as well as instruments of destruction. The Industrial Age has provided feats of engineering and technology, yet it has also destroyed community, spread the plague of urbanization, uprooted us all, turned human beings into cogs and made possible the total war and wholesale industrial killing that has marked the last century. These technologies, even as we see them as our salvation, are rapidly destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life.

There is no linear movement in history. Morality and ethics are static. Human nature does not change. Barbarism is part of the human condition and we can all succumb to its basest dimensions. This is the tragedy of history. Human will is morally ambiguous. The freedom to act as often results in the construction of new prisons and systems of repression as it does the safeguarding of universal human rights. The competing forces of love and of power define us, what Sigmund Freud termed Eros and Thanatos. Societies have, throughout history, ignored calls for altruism and mutuality in times of social upheaval and turmoil. They have wasted their freedom in the self-destructive urges that currently envelope us. These urges are very human and very dangerous. They are fired by utopian visions of inevitable human progress. When this progress stalls or is reversed, when the dreams of advancement and financial stability are thwarted, when a people confronts its own inevitable downward spiral, dark forces of vengeance and retribution are unleashed. Fundamentalists serve an evil that is unseen and unexamined. And the longer this evil is ignored the more dangerous and deadly it becomes. Those who seek through violence the Garden of Eden usher in the apocalypse.

Chris Hedges is a weekly Truthdig columnist and a fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is "The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress."

FBI rules changes provoke Senate inquiry

The FBI plans to issue new rules broadening the discretion of its 14,000 field agents over matters of individual privacy, and, while the legality of such a move hasn't been called into question, it has raised questions and concerns on the part of civil libertarians and some lawmakers alike.

The new rules are to be made public when the Bureau releases an update of its Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, which outlines policies on how agents are to conduct investigations. The current version was published in 2008.

The law enforcement agency sees the changes as minor, but the American Civil Liberties Union disagrees. "The FBI claims that this update to the guidelines is a mere tweak," wrote the ACLU's Amanda Simon on the organization's blog. "Somehow that sounds like an incredible understatement."

Simon said that the current guidelines are already bad: "[T]here is a dangerously low threshold for beginning an investigation or conducting surveillance about individuals or groups who are not suspected of any criminal activity," she wrote. "The guidelines in place now also allow the FBI to collect, analyze and map racial and ethnic data about local communities, which also opens up a whole other can of worms - namely, the possibility that the FBI is engaging in unconstitutional racial profiling."

Some are troubled that the rules changes come in the context of a recent Chicago FBI raid of anti-war groups and their supporters that received that condemnation of many, including the local Sun-Times.

Sens. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, respectively chair and ranking member of the Senate's judiciary committee, agreed that the matter was worth more consideration. They sent a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller requesting that "that the FBI provide a briefing to Committee staff to discuss the proposed changes and provide an opportunity to review the final version of [the new FBI rules manual] before it is implemented" and "that once [the manual] is finalized, a public version be released and made available on the FBI's website."

The New York Times, which broke the news, was also extremely critical. "The Obama administration has long been bumbling along in the footsteps of its predecessor when it comes to sacrificing Americans' basic rights and liberties under the false flag of fighting terrorism," the editorial read. "Now the Obama team seems ready to lurch even farther down that dismal road than George W. Bush did."

The proposed new guidelines, as reported by the Times, would contain several changes that give agents greater discretion in investigations.

Included in the changes:

Agents will be able to freely conduct searches of people and organizations in law enforcement and commercial databases. They currently have the right to do this, but now they won't need to make a record.

There are secret rules on the books governing how agents must operate when they infiltrate religious or other organizations, but now they will be able to attend five meetings of such a group before they must follow these rules.

In the lowest level investigations, or assessments, officials will be able to use lie-detector tests on informants as well as suspected perpetrators.

Agents will be able to search the trash of anyone involved in an assessment, which requires no documentation of suspected wrongdoing.

Agents will not need special oversight to investigate some public officials, "low-profile" bloggers and scholars employed by foreign institutions.

On the other hand, the FBI is tightening up regulations of some activities, including policies on who has authority to approve covert participation in religious ceremonies.

Address : http://peoplesworld.org/fbi-rules-changes-provoke-senate-inquiry/

Investigate FCC Commissioner Baker's clear conflict of interest.

Republican FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker is leaving the FCC to
become a lobbyist for Comcast/NBC Universal -- just four months after
she voted to approve the controversial merger of the two media behemoths.

We need to stop the revolving door of public servants leaving their
government role and cashing in by joining companies they were supposed
to be regulating.

I just signed a petition telling congress to launch an investigation of
the FCC Commissioner's seemingly blatant conflict of interest. You can
too, through the link below:

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/fcc_baker/?r_by=20926-2728311-eyIYEyx&rc=mailto1

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