Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand
by Chris Hedges
Truthdig
The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.
The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Workers in this country paid for their rights by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targeted assassinations of union leaders and armed battles with hired gun thugs and state militias. The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies and the Morgans—the Koch Brothers Industries, Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart of their day—never gave a damn about workers. All they cared about was profit. The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid vacations, retirement benefits and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation. They rallied around radicals such as “Mother” Jones, United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis and “Big” Bill Haywood and his Wobblies as well as the socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.
Lewis said, “I have pleaded your case from the pulpit and from the public platform—not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.”
Those who fought to achieve these rights endured tremendous suffering, pain and deprivation. It is they who made possible our middle class and opened up our democracy. The elite hired goons and criminal militias to evict striking miners from company houses, infiltrate fledgling union organizations and murder suspected union leaders and sympathizers. Federal marshals, state militias, sheriff’s deputies and at times Army troops, along with the courts and legislative bodies, were repeatedly used to crush and stymie worker revolts. Striking sugar cane workers were gunned down in Thibodaux, La., in 1887. Steel workers were shot to death in 1892 in Homestead, Pa. Railroad workers in the Pullman strike of 1894 were murdered. Coal miners at Ludlow, Colo., in 1914 and at Matewan, W.Va., in 1920 were massacred. Our freedoms and rights were paid for with their courage and blood.
American democracy arose because those consciously locked out of the system put their bodies on the line and demanded justice. The exclusion of the poor and the working class from the systems of power in this country was deliberate. The Founding Fathers deeply feared popular democracy. They rigged the system to favor the elite from the start, something that has been largely whitewashed in public schools and by a corporate media that has effectively substituted myth for history. Europe’s poor, fleeing to America from squalid slums and workhouses in the 17th and 18th centuries, were viewed by the privileged as commodities to exploit. Slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants, women, and men without property were not represented at the Constitutional Conventions. And American history, as Howard Zinn illustrated in “The People’s History of the United States,” is one long fight by the marginalized and disenfranchised for dignity and freedom. Those who fought understood the innate cruelty of capitalism.
“When you sell your product, you retain your person,” said a tract published in the 1880s during the Lowell, Mass., mill strikes. “But when you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress. Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism.”
As Noam Chomsky points out, the sentiment expressed by the Lowell millworkers predated Marxism.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Showing posts with label Liberals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberals. Show all posts
Monday, March 14, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
Uprising Radio: Hedges, Shiva, and Scheer on Liberalism, Economy, and Corporate Domination
Hedges, Shiva, and Scheer on Liberalism, Economy, and Corporate Domination
Uprising Radio (Los Angeles: KPFK/Pacifica Radio)
Veteran journalist and author Chris Hedges says in his latest book, The Death of the Liberal Class, that American liberalism is dying. Surveying the current political state of affairs, Hedges makes the case that progressive institutions that have largely represented the interests of the poor, the working class, and the middle class— such as universities, the press, trade unions and the liberal Church—are being dismantled. Hedges makes the analogy with Tsarist Russia, Germany and Yugoslavia as he points out the enormous consequences that the fall of the middle class could have on the rest of American society. Chris Hedges spoke just 6 days ago about his new book at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in New York.
Chris Hedges is a columnist for Truthdig.com, and spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
* * *
Vandana Shiva, environmental activist, physicist, author, and founder of Navdanya. Her books include Water Wars; Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, Earth Democracy; Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, and her latest, Soil Not Oil. A winner of the Right Livlihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize, Vandana Shiva is one of the most well known international advocate for the protection of our commons. She spoke recently at a fundraiser for Navdanya here in Los Angeles.
Shiva participated in the nonviolent Chipko movement during the 1970s. The movement, some of whose main participants were women, adopted the approach of forming human circles around trees to prevent their felling. She is one of the leaders of the International Forum on Globalization. She is featured in the documentaries, The Corporation, Dirt! The Movie, and FLOW: For the Love of Water.
* * *
In his new book, The Great American Stickup, author, journalist, and political watchdog Robert Scheer untangles the history of political maneuvering and financial deregulation that led to the financial crash. Scheer does not spare Former President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama, or the media from blame. The book is an entertaining history and astute analysis of the free-market frenzy and lazy regulatory response that resulted in what Scheer calls “The Great American Stickup.”
Robert Scheer is founder and editor-in-chief of the progressive online news site Truthdig.com. His column is nationally syndicated in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle and The Nation. He is a professor of communications at the University of Southern California. His earlier books include Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton – and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush, and The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. Scheer’s latest book, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street was published on September 7 of this year. Robert Scheer worked for the LA Times for 17 years, but was let go by the paper in 2005 and replaced with rightwing journalists, Joel Stein and Jonah Goldberg.
