[Peace-discuss] Changing the world

[patton paul]

Here is an inspiring article by activist "Granny D" Haddock about our
current situation and what can be done to change the world.
-Paul P.


How a Small Group of Dedicated People Might Actually Do Something
by Doris "Granny D" Haddock
Speaking in Hood River, Oregon
August 16, 2003

Thank you.

Well, you've heard that wonderful Margaret Mead quote about how you should
never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world,
and that, indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. Well, I think it's
time we stopped repeating that quotation and came to some agreement about
what we happy few might do over the next five years or so. That is the
purpose of my remarks today.

You know, there are two kinds of politics in the world: the politics of
love and the politics of fear. Love is about cooperation, sharing and
inclusion. It is about the elevation of each individual to a life neither
suppressed nor exploited, but instead nourished to rise to its full
potential--a life for its own sake and so that we may all benefit by the
gift of that life. Fear and the politics of fear is about narrow
ideologies that separate us, militarize us, imprison us, exploit us,
control us, overcharge us, demean us, bury us alive in debt and anxiety
and then bury us dead in cancers and wars. The politics of love and the
politics of fear are now pitted against each other in a naked struggle
that will define not only the 21st Century but centuries to come. We are
the Sons and Daughters of Liberty in that struggle, indeed we are. Let us
not shirk from the mission that fate has bestowed upon us, for it has done
so as a blessing.

This struggle is real. A very close friend of mine, a college student,
spent this summer in Guatemala to help small communities prosper in ways
that support their local environments. Those villagers and their
environments are under siege by international big business, using a
captured U.S. Government to push through damaging treaties such as the
proposed Central America Free Trade Agreement and the hemisphere-wide Free
Trade Area of the Americas. The villagers of Guatemala want global FAIR
trade, but the corporations and their captive governments want FREE trade.
If fair trade wins, a global middle class will rise, as farmers and
craftsmen are paid fairly for their work, and as they gain a voice in
their governance and their environments are protected for their future
generations. If free trade wins, it is colonial exploitation, torture and
murder written in blood across another century.

Or do you wonder if it is really an honest difference of opinion as to
which policies are best for the people? On July 24, three armed gunmen
broke into the home where my young friend was staying in Guatemala,
dragging her and another young woman to the ground, covering their heads
with blankets. These young women began to count their lives in seconds.
For three-quarters of an hour, the gunmen went through the biodiversity
files in the home. Big business interests in Guatemala, in league with
elements of the military, are trying to push-through the passage of free
trade agreements and to do it they must suppress all dissent. Their
partner and blood brother is the U.S. Government. Not the U.S. Government
that we see, but the U.S. Government that much of the rest of the world
sees: a world of C.I.A. treachery, the training of death squad leaders in
our own Army facilities within the U.S., and a big business-friendly White
House that winks and nods as great injustices continue.

The two women survived, but tens of thousands have not, because they are
in the way of big business. It is not an honest difference of opinion; it
is a global struggle of people versus a global crime syndicate that counts
taken-over governments and multinational corporations among its members.

There is a term now in common use in Latin America that is confusing to us
Americans. It is called neoliberalism and it is a very dirty word indeed
among the brave pro-democracy and fair trade groups throughout the
Americas. "Neoliberal" sounds like the happy return of the Kennedys, but
it is not. Nor is it about some resurgence of the liberal values of the
Square Deal or the New Deal or the War on Poverty or any of those great
moments when we called upon our best instincts to cooperatively address
our largest needs as a free and self-governing people. The liberation that
we meant then when we used the word "liberal" was the liberation from
poverty, despair and ignorance, the liberation of the mind through public
education, the liberation of the citizen through universal voting, equal
rights and equal opportunity, and the freedom to prosper from the fruits
of our labors. But that is not the liberal that is meant by neoliberal. It
means newly free to rampage. It means free of! government constraint. It
means free trade over fair trade.

"Neoliberalism" refers to the liberation of a giant beast that we, the
ordinary people of America -- the farmers, the townsmen and townswomen,
the trade unionists -- tied down to the earth early in the 20th Century
and it is that beast that has now gotten himself loose again to do great
damage to us all. The deadly meanderings of this beast are most apparent
in the most labor-intensive regions of the world, but the beast is here,
too, and he has brought misery and suffering into your life and mine,
stealing our water, blowing up our mountains, fouling our air and seas,
and stealing our lives and our future at every turn. Neoliberalism is the
colonialism department of neoconservatism.

