Occupy’s Second Coming – by Jack Johnson

The great writers of the nineteenth century had neither religion nor politics nor aesthetic principles in common. But what they did have in common was a climate of ethical judgment, a moral climate. They shared certain values, they were humanist. If you read a nineteenth century novel today, Dostoevsky or Dreiser, Dickens or Twain, it is recognizable as a novel from the 19th century because of this moral climate. The core question that is asked is not are the characters successful or witty, but are they right? Writers of that period saw the individual struggling to find the correct balance between their independence and individual beliefs and the needs of the collective. There are only a handful of 20th century writers that have carried on this discourse and too many of them are given over to despair. The post-modernists of the 70s and 80s saw almost any political action as futile, compromised, or something of a joke. Some –too many –took ironic delight in pointing out the obvious difficulties. And rather than enlighten, they left one feeling bleak and hopeless. Meanwhile, in the real world, small wars and large wars continued. Corporations were stripped of their essential community based purpose, and instead were turned into the raw machines of profit. Yet, despite this sea change, our writers seemed stuck in a kind of identity crisis, a second gear, neither willing or able to tackle political issues of the day. Our popular culture essentially gave up on political man. News shows only pretended to objectively cover politics, and then only covered scandal. People forgot what it was to be politically or ethically engaged. During this same period, roughly from the late 1970s to 2012, our industrial base was eviscerated, our addiction to oil became deadly, and the American middle class saw their healthcare costs sky-rocket, their pensions raided, and their educational institutions privatized for the profit of a few. None of this is a coincidence.

As Christopher Hedges points out, “We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.”

Hedges goes on to note that what fosters revolution is not misery, alone, but the gap between what people expect from their lives and what is offered. As if in response to this syllogism, on September 17th of last year, activists and students descended on Wall Street and said, essentially, the gig is up. The scam must stop. The financialization of the world is killing our Earth. The Occupy Wall Street crowd did not operate in a vacuum. They were following The Arab Spring and the European Indignados. In fact, Spaniards from Puerta del Sol marched with us on Wall Street in those beginning days. And, on cue, it would seem, the Indignados in Spain have returned. They have reoccupied the Puerta del Sol as part of a global day of action to commemorate the first anniversary of the 15-M (May 15) movement. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards amassed in the square, some dancing joyfully, others debating the replacements for capitalism. According to an article on roarmag.org, a message circulating on Twitter yesterday perfectly caught the mood in Madrid:

“This is not an anniversary — it’s a tradition!”

In a few more months, the United States will have its own anniversary. In advance of that, Noam Chomsky, MIT linguist and political activist, outlines the reasons Occupy should make a come back, and, seeing the challenges ahead, he offers a warning as well:” Unless the spirit of the last year continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high. “

Read more below…

Chomsky: Do We Have the Makings of a Real Revolution?

National Teacher Appreciation Week – Last Call

Today is the last day of Teacher Appreciation Week for 2012, but it shouldn’t end. Our teachers earn appreciation from the American people every day. Collectively, they shape our nation and the world, preparing us for every crisis on earth. Individually, they do everything from wiping runny noses and spending their own money on school supplies, to forfeiting more gainful careers for a life of helping the rest of us improve ourselves. I think there is no calling more noble or worthy of our constant praise than that which falls to the devoted teachers who enrich our lives – all year, every year – in every imaginable way.

In recent years, with the help of  ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, our school system has been under attack like never before in our country. So much blame has been placed on our hard-working, dedicated educators it is ridiculous. It comes from misinformation and faulty logic, and it’s just as wrong as saying all parents are to blame for failures in the school system, so we need to demonize parenting.

To honor our teachers this year, take a close look at what’s really happening with education.

Why Isn’t Closing 40 Philadelphia Public Schools National News?

So the carving up of Philadelphia public schools IS a national story. It’s just one that corporate media won’t tell. Not in Philly, not in LA, not in Kansas City or anywhere, for fear that ordinary people might try to write themselves into a leading role. Polls show that the American people don’t want their schools privatized, and don’t believe education should be run by business people like a business. People want to take the money we spend on wars and bailouts and use it on education. Telling the story might give people the notion that the ultimate power is in their hands, not of mayors and chambers of commerce or the so-called “CEOs” of school system. It’s time that story was told, and more of us heard it.

