"No!"<div><br></div><div>NOW what do I do?</div><div><br></div><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 12:09 AM, C. G. Estabrook <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:galliher@illinois.edu">galliher@illinois.edu</a>></span> wrote:</div>
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<td width="100%"><a href="http://chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/2038-say-no-or-surrender-progressives-seek-to-close-qenthusiasm-gapq-for-evil.html" target="_blank">Say No or Surrender: Progressives
Seek to Close "Enthusiasm Gap" for Evil</a> </td>
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<td valign="top"> <span> Written by Chris Floyd
</span> </td>
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<td valign="top"> Tuesday, 26 October 2010
12:14 </td>
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<div><span><span><span><span><span></span><span></span></span></span></span></span><span><a style="text-decoration:none" name="12bebe0b5554488f_fb_share" type="box_count" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fchris-floyd.com%2Farticles%2F1-latest-news%2F2038-say-no-or-surrender-progressives-seek-to-close-qenthusiasm-gapq-for-evil.html&t=Say%20No%20or%20Surrender%3A%20Progressives%20Seek%20to%20Close%20%22Enthusiasm%20Gap%22%20for%20Evil&src=sp" target="_blank"><span><span></span><span></span><span><span></span></span><span><span></span></span></span></a></span><br>
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<p><font face="Georgia"><img src="cid:part4.03070805.00050105@illinois.edu" alt="alt"> </font></p>
<p><font face="Georgia">In these last days before the
massively important, world-historical off-year election,
as all our good progressives are out there rallying the
troops for the beleaguered Democrats, trying to hold the
racist, tyrannical, warmongering Tea Party at bay, <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2010/10/hbc-90007762" title="title" target="_blank">Scott Horton at Harper's</a>
provides us with yet another reminder of just what kind
of governance these poor, beleaguered Democrats are
delivering with the power they received in 2008.<br>
<br>
Horton reports that Barack Obama has won a great victory
for the power of the state to falsely imprison innocent
citizens, subject them to repeated abuse, tell
slanderous lies about them -- then absolve itself of any
responsibility for this systematic series of crimes ...
crimes committed in the name of racist, tyrannical
warmongering.<br>
<br>
Yes, Obama is back on the front lines in the legal
battle to defend, uphold, entrench and expand the worst
abuses of power carried out by his loathed predecessor.
His Yoo-like legal minions have convinced the Supreme
Court to consider quashing a case that has been upheld
by several lower, conservative courts as one worthy to
be heard in court. As Horton notes:<br>
<br>
</font></p>
<blockquote><font face="Georgia">The case involves Lavni
Kidd, a star football player at the University of Idaho
who converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdullah
al-Kidd. He was seized as he boarded a flight to pursue
religious education in Saudi Arabia in 2003. Justice
Department officials claimed that he was needed as a
material witness in a case against another University of
Idaho student, Sami Omar al-Hussayen, who was charged
with visa fraud. It does not appear that Kidd knew
anything relevant to the visa fraud case, federal
authorities never called him to testify, and the
prosecution of Hussayn, which rested on a feeble
evidentiary case to start with, failed before an Idaho
jury. The claim appears now to have been a shabby
pretext for arresting Kidd, whose offense apparently
consisted of converting to Islam and espousing views
critical of the Bush Administration and its plans to
invade Iraq under false pretenses.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Georgia">Over a period of 16 days, Kidd was
moved to three separate detention facilities in three
different states. He was treated brutally, according to
procedures that the Justice Department approved for use
on terrorism suspects. He was subjected to a withering
interrogation by FBI agents who demanded to know why he
had converted to Islam. He was stripped naked, subjected
to body cavity searches, shackled hand and foot, and
incarcerated with violent convicts.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Georgia">To secure Kidd’s detention as a
material witness, the Justice Department made a series
of false statements to the magistrate who issued a
warrant—claiming that he had purchased a one-way,
first-class ticket to Saudi Arabia, when in fact the
Justice Department knew he had purchased a return
economy class ticket, for instance. It also withheld
such information as the fact that Kidd was a U.S.
