[GPSCC-chat] [ufpj-activist] Chris Hedges: ONWT March to Nowhere
fred
fredd at freeshell.org
Thu Oct 7 15:44:54 PDT 2010
Thanks for your reply, Mark.
During the first half of the past century there was a Progressive Party
in Wisconsin.
In fact, the late U. S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson got his start as a
Progressive. Also, I believe the Progressives in Wisconsin made it
possible for the development of cooperatives.
In a nutshell and in general, I consider a "progressive" as one whose
priorities are based on social, economic and political justice versus
the dominant empowerment of those who resist the enactment of
regulations developed to guarantee living wages and equal rights for all -
and who feel corporations must have political rights equal to those of
persons.
Right on,
Fred
On 10/6/10 11:00 PM, Mark Stahl wrote:
> Fred, please forward to your list.
> As a former member of the radical community at Berkeley, Greetings to
> comrades in South SF Bay.
> I am not really affiliated with UFPJ other than as our group's
> representative on the UFPJ listservs, so I don't speak for UFPJ.
> I'm not sure if am looking over a cliff, just trying to reach the next
> mountain over the empty chasm of our current political life.
> I am really more of a radical than a progressive, but I will cop to
> being outspoken, it comes from having been a Spock baby.
> Thanks for the invitation, I am looking for a party to join and will
> keep the Green Party in mind when I make my selection.
> Good luck with your activism. I heard Ralph might be running again on
> the Green party ticket, believe it or not I knew his sister Laura.
> Take care and thanks for your message.
> Mark
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* fred <mailto:fredd at freeshell.org>
> *To:* South SF Bay Discuss at CA Greens
> <mailto:sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org>
> *Cc:* Mark Stahl <mailto:mcstahl3 at cox.net>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, October 06, 2010 5:31 PM
> *Subject:* Fwd: [ufpj-activist] Chris Hedges: ONWT March to Nowhere
>
> Chris Hedges, the bold reformist, and Mark Stahl, of the United
> for Peace and Justice (ufpj) coalition activist" talk like they
> are looking over a cliff, with no place to go. Why don't they
> pick out an active, independent third party - preferably the
> Green (How about it, Mark?) - and help recruit others? Hedges, a
> well known progressive blogger, and Stahl another outspoken
> progressive, should look around and join a party, even though
> Ralph Nader hasn't.
>
> The Green Party openly stands for most, if not all, of what they
> express.
>
> In the spirit of peace, justice and open discussion,
>
> Fred Duperrault
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [ufpj-activist] Chris Hedges: ONWT March to Nowhere
> Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 03:48:17 -0400
> From: Mark Stahl <mcstahl3 at cox.net>
> To: ufpj-activist <ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org>
>
>
>
> Attached below is an essay by Chris Hedges about the One Nation
> rally on 10/2 which he refers to as the "March to Nowhere".
> Following are my prefatory comments to his essay.
>
> Overall, I think that participation by the peace/antiwar movement
> in the ONWT rally was a worthy experiment, but not a truly
> successful one, although I think there was benefit provided by the
> Peace Table/UNAC contingents and by the socialist contingent,
> which met in the late morning and marched to the main event.
>
> Other than the Belafonte speech, however, there was very little
> peace/antiwar content at the main rally, with the exception of UAW
> president Bob King, who called for an end to the Iraq and
> Afghanistan wars. Given the major escalations in Afghanistan and
> Pakistan, any truly liberal/progressive rally should have had a
> major focus on ending the wars. Nor was there much emphasis on
> Guantanamo or the steady erosion of civil liberties in this country.
>
> We know why the rally did not seriously address such critical
> issues as the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the erosion
> of civil liberties, or the growing role of corporate interests:
> because the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have
> not only maintained the policies of the Bush administration, but
> in many cases they are actually worse than Bush, including the
> steady escalation of the drone war in Pakistan.
>
> Yet, the major purpose of the rally was to encourage people to
> vote for Democrats on November 2. Since the Obama administration
> is weak to catastrophic on virtually every major issue, they had
> no choice but to avoid any serious challenges to the party in
> power on these critical issues.
>
> Only a movement which is independent of the major political
> parties, committed to a strong platform of immediate withdrawal
> from all foreign wars and occupations, and prepared to address
> issues of global imperialism and economic collapse, will be able
> to mobilize people effectively for the kind of radical changes
> necessary to move our society forward in the face of a growing
> reactionary trend in our public institutions. The article by
> Chris Hedges follows.
>
>
> Mark Stahl
> Providence
>
>
> March to Nowhere
>
>
> Posted on Oct 5, 2010
>
> By Chris Hedges
>
> We can hold One Nation marches every week. It will not make any
> difference until we revolt against the formal structures of power.
>
> The liberal preoccupation with positive forms of propaganda
> ignores the root of our problem. The tea party and hate mongers on
> Fox such as Glenn Beck, however repugnant, are the manifestation
> of the crisis, not its cause. The forces assaulting the remnants
> of American democracy will not be cowed or discredited with
> rallies, such as the one in Washington on Saturday. We will blunt
> these rising anti-democratic forces only when we organize outside
> conventional systems of power. It means dismantling the permanent
> war economy and the corporate state. It means an end to
> foreclosures and bank repossessions. It means a functional health
> care system for all Americans. It means taking care of our poor
> and unemployed. And it means a system of government that is freed
> from corporate interests.