Changing the way we educate America’s students is a priority for three groups – parents, educators and corporatist-neoliberals. And the legislation to change our system is being pushed through by the wrong group – the ones who want to implement their corporate control fantasies. Every benefit of a school system that actually educates the people flies in the face of their profit-driven goals.

They’ve done their best to ruin our schools through neglect, defunding, the demonization of good teachers and by eliminating the protections that allow them to keep teaching. So much disinformation has been spread about it that many good-hearted American parents can only see their children as the “trees”, and are helping to burn down the forest for every American student to come.

Privatization, vouchers, choice, corporate scholarships, internet education – it’s all about neoliberals deconstructing the public good. They want it; they want to control it; they want to sell it; and eventually, they will decide who is entitled to it. What they’re doing is typical: 1) break it 2) get paid to privatize and rebuild it 3) and then funnel the money up to the top. It’s always the same pattern for these people. You can see it in everything they do.

What Matt Taibbi so aptly said about Goldman Sachs applies to neoliberalism in general: It’s “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

We’re turning the education of America’s children over to the same group – the likes of Goldman Sachs – who destroyed our economy with impunity. They’ve already come so far with higher education that extreme personal indebtedness now stunts the beginning of independent life for most students who graduate from college. And typically, they pushed through legislation to remove all the reasonable American protections against bankruptcy and credit abusers for these same students.

Will a Young Generation’s Dreams Be Rescued – Or Bundled and Sold On Wall Street?
Jobless or overextended college graduates aren’t even allowed to declare bankruptcy – a privilege that’s extended to every reckless investor and mismanaged corporation in the nation. Once they finally find work, college graduates face years of garnished wages to repay the loans that funded their often-overpriced educations. If they haven’t repaid that debt by the time they grow old – a very real possibility at the cost of a college education today – they’ll even be forced to surrender part of their Social Security benefits.

That’s indentured servitude.

Meanwhile banks have been slicing and dicing student loans into derivative financial instruments called “SLABS” – student-loan asset backed securities. We’ve seen this movie before – the one where big banks mass-market loans to a population with stagnated wages and dwindling economic prospects, then bundle them and sell them to investors who haven’t reviewed the way they were underwritten and sold.

SLABS for Wall Street investors are a big red flag waving in our faces. And when they jack up the interest and cut the grants while increasing the salaries of college presidents, it’s neoliberalism and it’s not going to end well for the American people.

As neoliberals find it reasonable to cut food money from hungry people – which is what they are doing now, how long will it be before they refuse tuition loans to anyone who might be a financial risk? This brand of corporate interference is what has happened to healthcare, the Post Office, the prison system – and everything else their blood funnels have jammed into … and it’s a long list. It always starts with “breaking” something they want to take from the public good to be controlled by corporate players for maximum profit.

While America still has the finest educators in the world, why aren’t we listening to their advice about the needed changes for our education system? This opinion by Chris Hedges from last year is the best answer I’ve found to that question. Please read it. Our teachers have earned and deserve America’s wholehearted protection in the fight for better education, last week, next week, every week … they simply are not the culprits.

Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

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Off topic, here, but to drive the point home, consider another recent and shocking example of planned privatization. Last year, the Chief Economist at Citigroup, Willem Buiter, announced a similar neoliberal vision for our drinking water!

“I expect to see a globally integrated market for fresh water within 25 to 30 years. Once the spot markets for water are integrated, futures markets and other derivative water-based financial instruments—puts, calls, swaps—both exchange-traded and OTC will follow. There will be different grades and types of fresh water, just the way we have light sweet and heavy sour crude oil today. Water as an asset class will, in my view, become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals.”

Chris Saladino: “This only has the worst possible outcomes. The attempts at water privatization have so far created far more problems than solutions and in most cases have actually failed. To make it worse, this kind of corporate intervention in yet another essential component of human survival has been just as unfairly dominated as food, health care, and energy.

The Cochabamba riots in Bolivia are a telling and frightening case study. The police actually arrested people for illegally collecting rain water. It’s just a bit too much like the fear of Jack T. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove…”
Water Privatization Case Study:
Cochabamba, Bolivia (pdf)

We thank our new APV member, Chris Saladino, Professor of International Studies at VCU, for commenting on the privatization of fresh water and look forward to more of his contributions in the future!
DCKennedy

The Wolf in South Carolina ~ ALEC

South Carolina has a new and improved Lobbying Law. SECTION 2-17-5, transfers the duties and powers from the Secretary of State to the State Ethics Commission – among other things.