citizen who had cooperated with authorities. The record
strongly suggests actual malice and bigotry. These facts
no doubt played a strong role in persuading judges at
the district court in Idaho and on the appeals court in
California of the merits of the case. They therefore
denied the Justice Department’s vigorously argued
efforts to have it dismissed.</font><br>
</blockquote>
<p><font face="Georgia">But Obama is tireless in his
protection of tyranny. He seeks to defend it from any
and all challenges, small or great. It would be the
easiest thing in the world to simply step back and let
this case be heard in court, let it be argued on its own
merits and decided accordingly. It would not require
some harsh denunciation of his predecessors, since he
finds such things so distasteful. It would not require
him to support his predecessors. It would not require
the White House to do anything at all except to let
justice takes its course.<br>
<br>
But we know that our brave progressive paladin never
takes the easy way. No, he will stand
shoulder-to-shoulder with George Bush and John Ashcroft,
he will stand up boldly, yea proudly, for jailing young
students for voicing dissent, for rigging up false
charges based on deliberate lies, for stripping innocent
people and subjecting them to body cavity searches --
and for ensuring that no minion of the state who so
abuses innocent citizens need ever face the slightest
disturbance in his cushy, comfortable life. So he has
fought it convince the Supreme Court to hear his earnest
pleas for throwing out al-Kidd's case and protecting all
those who abuse and pervert the power of the state.<br>
<br>
This is what you support when you support Obama and the
Democrats. And if we are about to get another gaggle of
rapacious rightwing geese flapping into the corridors of
power, it is precisely because the Democrats long ago
sold out, lock, stock and millions of smoking barrels,
to the corporate-militarist elite, leaving no genuine
institutional outlets of opposition to corporate rapine,
continual war and state tyranny within the American
political system.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/" title="title" target="_blank">Chris Hedges has much to
say</a> on this point:<br>
<br>
</font></p>
<blockquote><font face="Georgia">The liberal class, which
once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible,
functioned traditionally as a safety valve. During the
Great Depression, with the collapse of capitalism, it
made possible the New Deal. During the turmoil of the
1960s, it provided legitimate channels within the system
to express the discontent of African-Americans and the
anti-war movement. But the liberal class, in our age of
neo-feudalism, is now powerless. It offers nothing but
empty rhetoric. It refuses to concede that power has
been wrested so efficiently from the hands of citizens
by corporations that the Constitution and its guarantees
of personal liberty are irrelevant. It does not act to
mitigate the suffering of tens of millions of Americans
who now make up a growing and desperate permanent
underclass. And the disparity between the rhetoric of
liberal values and the rapacious system of inverted
totalitarianism the liberal class serves makes liberal
elites, including Barack Obama, a legitimate source of
public ridicule. The liberal class, whether in
universities, the press or the Democratic Party, insists
on clinging to its privileges and comforts even if this
forces it to serve as an apologist for the expanding
cruelty and exploitation carried out by the corporate
state. </font><br>
<br>
<font face="Georgia">As long as the liberal class had even
limited influence, whether through the press or the
legislative process, liberals were tolerated and even
respected. But once the liberal class lost all influence
it became a class of parasites. The liberal class, like
the déclassé French aristocracy, has no real function
within the power elite. And the rising right-wing
populists, correctly, ask why liberals should be
tolerated when their rhetoric bears no relation to
reality and their presence has no influence on power. </font><br>
<br>
<font face="Georgia">The death of the liberal class,
however, is catastrophic for our democracy. It means
there is no longer any check to a corporate apparatus
designed to further enrich the power elite. It means we
cannot halt the plundering of the nation by Wall Street
speculators and corporations. An ineffectual liberal
class, in short, means there is no hope, however remote,
of a correction or a reversal through the political
system and electoral politics. The liberals’
disintegration ensures that the frustration and anger
among the working and the middle class will find
expression in a rejection of traditional liberal
institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy.