>
> Mass support for anti-democratic movements and public acceptance
> of open violations of human rights are not caused, in the end, by
> the skillful dissemination of misinformation or brainwashing. They
> are caused by the breakdown of a society and the death of a
> liberal class that once made reform and representative government
> possible. The timidity of our liberal class was on public display
> during the march in Washington. Speakers may have called for jobs,
> but none would call on citizens to abandon the rotting hull of the
> Democratic Party and our moribund political system or put Wall
> Street speculators in prison. The speakers at the rally proposed
> working within the current electoral system, although most
> Americans are aware that it has been gamed by corporate interests.
> This is hardly a call, especially given the failures of the Obama
> administration, that will fire up the unemployed and underemployed.
>
> "We need jobs," the Rev. Al Sharpton said at the march. "We've
> bailed out the banks. We bailed out the insurance companies. Now
> it's time to bail out the American people."
>
> But Sharpton and the other speakers, too close to the power elite
> in the Democratic Party, did not call for rebellion. There was no
> war cry against Wall Street and the purveyors of death in the
> defense and health industry. There was no acknowledgement that
> unfettered capitalism and globalization are killing our ecosystem
> and creating a worldwide system of neo-feudalism. There was no
> acceptance that the corporate state must be dismantled if we are
> to save ourselves. Any effective resistance must begin with a
> condemnation of our political elite and liberal institutions,
> including the press, the universities, labor, the arts, religious
> institutions and the Democratic Party, for selling us out. But the
> speakers on the mall in Washington would not go there. And I
> suspect, for this reason, the Americans who are hurting most found
> nothing they said of interest.
>
> All totalitarian movements, even those that are openly criminal,
> succeed because they have widespread mass support. They are the
> expression of a yearning that sweeps through a nation that has
> been convulsed by economic dislocation, a loss of hope and
> flagrant political corruption. And in these times of lament and
> deprivation the absurdities, crimes and excesses of reactionary
> forces do not matter. It wasn't hard to find out what Slobodan
> Milosevic was doing in Bosnia. It wasn't hard in Nazi Germany to
> hear about the widespread massacres of Jews in Poland. It is not a
> secret to most Americans that Muslim detainees, held for years
> without charges, are tortured in black sites around the world. The
> murder of tens of thousands of civilians by our forces in Iraq,
> Afghanistan and Pakistan is tacitly acknowledged by the public as
> the price of war. The massive human suffering in the open-air
> prison that is Gaza is not a mystery. We know what happens to the
> millions of undocumented workers who live as stateless citizens
> among us and have become a kind of modern day slave labor force.
>
> The rising proto-fascist movement in America is caused by a hatred
> and alienation so profound that the crimes of the state, along
> with the buffoonish antics of those who defend and champion these
> crimes, do not matter. We will not discredit the right-wing with
> facts, a demand for a respect of law or rational discussion.
> Propaganda or counter messages of tolerance are not the issue. The
> issue is societal collapse. This issue is a corporate state that
> has carried out a coup d'etat. The issue is the rupture of all
> mechanisms within the political process to protect citizens from
> accelerating impoverishment, internal control and corporate abuse.
> Those who refuse to acknowledge this bleak reality cannot offer
> solutions.
>
> The right-wing propagandists have not created the problem. They
> have tapped into the moral void that has left tens of millions of
> Americans yearning for a profound and radical change. And if
> torture, war, racist attacks on immigrants, gays and Muslims,
> along with increased repression against internal dissidents, is
> the price for moral and economic renewal, many Americans are ready
> to sign on. If those who lead this rising proto-fascist movement
> insist on a Christian nation, teach creationism and believe in the
> physical existence of Satan, many Americans will sign on for this
> too. Hatred, when mobilized, is a very effective political force.
> And hatred, including the hatred for a liberal class that
> abandoned the working class, is what we face.
>
> The decimation of our working class through outsourcing and
> globalization dynamited two of the most important props of the
> democratic system---class consciousness and class conflict. This
> has left traditional political parties, which once represented
> differing class interests, with nothing to offer the public beyond
> fringe issues such as abortion or gay marriage. Those in the
> liberal class who cling to the corpse of the Democratic Party do
> so not because they believe in the policies of the party---it does
> not differ in any significant way from the Republican Party---but
> because they hope against hope that the party will somehow restore
> itself to its former position as a defender of liberal values and
> the working class interests. It is the politics of nostalgia.
>
> Our political theater has orphaned citizens who once looked to
> political parties to express and defend their interests. It has
> engendered apathy toward traditional social and political
> structures and an inchoate rage. This mixture of apathy and rage
> is a volatile cocktail. It finds its expression outside normal
> systems of dissent and in leaders who, in times of prosperity and
> stability, would be dismissed as lunatics.
>
> No rally, no positive message, no effort to expose the idiocies of
> those arrayed against us will work until we restore to the
> political process mechanisms by which ordinary citizens can be
> heard. Hannah Arendt in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" cites the
> collapse of traditional political mechanisms, which now plagues
> us, as the opening needed for all totalitarian movements:
>
> "The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering
> majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized,
> structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in
> common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party
> members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected,
> articulate and representative members of the community were fools
> and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were
> equally stupid and fraudulent."
>
> The One Nation March in Washington, which lacked moral and
> political courage, did nothing to educate or rally our most
> important constituency---those out of work, those being
> foreclosed, those without hope. It refused to confront the real,
> corporate structures of power. It refused to disown Barack Obama
> and the Democrats. And in the end it only confirmed what those who
> hate us think of liberals.
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/march_to_nowhere_20101005/
>
>
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