If you read it, you’ll notice it includes wording like this throughout: “Except as otherwise provided by Section 2-17-90″, “Notwithstanding the limitations of Section 2-17-90″, “pursuant to Section 2-17-90″.

So what does Section 2-17-90 have to say? It’s an exemption for ALEC – by name:

SECTION 2-17-90. Acts prohibited of lobbyists’ principals; acts prohibited of public officials and employees; exceptions; disclosure requirements. (…) except for:
… (a) national and regional conventions and conferences of organizations for which the General Assembly pays annual dues as a membership requirement and (b) American Legislative Exchange Council conventions and conferences;

SC Makes A Special Exception To State’s Lobbying Law for ALEC:

State Rep. Boyd Brown (D-Fairfield) discovered the exemption in the lobbying law on Wednesday.

“I am disgusted that this group has been specifically exempted from ethics laws in the state of South Carolina,” said Brown in a statement. “I am appalled but not surprised that an extremist group such as ALEC wields such influence in the South Carolina General Assembly.”

This new S.C. law comes *conveniently* in the wake of a recent Common Cause submission “to the Internal Revenue Service under the Tax Whistleblower Act, 26 U.S.c. § 7623(b) regarding underreporting of lobbying and operation in furtherance of private corporate interests in contravention of 26 U.S.c. § 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable status.”

They’re covering the bases. Here’s a good report on the action being taken – the one they’re heading off at the pass:

Shame on South Carolina legislators!
DCKennedy

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May Day, 2012

While not officially involved in the May Day events scheduled for today including marches and a call for a general strike, APV is very sympathetic to many of the concerns and aspirations that have traditionally revolved around the first of May. So while the press may end up fixating about confrontations between authorities and protesters we’d like to draw your attention to some of the serious issues that this day’s events are meant to be highlighting.

• · Stalled wages: over the last three decades the cost of living has continued to rise, but average wages have not moved. While worker productivity has skyrocketed compensation has not kept pace. Instead profits for the wealthy have soared over this period creating the largest gap between rich and poor since the 1920s and effectively shrinking a broad middle class that gave us the strong underpinning that a democracy needs to survive.
• · During this same period a concerted war against organized labor has raged. Union busting has been largely successful in much of the United States and there is clear evidence that it has contributed to the previous problem of stalled wages. When workers can no longer bargain collectively to leverage concessions from corporate bosses, the outcome is invariably lower wages, longer hours and less safe working conditions.
• · America is the only industrialized nation that does not provide its citizens with a state funded healthcare system. This places massive stress on both industry and on labor. State sponsored healthcare is simply cheaper and more effective than the Byzantine, patchwork system that exists today. While some elements of the 2009 Affordable Care Act were laudable, its focus on preserving the current system was a bad idea and we need to move ahead with a universal, single payer plan that removes the profit motive as the prime indicator for healthcare outcomes.
• · In the second decade of the 21^stcentury women still make 77 cents on the dollar compared to their male counterparts. Women deserve equal pay for equal work! Women deserve equal pay, but they also need support if they choose not to work or to work less in order to have children. We need to support American families with longer maternity leaves and childcare alternatives as well as options for men that would allow them to share more fully in raising their children. Measures like these would go a long way to helping women finally achieve parity. In the meantime, women need to be paid the same as men for the same work.
• · America needs a financial system that serves American workers and protects them from the most harmful byproducts of globalization. Companies have to stop being rewarded for moving jobs overseas or from using that threat as a wedge to pry even more concessions from our already battered workers. The continued assault on labor has taken the form of union busting, offshoring, and more recently moves to bring back relics from the Gilded Age, like legal sweat shops and child labor. While a global economy may be inevitable, there is no reason that the burdens and stresses associated with it should be born solely by the workers and their families.