To Listen to the Episode
Uprising Radio (Los Angeles: KPFK/Pacifica Radio)
Veteran journalist and author Chris Hedges says in his latest book, The Death of the Liberal Class, that American liberalism is dying. Surveying the current political state of affairs, Hedges makes the case that progressive institutions that have largely represented the interests of the poor, the working class, and the middle class— such as universities, the press, trade unions and the liberal Church—are being dismantled. Hedges makes the analogy with Tsarist Russia, Germany and Yugoslavia as he points out the enormous consequences that the fall of the middle class could have on the rest of American society. Chris Hedges spoke just 6 days ago about his new book at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in New York.
Chris Hedges is a columnist for Truthdig.com, and spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
* * *
Vandana Shiva, environmental activist, physicist, author, and founder of Navdanya. Her books include Water Wars; Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, Earth Democracy; Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, and her latest, Soil Not Oil. A winner of the Right Livlihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize, Vandana Shiva is one of the most well known international advocate for the protection of our commons. She spoke recently at a fundraiser for Navdanya here in Los Angeles.
Shiva participated in the nonviolent Chipko movement during the 1970s. The movement, some of whose main participants were women, adopted the approach of forming human circles around trees to prevent their felling. She is one of the leaders of the International Forum on Globalization. She is featured in the documentaries, The Corporation, Dirt! The Movie, and FLOW: For the Love of Water.
* * *
In his new book, The Great American Stickup, author, journalist, and political watchdog Robert Scheer untangles the history of political maneuvering and financial deregulation that led to the financial crash. Scheer does not spare Former President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama, or the media from blame. The book is an entertaining history and astute analysis of the free-market frenzy and lazy regulatory response that resulted in what Scheer calls “The Great American Stickup.”
Robert Scheer is founder and editor-in-chief of the progressive online news site Truthdig.com. His column is nationally syndicated in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle and The Nation. He is a professor of communications at the University of Southern California. His earlier books include Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton – and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush, and The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. Scheer’s latest book, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street was published on September 7 of this year. Robert Scheer worked for the LA Times for 17 years, but was let go by the paper in 2005 and replaced with rightwing journalists, Joel Stein and Jonah Goldberg.
To Listen to the Episode
Saturday, January 08, 2011
Sunday, April 04, 2010
E. McCarson: Media is Propaganda!
Media is Propaganda!
by E. McCarson
Indypendent Reader (Baltimore)
Even before the spike in popularity of online news sites, blogs, Facebook, and other social networking tools, print media in this country was already in a state of crisis, despite the fact that the prevalence of major newspapers and magazines might have indicated otherwise. While print media (newspapers in particular) seem to be slightly more substantive than television, even before the “crisis” the media was overwhelmingly narrow, limited in scope, monolithic in perspective, hollow, and dangerously propagandistic. In other words, it doesn’t much matter to most Americans (or independent journalists, for that matter) that corporate-funded print media is declining since it was mostly propaganda anyway.1
“Propaganda for whom?” you might ask. It should come as no surprise that corporate-funded media acts as propaganda for the continued existence and dominance of corporations, in the form of pro-State and pro-industrial-economy premises. No matter how varied the articles are, nor how many of them “expose” City Hall, the aggregate message of every major newspaper and magazine is that whatever helps the industrial economy is good and whatever doesn’t is bad. Even “liberal” newspapers start with the premise that the State should exist, especially in its current late-capitalist form, and that all arguments should be concerned with how to make the economy “grow.” All arguments about whether or not the economy should grow, or whether it should even exist at all, are either omitted or roundly rejected.
Furthermore, this slant holds true not just for editorial sections of newspapers and magazines but for their entire content. In fact, the propaganda is even heavier in the “news” sections because in these sections the premises are more covert. The primary goal of truly effective propaganda, it must be pointed out, is not to hit people over the head with messages, but rather to slip them by in the form of hidden premises that people come to take for granted as true.
Think about every article about the police that you've ever read in a major newspaper. The article may include views that question the actions of the police department in a certain community, or the tactics of a particular officer in one situation or another, but the underlying premise is always that the police department should exist, and should enforce certain laws, and should be involved in every community, everywhere. Thus, even a question such as “What kind of policing is working best to lower Baltimore’s homicide rate?” contains the following hidden premises: one, the police department should exist; two, the police department is the only entity that can lower the homicide rate; three, the police department has been responsible for lowering the homicide rate in the past; and four, people in power want the homicide rate to decrease.2
By hiding these premises as givens, the editors of major papers and magazines are allowed to shape the framework so that even when allowing for so-called “dissent,” the same pro-State, pro-economy message resounds. The more variance the opinions have while still remaining in this box, the more effective the propaganda becomes. The goal of the propagandist is to have the receiver perceive choice—to have her perceive that a wide range of topics is being covered—while she eventually comes to adopt the major premises, hidden in all of the “varied” topics as givens.
Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister for the Third Reich, understood completely the use of subtlety to indoctrinate a mass of people with ideological messages. He disliked the portrayal of Hitler in movies, for example, because he thought the glorification of the führer was too obvious and blunt. His preferred tactic was to bury premises in lighter, more entertaining, more seemingly “moderate” scenes and situations. He justified this technique to other members of the Nazi high command by insisting that “even entertainment can be politically of special value, because the moment a person is conscious of propaganda, propaganda becomes ineffective. However, as soon as propaganda as a tendency, as an attitude, remains in the background … then propaganda becomes effective in every respect.”3
Goebbels also believed that propaganda should, when possible, reinforce what people already think so that the messages seem natural or self-evident to the viewer.
To Read the Rest of the Essay and See Examples of Media Headlines
by E. McCarson
Indypendent Reader (Baltimore)
Even before the spike in popularity of online news sites, blogs, Facebook, and other social networking tools, print media in this country was already in a state of crisis, despite the fact that the prevalence of major newspapers and magazines might have indicated otherwise. While print media (newspapers in particular) seem to be slightly more substantive than television, even before the “crisis” the media was overwhelmingly narrow, limited in scope, monolithic in perspective, hollow, and dangerously propagandistic. In other words, it doesn’t much matter to most Americans (or independent journalists, for that matter) that corporate-funded print media is declining since it was mostly propaganda anyway.1
“Propaganda for whom?” you might ask. It should come as no surprise that corporate-funded media acts as propaganda for the continued existence and dominance of corporations, in the form of pro-State and pro-industrial-economy premises. No matter how varied the articles are, nor how many of them “expose” City Hall, the aggregate message of every major newspaper and magazine is that whatever helps the industrial economy is good and whatever doesn’t is bad. Even “liberal” newspapers start with the premise that the State should exist, especially in its current late-capitalist form, and that all arguments should be concerned with how to make the economy “grow.” All arguments about whether or not the economy should grow, or whether it should even exist at all, are either omitted or roundly rejected.
Furthermore, this slant holds true not just for editorial sections of newspapers and magazines but for their entire content. In fact, the propaganda is even heavier in the “news” sections because in these sections the premises are more covert. The primary goal of truly effective propaganda, it must be pointed out, is not to hit people over the head with messages, but rather to slip them by in the form of hidden premises that people come to take for granted as true.
Think about every article about the police that you've ever read in a major newspaper. The article may include views that question the actions of the police department in a certain community, or the tactics of a particular officer in one situation or another, but the underlying premise is always that the police department should exist, and should enforce certain laws, and should be involved in every community, everywhere. Thus, even a question such as “What kind of policing is working best to lower Baltimore’s homicide rate?” contains the following hidden premises: one, the police department should exist; two, the police department is the only entity that can lower the homicide rate; three, the police department has been responsible for lowering the homicide rate in the past; and four, people in power want the homicide rate to decrease.2
By hiding these premises as givens, the editors of major papers and magazines are allowed to shape the framework so that even when allowing for so-called “dissent,” the same pro-State, pro-economy message resounds. The more variance the opinions have while still remaining in this box, the more effective the propaganda becomes. The goal of the propagandist is to have the receiver perceive choice—to have her perceive that a wide range of topics is being covered—while she eventually comes to adopt the major premises, hidden in all of the “varied” topics as givens.
Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister for the Third Reich, understood completely the use of subtlety to indoctrinate a mass of people with ideological messages. He disliked the portrayal of Hitler in movies, for example, because he thought the glorification of the führer was too obvious and blunt. His preferred tactic was to bury premises in lighter, more entertaining, more seemingly “moderate” scenes and situations. He justified this technique to other members of the Nazi high command by insisting that “even entertainment can be politically of special value, because the moment a person is conscious of propaganda, propaganda becomes ineffective. However, as soon as propaganda as a tendency, as an attitude, remains in the background … then propaganda becomes effective in every respect.”3
Goebbels also believed that propaganda should, when possible, reinforce what people already think so that the messages seem natural or self-evident to the viewer.
To Read the Rest of the Essay and See Examples of Media Headlines
Monday, February 22, 2010
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Chris Hedges: Liberals are Useless
Liberals Are Useless
by Chris Hedges
TruthDig
Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.
I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.
“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”
I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.
Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Chris Hedges
TruthDig
Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.
I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.
“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”
I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.
Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
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