The very forces that co-opted the liberal class and are
responsible for the impoverishment of the state will,
ironically, reap benefits from the collapse. These
corporate manipulators are busy channeling rage away
from the corporate and military forces hollowing out the
nation from the inside and are turning that anger toward
the weak remnants of liberalism. It does not help our
cause that liberals indeed turned their backs on the
working and middle class. ...</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Georgia">The corporate state, by emasculating
the liberal class, has opted for a closed system of
polarization, gridlock and political theater in the name
of governance. It has ensured a further destruction of
state institutions so that government becomes even more
ineffectual and despised. The collapse of the
constitutional state, presaged by the death of the
liberal class, has created a power vacuum that a new
class of speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and
killers, historically led by charismatic demagogues,
will enthusiastically fill. It opens the door to overtly
authoritarian and fascist movements. ....</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Georgia">The liberal class was permitted a
place within a capitalist democracy because it also
vigorously discredited radicals within American society
who openly defied the excesses of corporate capitalism
and who denounced a political system run by and on
behalf of corporations. The real enemy of the liberal
class has never been Glenn Beck, but Noam Chomsky.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Georgia">The purging and silencing of
independent and radical thinkers as well as iconoclasts
have robbed the liberal class of vitality. The liberal
class has cut itself off from the roots of creative and
bold thought, from those forces and thinkers who could
have prevented the liberal class from merging completely
with the power elite. ... </font><br>
<br>
<font face="Georgia">Once the liberal class can no longer
moderate the savage and greedy inclinations of the
capitalist class, once, for example, labor unions are
reduced to the role of bartering away wage increases and
benefits, once public education is gutted and the press
no longer gives a voice to the poor and the working
class, liberals become as despised as the power elite
they serve. The collapse of liberal institutions means
those outside the circles of power are trapped, with no
recourse, and this is why many Americans are turning in
desperation toward idiotic right-wing populists who at
least understand the power of hatred as a mobilizing
force.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Georgia">The liberal class no longer holds
within its ranks those who have the moral autonomy or
physical courage to defy the power elite. The rebels,
from Chomsky to Sheldon Wolin to Ralph Nader, have been
marginalized, shut out of the national debate and
expelled from liberal institutions. The liberal class
lacks members with the vision and fortitude to challenge
dominant free market ideologies. It offers no
ideological alternatives. It remains bound to a
Democratic Party that has betrayed every basic liberal
principle including universal healthcare, an end to our
permanent war economy, a robust system of public
education, a vigorous defense of civil liberties, job
creation, the right to unionize and welfare for the
poor.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Georgia">... As Wall Street steals billions of
taxpayer dollars, as it perpetrates massive fraud to
throw people out of their homes, as the ecosystem that
sustains the planet is polluted and destroyed, we do not
know what to do or say. We have been robbed of a
vocabulary to describe reality. We decry the excesses of
capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the
corporate state. Our pathetic response is to be herded
to political rallies by skillful publicists to shout
inanities like “Yes we can!”</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Georgia">The liberal class is finished.
Neither it nor its representatives will provide the
leadership or resistance to halt our slide toward
despotism. The liberal class prefers comfort and
privilege to confrontation. It will not halt the
corporate assault or thwart the ascendancy of the
corporate state. It will remain intolerant within its
ranks of those who do. The liberal class now honors an
unwritten quid pro quo, one set in place by Bill
Clinton, to cravenly serve corporate interests in
exchange for money, access and admittance into the halls
of power. </font><br>
</blockquote>
<p><font face="Georgia"><br>
The Democratic Party has become the enabler -- and the
eager, avid <em>enactor </em>-- of the same sinister,
inhumane, corrosive and murderous policies that
liberals, progressives, dissenters, true patriots (call
them what you will) once fought so hard to resist. <br>
<br>
Now you can seek to close the "enthusiasm gap" ('Hey,
did ya see that Big Dawg Bill is out there on the
hustings for us again? Yeehaw!') for the Democrats, you
can tremble in fear at the corporate-owned Tea Partiers
(as if the Democrats are not also corporate-owned by war
profiteers, community eviscerators and rapers of the
land) -- but all you are doing is perpetuating the
dynamic that has brought the Tea Partiers and their ilk
to prominence. All you are doing is guaranteeing the
further drift -- or rather, stampede -- of American
politics toward the openly fascist, brutal, barbaric
future that Hedges describes above.<br>
<br>
You are standing with tyrants, with those who strip and
abuse innocent citizens, with those who wage ceaseless,
needless war, who kill the innocent, torture the
captive, and drive millions of innocent people from
their homes. <br>
<br>
As Arthur Silber has said so many times, <a href="http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/12/honor-of-being-human-why-do-you-support.html" title="title" target="_blank">why do you support</a>
such things? Will you go on "<a href="http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2010/05/ii-story-for-children-making-friends.html" title="title" target="_blank">making friends with evil</a>"?
Will you give your support to it yet again? Or, in
Silber's words: <a href="http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2010/05/iii-life-in-shadow-of-death-and-power.html" title="title" target="_blank">"Will you say, 'No''?"</a>
Will you, at last, say No to this bipartisan cycle of
horror?<br>
<br>
There will be no end to the horror, and not the
slightest possibility of healing this broken society,
and turning it, painfully, fitfully, toward something
more holistic and humane, until you speak that word.</font></p></td></tr></tbody></table></div></blockquote></div><br></div>