For a generation now America has been steadily moving backwards on issues that involve labor and the rights and privileges of workers. It’s time to stop this harmful trend. May Day originated in the U.S. in 1867 as part of the agitation for an eight hour work day. It’s sad that 145 years later we’re still fighting for some of the same basic rights that fueled the Progressive Movement and the New Deal. Today we urge you to stop and think at some point during your busy day at work, or if you chose to strike or if you chose to do something in between, about the fact that if we don’t diligently foster and protect our rights, including our right to a decent wage, a safe working environment and the right to organize and bargain collectively, we will surely lose them. Happy May Day from the Alliance for Progressive Values.

CISPA, The Latest Threat To Internet Freedom And A Further Erosion Of Privacy

From Scott Lemieux at Alternet:

Six things you should know about the proposed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), H.R. 3523, which is scheduled to go to the House floor this week for a final vote.  The Bill has 112 cosponsors and is expects to pass the House.

1. CISPA would allow companies to share potentially sensitive customer data with each other in ways that would otherwise be inconsistent with current laws that protect consumer privacy, such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). As the ACLU notes, “Health records, gun records, tax records, census data, educational records – essentially all information now protected under privacy laws carefully considered and passed by Congress over the past decades –would no longer have that protection as cybersecurity information if these bills are to become law.” CISPA would also allow the government to require companies to share customer data without the warrant or subpoena that would be required under current law. The privacy rights of customers may be violated, in other words, without substantial evidence that they pose any kind of security threat.

2. CISPA would also pre-empt state laws that provide more privacy protection than the federal standard. Citizens in some states would face diminished privacy rights both now and in the future.

3. Companies would be broadly immunized from both criminal and civil liability for sharing personal data under CISPA. This is important, because the threat of lawsuits is crucial to ensuring that companies respect the privacy of their customers. Under CIPSA, conversely, corporations would have little incentive to err on the side of protecting privacy and would not face legal sanctions for even wholly unjustified invasions of privacy.

4. Private companies would not be required to remove identifying information from data they share with the government. Private information could be shared not only with civilian but with military authorities. Given the deference that courts generally show to invocations of national security interests by entities associated with the military, this makes the risks of privacy invasions even more severe. Any information shared under a new legislative framework should go to a civilian rather than a military agency.

5. The only restriction on the sharing of data is that it be related to “cybersecurity.” The bill makes no serious attempt to specifically define what would qualify, and hence this limitation will do very little to limit privacy violations in practice. As the Electronic Freedom Foundation correctly points out, the bill would apply to “far more than what security experts would reasonably consider to be cybersecurity threat indicators — things like port scans, DDoS traffic, and the like.” Without a more careful definition, the potential for abuse is simply too great.

6. Not only does the language of the bill not provide enough protection before the fact, but it also does too little to protect individual privacy after information is first shared with the government. As Sharon Bradford Franklin explains, “CISPA lacks any meaningful limitations on the ways in which the federal government may use personal information.”

Occupy’s May Day Strike! – by Jack Johnson

We’ve been here before. About 126 years ago, thousands of workers and their families were marching through the streets of Chicago on May 1st, 1886. It was a Saturday. Everyone left work, because in those days people had to work on Saturday. They were working a ten- and twelve-hour day. Most of these people were immigrants, and they were fighting for an 8 hour work day rallying in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. It was near the end of a fairly successful rally, when about 176 police showed up, uninvited.

Yes, we’ve been here before.

The police captain had actually disobeyed the orders of the mayor, who said, “The rally is peaceful. There’s no need to disperse it.” The police captain acted on his own, marched right up to the crowd and said, “You must disperse,” and the speaker said, “But we are peaceful.” And he said, “You must disperse anyway.” And as the speaker was coming down from the wagon, someone — and to this day, we don’t know who it was — threw a bomb that landed into the ranks of the police. One officer was killed immediately. Six others later died.

The police were panicked, of course, almost hysterical. They’d never expected anything like this, began firing, probably shot each other, shot people in the crowd, and in the end, seven police died and at least three of the demonstrators. Many, many people were wounded, and later seven anarchists were fingered for trial, although no conclusive evidence was brought to bear. May Day became a global labor holiday in honor of the “Haymarket Martyrs” who were tried by a judge so prejudiced against them that their execution has often been referred to as “judicial murder.” More importantly, May 1 became a traditional day across the world to honor workers rights.

