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Don't mourn. Organize.<br>
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On 10/27/10 3:02 PM, John W. wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:AANLkTi=T7X_RMF_0f0MaF0RCoxD65HZEwPORg4J8A=pS@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">"No!"
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</div>
<div>NOW what do I do?</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 12:09 AM, C. G.
Estabrook <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:galliher@illinois.edu">galliher@illinois.edu</a>></span>
wrote:</div>
<div class="gmail_quote"><br>
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<td width="100%"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
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>
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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
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<p><font face="Georgia"><img
src="cid:part4.08090902.08040503@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 moz-do-not-send="true"
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 moz-do-not-send="true"
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
moz-do-not-send="true"
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
moz-do-not-send="true"
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
moz-do-not-send="true"
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>
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