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I don't have much nice to say about Palin, and I don't trust Glenn
Beck, but you<br>
hit the nail on the head, Mort, when you find that the One Nation rally
is simply<br>
a reactionary effort to nullify the anti-establishment tea parties and
get votes <br>
for Democrats who will maintain the status quo.<br>
<br>
Chris Hedges is a good writer. It's unfortunate that he is so blinded
by his<br>
contempt for what he calls the "right-wing" that he fails to see the
real<br>
enemy or imagine that he could use a little help from his "right-wing"
friends<br>
or realize there are some common goals afoot.<br>
<br>
The "right-wing" and quasi-libertarian camp on the other side of the
ideologic<br>
abyss seems to have a similar problem inasmuch as they can't get over
attacking<br>
"liberals" and "progressives" long enough to quit alienating them.<br>
<br>
They all are deluded into thinking that changing the nameplate is going
to make a<br>
"kenmore" different fundamentally from a "whirlpool".<br>
<br>
Experience should be showing even the most deluded partisan that the D
brand <br>
aint much different from the R brand, and vice versa, and they both
suck.<br>
<br>
On 10/7/2010 5:04 AM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:90BE355D-FC6B-4860-B1EE-E671B62352D6@comcast.net"
type="cite"><base href="x-msg://519/">Reflections on the October 2
Washington demonstrations.<br>
<div><br>
<div>Begin forwarded message:</div>
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
<blockquote type="cite">
<div style="margin: 0px;"><span
style="font-family: 'Helvetica'; font-size: medium; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><b>From:
</b></span><span
style="font-family: 'Helvetica'; font-size: medium;">"Mark Stahl" <<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:mcstahl3@cox.net">mcstahl3@cox.net</a>><br>
</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;"><span
style="font-family: 'Helvetica'; font-size: medium; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><b>Date:
</b></span><span
style="font-family: 'Helvetica'; font-size: medium;">October 6, 2010
2:48:17 AM CDT<br>
</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;"><span
style="font-family: 'Helvetica'; font-size: medium; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><b>To:
</b></span><span
style="font-family: 'Helvetica'; font-size: medium;">"ufpj-activist"
<<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:ufpj-activist@lists.mayfirst.org">ufpj-activist@lists.mayfirst.org</a>><br>
</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;"><span
style="font-family: 'Helvetica'; font-size: medium; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><b>Subject:
</b></span><span
style="font-family: 'Helvetica'; font-size: medium;"><b>[ufpj-activist]
Chris Hedges: ONWT March to Nowhere</b><br>
</span></div>
<br>
<span class="Apple-style-span"
style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; font-size: medium;">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff">
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><font face="Times New Roman"
size="3">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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<br>
Mark Stahl<br>
Providence</font></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"> </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">
<h1><font size="4">March to Nowhere</font></h1>
<h6>Posted on Oct 5, 2010</h6>
<div class="printlinks"><font
face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">
<p><font size="3">By Chris Hedges</font></p>
<p><font size="3">We can hold One Nation marches every week. It
will not make any difference until we revolt against the formal
structures of power.</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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.</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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. </font></p>
<p><font size="3">“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.”</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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.</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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.</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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.</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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.</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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. </font></p>
<p><font size="3">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. </font></p>
<p><font size="3">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:</font></p>
<p><font size="3">“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.”</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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.</font></p>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/march_to_nowhere_20101005/"><font
size="3">http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/march_to_nowhere_20101005/</font></a></p>
</font></div>
<br>
</font></div>
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