Occupy’s call for a General Strike this May 1st is the latest in a long series of actions against a system designed to marginalize workers and the poor. As they put it on their website:

“The General Strike is a demand for good jobs and good pay for everyone on the planet–citizens of the country they work in or not. Outsourcing will no longer be tolerated by the so called “job creators” for cheap labor. All human beings deserve a living wage. Education, Housing and Healthcare are human rights NOT ‘entitlements’.”

That might sound a little far fetched to our contemporary ears, but so did the idea of an 8 hour work day and time off for weekends to those who started protesting some 126 years ago.

Below are some of the more creative posters Occupy has produced in their effort to agitate for a General Strike on May 1st, 2012 with some observations and historical notes.

(click posters to open)

1) In the 1700s, sailors would sometimes strike or lower their ship’s sails as a symbol of their refusal to go to sea. From this refusal to acquiesce with the requirements of the work day we get the term ‘strike’ and this poster playfully toys with both meanings. In 1888, young girls in London were forced to dip matches in dangerous white phosphorous for 14 hours at a stretch. After one of their numbers was unjustly fired, they went on strike. Thus the match blossoming with the starry night flame indicates both the match girl’s strike of 1888 and the underlying flame that occurs when a match is struck. Floating in the upper darkness of the poster are two cats. A general strike—which is what is being called for—is also sometimes termed a wild cat strike because it is not authorized by a union and hence is ‘wild’. Anarchists and IWW affiliates will often use cats or sabot-cats in their graphics as well. The woman is likely either Hispanic or Afro American; both races (and gender) have been roundly abused by a system that would rather produce matches than well rounded humans.

2) Time is money wasn’t always the case. There was a time, well before the advent of industrialization and what we have come to call ‘time discipline’ when biology and nature ruled our internal clocks. If you were a hunter or early farmer, the shifting of the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun was your only ‘clock’. In fact, time in hours and even minutes has become the single most used measurement for tying labor to value (justly or unjustly). With background colors reminiscent of a naval signal flag (an inverted man overboard, perhaps?), this poster features a brilliant sun eclipsing a clock, telling the world that for at least one day, the tyranny of time discipline will be thrown off. Says Jess Goldstein of Occuprint: “To me, this really sums up the spirit of a general strike; it’s a call to realize that we, collectively, can and should be in control of our time.” The poster’s words echo the famous street call and response….: whose time? our time! Whose street? our street! Of course, only time will tell.

3) The Guy Fawkes mask, celebrated in the movie V for Vendetta, and becoming a near universal symbol of rebellion, has also been closely associated with the hacking collective known as Anonymous. Both Ad Busters (the Canadian anti-advertisement collective) and Anonymous have been the moving spirit if not direct organizers of the original Occupy Wall Street. The poster artfully uses an old arcade video game metaphor to shout out the relevance of computers to the Occupy movement. The words, Hack The Day, are a reminder of Hacks twofold meaning in both the virtual and wider world. Commonly, a hacker is someone who breaks into or disrupts normal operations—fitting perfectly with a call for a General strike. But perhaps, more importantly, a hack is also a provisional solution to a systemic problem. One thing we’ve seen over and over again at the Occupy sites is the brilliant and provisional nature of their solutions to restrictions imposed by a mostly antagonistic environment. Fittingly, the Wall Street Bull looks as though it is being levitated or is under attack by a Guy Fawkes mask.

4) Flowers jamming the cogs of a machine represent one approach to a general strike, taking time away from ‘productive work’ that profits others to simply grow on our own. This self oriented activity has another consequence—it fouls the smooth working of a system that depends on our devotion to its functioning. It’s also reminiscent of Mario Savio’s famous 1964 speech at The University of California’s Sproul Hall: “And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

To extend the metaphor in the image, our bodies are those flowers.

5) One of the more fun (and subversive) posters, this one was developed by the Institute for Experimental Freedom (the small publishing collective who put out the brash but fun-filled insurrectionary text “Politics Is not a Banana.”) asks us to replace the main image with some sort of “riot graphic” while using the appropriate, hip font (Haas Grotesk). At first blush, a kind of meta joke, it’s also got a point: everything about this strike and Occupy is essentially do it yourself. That’s not just an accident, it’s by design. Part of the rationale comes from a deep historical awareness of how other movements have been co-opted in the past; the symbols and fashion of a movement become commoditized, while the underlying reality and message is diminished or crushed. Ad Busters, among others, is especially sensitive to the phenomena. This poster seems to be going on the offensive. Note the Coca Cola style font and bottle cap design that surrounds the General Strike notice. It would be interesting if a set of images could retool major corporate ‘brands’ with subversive messaging. A Pepsi shaped bottle with a General Strike Message in it, the Wal-Mart smiley face, announcing the next round of boycotts against that behemoth. None of this would be exactly ‘legal’ of course, but maybe that’s the point.