How did we handle this evil giant before? The Teddy Roosevelt
Progressives, and the William Jennings Bryan Populists before him, were
part of a successful effort to tie down the giant. After the Civil War, at
the high point of the Industrial Age--the age of railroads, oil and
steel--great corporations and trusts were created that towered high over
the human-scaled businesses of America's Main Streets and cast dark
shadows over human liberty and happiness. These monstrosities treated
humans as slaves. They robbed the public wealth and were properly called
the robber barons of that Gilded Age. These giants freely stalked,
destroying the economics of family farms and family businesses, corrupting
our governments with great bribes and corrupt deals, and polluting our
food, our land, water and air. They tore our families apart and dragged us
into the hardest of hard times, as they have been liberated to do once
more.

I am not talking about all corporations or all big business. Corporations
of reasonable size are but groups of people. Beyond some point, however,
the humanity falls away from an organization and all that is left is the
will to power and profit. They care not that our seas and atmosphere are
rapidly changing in ways that may lead to disaster and famine of
unimaginable scale. They care not because they are not human and they have
moved beyond human values. They do not need the fresh air or the water or
the mountains of the birds. They are a kind of virus or a cancer, all
prettied up with a nice logo and television commercials to tell us the
most outrageous lies, one after the other. For in reality, they crush us
under their boots and they pay off our political leaders with campaign
contributions and other bribes. They trample on diversity of all kinds,
including human personality, as fewer and fewer kinds of people can
prosper in the world they are casting, and more and more ! of us are
marginalized.

The big corporate empires would be powerless if they were not in league
with crooked politicians. I do not mean that the politicians necessarily
know what they are doing. The corruption is so immense that they cannot
even see it, even when it pays their spouse and finances their reelection.
These, the happily blind, populate Capitol Hill and our state capitols
like vermin who have been for generations in deep caves where they
gradually lose their vision and there other senses, too.

Well, two and a quarter centuries was a good run for this democracy, but a
rebirth is long overdue, and it is indeed necessary if we are to save our
freedoms and our human values here and abroad, and if we are to protect
the beauty and sustaining graces of nature, including the positive sides
of human nature.

What that Republican Teddy Roosevelt understood at the beginning of the
20th Century was that, if the rights and fortunes of the human scale are
to be protected, if the rights and fortunes of average Americans, small
businesses, family farms and Main Street are to be protected from the
ravages of overscaled business giants, then government must grow in size
and power to protect us all. The big business wing of the Republican
Party, under Taft, defeated the family business wing of the Republican and
their leader, Teddy Roosevelt. It would take another Roosevelt of another
party to turn the Square Deal into the New Deal, under which government
greatly expanded to protect the people.

That has not been altogether a happy strategy, as large government has its
own costs to us and its own abuses. The Libertarians are our new and brave
allies in the defending of the Bill of Rights from Bush's anti-American
attacks through his henchmen Ashcroft and Ridge. But our friends the
Libertarians would have us do away with most all of our government. Anyone
who has paid too many taxes or dealt with too many rude and
overly-powerful bureaucrats understands the Libertarian's feelings, but I
ask at least the intellectually honest Libertarians -- and there are many
of them -- to wisely see that government, which is indeed a system of
restraint -- must be matched in strength and scale to the corporate
monstrosities that now have the ability and the willingness to destroy us
-- to blow up the entire Appalachian Range for the profits of coal, for
example, as is now happening -- or to steal for profit the water supply of
whole regions, or to enslave whole regions at low wages rat! her than
allow fair trade. Or to move every one of our good jobs overseas. These
inhuman and inhumane organizations are stealing our lives and all nature
around us.

Only government is large enough and powerful enough to reign-in the
corporations whose cold heartedness trades lives for profits all over the
world. Republican Teddy Roosevelt began the buildup of big government
solely to protect us from overlarge corporations so that they might not
overwhelm us human beings. In doing so, he created a split in the
Republican Party, and big business interests won. Perhaps the rational
solution is to scale them both back -- corporations and government -- and
let individual enterprise and individual freedom, and its many middle
class treasures and blessings, blossom in the old battlefield. But there
is no leadership for that, and governments are being stripped of all
regulatory powers by the false religion of a new deity, the unfettered,
liberated market. So, no longer protected by governments, we must fight
the battle that is before us: human beings versus monstrous corporations
and their body snatched government puppets. It is a battle of human scale
versus monstrous scale, love versus fear.