6) Intentionally or not, the refrain, Let’s go fly a kite, belongs to a song that forms the climax to Disney’s Mary Poppins. For those who haven’t seen the movie in a while (has anyone not seen it?) Flying a kite becomes the ultimate resolution of the family tensions that bind the banker (Mary Poppins’ employer) to his family while rejecting his work life. That particular plot is an old cliché, but, as with most clichés, there’s more than a germ of truth to it. The song and characters in the movie, like the kites, offer wonderful overtones of an existence not tethered by work day concerns—liberated, floating and free. Flying a kite is just one possibility of things that can be done once the carefully enumerated list of modern distractions are abandoned: No work, no school, no housework, no service, no banking, no shopping, no data. For those who haven’t seen the movie or this clip, enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g89NxTTycxc

7) In the popular idiom, a general strike is as old as the hills, or at least as old as the hills of Rome. According to H.G. Wells, the first general strike properly took place in Rome by the lowly plebeians. The plebeians “saw with indignation their friends, who had often served the state bravely in the legions, thrown into chains and reduced to slavery at the demand of patrician creditors.” For veterans of the Iraqi or Afghanistan wars this might sound eerily familiar. In the U.S., one of the first general strikes was the infamous Railroad Strike of 1877. This was, in infancy, the beginning of a nascent labor movement showing its muscle across the nation, culminating ultimately in the May 1, Haymarket strikes and riots that led to the weekend, child labor laws, and the 8 hour day. The typeface is just a reminder how far things have come, and sadly, how far we still have to go. What this poster delivers in simple type face is almost as important as the message itself: We’ve been here before.

APV is always grateful to our friend, author and activist Jack Johnson for contributing his work to our blog.
DCKennedy

Castle Doctrine/Stand Your Ground

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away. ~William Golding, Lord of the Flies

PRwatch has chosen A Police Officer Speaks on ALEC and “Stand Your Ground”, by Brian Austin, as one of their highlighted opinions this week. Interestingly, Austin has been a state prosecutor and is now a police detective in Wisconsin. He was “a police officer for 15 years, and a SWAT officer for 12 of those”. Aligning his experience with his insight was a curious task for me, but I was delighted with his ability to step way back and apply a patchwork of current events to one of our nation’s most profound and troubling choices – which is where he leaves us at the end.

Insinuating Golding’s Lord of the Flies was also a little curious. Afterward, I thought about it … so will you.

Here’s a taste:

The Castle Doctrine is just one part of the “shiny object” campaign that the corporate right has waged for decades to prevent this awakening from occurring. (…)

I believe that in order for the corporate elite to continue to further an agenda that favors a select few, they have to turn the masses against each other. That need becomes even more urgent as more and more people wake up to the realities of America in 2012, and uprisings like the Wisconsin protests and the Occupy movement spread. If the corporate elite failed to keep us at each other’s throats, and we actually developed a sense of community and compassion and empathy, we would see with total clarity the insanity that grips our nation. At that moment, their gig would be up. We would no longer tolerate what is occurring in America, and the corporate elite and their legislative water boys would be driven from power post-haste.

DCKennedy

…

Truth, Love, Power

Love is the symbol most often associated with perfection – the power of love, the power of truth …. It’s the stuff of poets.

Poets are all who love, who feel great truths,
And tell them; and the truth of truths is love. ~ Philip Bailey

It may be innate – I think so. But early gratification, when we’re defenseless and being cared for is surely a time to feel the give and take of love. We present at birth and begin taking from others straight away in lovely, greedy, gulping neediness – and that creates a miracle. It may feel at times like the most under-appreciated part of the human experience, but taking enables giving. It’s good and right and makes possible that feeling we associate with perfection.

When the baby looks around him
It’s such a sight to see
He shares a simple secret
With the wise man ~ Leon Russel

Completing the cycle is the consciousness of giving. Heart-felt giving, generosity, is the true and ultimate form of greed. The pay-off, of course, is love – what we truly crave and what makes us healthy. Our desire for love is as wonderfully selfish and greedy as every breath we ever take, or more so. In that respect, our survival simply depends on the needy taking and the greedy giving.

I believe the harmony for that balance is available all the time, and that our numbers, personalities, strengths and weaknesses are complimentary. But when we separate people into takers and givers, making one group bad and one group good, it depletes our source of power – the love we create when we help each other. In providing for each other we thrive. Love is plenty. Plenty divides into more plenty.

When we can’t count on each other, our sense of community is destroyed and we feel isolated. I think that’s when our quest for love is bastardized into a feeling of worth that’s disconnected from providing for each other. We collect and hoard and mood-alter in a million ways, chasing one vanishing point after another, but it’s loveless. That’s why we know health and happiness as fleeting or temporary states, and why we don’t get along, live in peace, feel safe or feel “saved”. Give and take are separated on our balance sheets.

Do you recognize the bells of truth
When you hear them ring
Won’t you stop and listen
To the children sing ~ Leon Russell

Asking if your butt looks big is a test you probably shouldn’t give to a three-year-old. Truth is their reality, their community, a universe of boundless energy where the freedom to create is the freedom to fail, where trial and error are perfect partners. In loving innocence, children understand the harmony that allows everybody to be a work in progress as givers and takers at the same time. They accept and encourage others regardless of imperfection or weakness, and they need the same in return.

We’re wonderfully thoughtful, creative, needy and generous until we learn to distrust, and then we try to live among people who might not help us if we fail, if we’re needy, or if we have a “big butt”. We learn to criticize and fear criticism, smothering our natural inclination to create and offer our gifts. And that fear weakens humankind as surely as the lack of human kindness kills an infant. Our resistance to helping each other is so sad and irrational. Love provides. Deviating from love weakens.

There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in. ~Leonard Cohen

The enlightened and the creative among us have always given rise to truth. It’s a bright light we tend to see through a veil, though, filtering its purity, its essence. We see truth as a choice between casual or formal wear. We see love during a weekly visit to the museum.

We all live and die within the margins of our experience, but I believe our best thoughts and deeds ripple out over time and space to touch others. And those who defeat resistance and unleash themselves to change the world and experience mankind’s greatest gifts are with us. Raising them up, we feel the glory of truth and love around us. What makes them adorable, though, is what they did when they had the chance: Here on earth, caring for each other is love ~ one in the same.

I love this analogy: When a fearful puppy rolls over to expose his belly, it’s a correction, an offering of trust, a submission to the highest power – love. Trust is the door love comes in through.

Love is the only miracle we know, unfailing, undying, available and waiting for us in every thought and every deed. Evidence of love’s power to transform anything into good is everywhere we choose to see it and honor it with the truth.

Our symbols are often inadequate. It’s difficult to assign mere words to a feeling of such power and importance, but it’s been done. It’s around the world in every language known to man: God is love.

Whatever this holiday means to you, I hope you enjoy it and make the most of it. I hope you feel love.
DCKennedy

Stranger in a Strange Land – Leon Russell and Don Preston

Debuting at #1

This Alternet article, Rachel Maddow: How America’s Security-Industrial Complex Went Insane is an excerpt from Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, Maddow’s new book that will debut at #1 on the New York Times best seller list.

Here’s a little taste of it:

It’s not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It’s the big-ticket stuff too. Nobody ever made an argument to the American people, for instance, that the thing we ought to do in Afghanistan, the way we ought to stick it to Osama bin Laden, the way to dispense American tax dollars to maximize American aims in that faraway country, would be to build a brand-new neighborhood in that country’s capital city full of rococo narco-chic McMansions and apartment/office buildings with giant sculptures of eagles on their roofs and stoned guards lounging on the sidewalks, wearing bandoliers and plastic boots. No one ever made the case that this is what America ought to build in response to 9/11. But that is what we built. An average outlay of almost $5 billion a month over ten years (and counting) has created a twisted war economy in Kabul. Afghanistan is still one of the four poorest countries on earth; but now it’s one of the four poorest countries on earth with a neighborhood in its capital city that looks like New Jersey in the 1930s and ’40s, when Newark mobsters built garish mansions and dotted the grounds with lawn jockeys and hand-painted neo-neoclassic marble statues.

The New York Times, Janet Maslin, published one of many good reviews, How War Came Home to Stay:

A book by the host of a political talk show is often an ancillary product or marketing tool. But “Drift,” by Rachel Maddow, whose show is on MSNBC, is much more. It is an argument — a sustained, lucid case in which points are made logically and backed by evidence and reason. What’s more, it follows one main idea through nearly a half-century. The subtitle, “The Unmooring of American Military Power,” explains exactly what “Drift” is about.

Sounds like a good read. 275 pages, Crown Publishers, $25.
DCKennedy

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1 Cop, 2 Cops, 3 Cops, 4 Cops

1 Cop, 2 Cops, 3 Cops, 4 Cops ~ by John Marshall

Movies that mock the police range from the Keystone Kops to Beverly Hills Cop, from Police Academy to Police Academies 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and Mission to Moscow.

Films that satirize police states are few and far between (Sleeper, Brazil), usually depicting an exaggerated totalitarian system meant to warn us what could happen, but also to reassure us that we aren’t there yet.

Two current films take a different approach, showing characters living under police states that are exaggerated, but not that far removed from our Patriot Act-ruled present day.

What further distinguishes them is that they are not gritty indie films made for an audience of disaffected adults – they are extravaganzas aimed at children.

Now playing at a free speech zone near you are the 3D environmental manifesto The Lorax and the dystopian teen action film The Hunger Games.

What is truly frightening in both movies is the unspoken acceptance of repression as an everyday fact of life, by characters who look and sound just like we do (if a little stylized).

In The Lorax surveillance cameras are everywhere, making this the first cartoon that is as Orwellian as it is Seussian. Instead of The Cat in the Hat, there’s a robot tabby that keeps tabs on the innocent. (Its motto could be “I Can Spy All By Myself.”)

Bad-guy elected officials have been a cartoon staple forever, but here pint-sized O’Hare is not just mayor, he is also a corporation president, who profits handsomely by preventing citizens from having access to free, clean air (instead he sells it to them in plastic bottles).

O’Hare embodies, in one classic comic character, both a police state and the lack of a boundary between business and government that makes such a thing possible, and does so with buffoonery, slapstick and other low-comedy devices that paint the story’s highest authority figure as so obviously wrong that a child couldn’t miss it.

The authorities in The Hunger Games are also comic figures, but chilling ones. With their gaudy, garish costumes and exaggerated speaking styles, they are like a cross between Batman villains and Lady Gaga, but grotesquely inhuman.

Here humor is used not to relieve tension, but to increase it. When the chaperone Effie Trinkett (Elizabeth Banks) speaks to the potentially doomed Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), it’s in cheerful, proper tones, as if Mary Poppins had become an executioner.

On the other hand, Katniss’s stylist, Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) and mentor, Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), both have a genuine sense of humor, which doesn’t serve them in a society so dead its members can only feel hope by watching child murder.

There are enough references in both The Lorax and The Hunger Games to contemporary culture to make it impossible to think you are watching visions of the future. Instead, you are watching commentaries on the present, both of which wield satire as a weapon.

Satire in The Lorax is no less blunt than in The Hunger Games; both are saying, in their own way, that cooperating with evil isn’t just wrong, it’s ridiculous.

Comedy has made similar warnings before.

The first film to parody Hitler was You Nazty Spy by The Three Stooges, which came out nine months before The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin.

Low comedians are often the first to see people in authority, from the mildly inflexible to the insanely evil, as comic figures.

However, no less a highbrow comedian than Woody Allen has said that only drama can deal with truth directly, that comedy can dance around a problem but can’t solve it.

Nevertheless, two films are dancing as fast as they can, teaching that a police state in any form is so ridiculous, a child couldn’t miss it.

But adults take more convincing, so Steve Guttenberg and Kim Cattrall should reunite for a movie even Effie Trinkett couldn’t deny – Police State Academy: No Shirt, No Shoes, No First Amendment Rights.

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Thanks to APV’s friend and activist, John Marshall for today’s post.
DCKennedy
John Marshall is a writer/comedian who has written for The Chris Rock Show (Emmy nomination), Politically Incorrect, Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn and the current version of The Electric Company. He has also written for Bazooka Joe comics. He contributes a political comedy blog to The Huffington Post.

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