What is happening now, of course, is that the neo's in the Bush
Administration -- you can call them neoliberals or neoconservatives,
though they are neo nothing except perhaps neocolonial and neolithic --
What's happening now is that the neo's in this Administration are starving
government very much on purpose, and they tell us as much in their
writing.

Huge military commitments, huge tax cuts to the wealthiest individuals and
corporations, and huge budget deficits leave no money for the old New Deal
programs like Social Security or newer programs such as Medicare. No money
for schools, hospitals, police, fire, veterans -- no money for anything
but the front lines of a corporatized military and a militarized
corporatocracy. A starved government -- once our government -- has no
ability to restrain the liberated giant or to investigate his abuses or
prosecute his crimes. And so, two years after Enron, but one person is
behind bars. It is not for lack of villains, and, as all California cries,
it is not for lack of victims.

All right. When did this monster get untied? He did so in the era of
corporate raiding, permitted and smiled upon by the Reagan Administration.
Reagan admired those cowboy businessmen of the 1980s -- the corporate
raiders who engineered hostile corporate takeovers. But those takeovers,
allowed by hamstrung regulators, caused all large and mid-sized American
corporations to go on a rampage of streamlining, outsourcing,
wage-cutting, plant closings and job exporting. They did so to make
themselves takeover-proof. It was no longer respectable to make a
respectable profit and to serve your community with good jobs and
fairly-priced goods and services. The new mentality of profit maximization
and unlimited mergers and no government control, was the untying of the
monster and it was no accident. The ropes were further loosened in the
greedy and morally corrupt Clinton and Bush administrations, until we find
ourselves now with a government of, by and for the corporations. The new
model CEO was the ruthless cost cutter and dealmaker. CEO salaries went
unbelievably high, where they have stayed. For every hundred dollars that
the average American worker makes, these top CEOs make fifty thousand
dollars. It is a moral outrage in the land of so many homeless and
struggling and worried people. But the giant does not care if we struggle
or worry. The giant does not care that every homeless person we walk by is
a humiliation to us, too, as members of a community no longer able to take
care of our own. It is a humiliation designed to impress upon us that we
are not in charge. That we must do as we are told if we do not want a
similar fate. It is concentration camp logic.

A century ago, the ordinary people of America joined together to tie down
the giant. The antitrust laws and environmental laws and the rights of
workers to organize and collectively bargain for wages and benefits all
joined to nurture the restoration of a great middle class -- always the
bedrock of democracy. The robber barons, the great giants, remained tied
down, no longer free, liberated, to do as they pleased in crushing us with
their great wealth and political power. And so it was for a time.

And now, loosed again, these giants have taken over our television
networks and most of our newspapers, turning them against our interests
and against the truth itself. These giants send our young people off to
fight their commercial wars -- great profitable ventures.

How free are we now, friends? Check you bills and your bank account. How
much time and leisure do you have to enjoy your life and friends? How is
your place in your community as a free and equal citizen? Or are we drones
that go to work, go to bed to rest for more work, go to the stores to
spend all that we earn and more, and watch television to receive our
instructions what to buy the next day, if we have jobs at all? Is that
freedom by some other name? It is not freedom by any name and it is
nothing to push on the rest of the world in the name of freedom.

These corporations steal our time with their computerized telephone
switchboards and their long waiting lines and few employees. They steal
our jobs and our benefits and our pensions. They use fear at every turn to
sell us a little protection, and a little more. And they steal our
senators and congressmen just when they might have earned their keep
protecting our democracy.

What shall we do, my fellows, about these corporate giants stalking our
earth freely? How shall we get our children home from their wars and
ourselves free from their captivities?

We the people, acting together in the new ways made possible by electronic
communication, must become the large counterbalance to these powers -- the
counterbalance that our government no longer provides. By communicating
and acting in concert, we can reward the good companies and thereby keep
our money clear of the worst. We can make our demand for fair trade
products and provide the shift in market share that will change the
practices of those businesses that now exploit our brothers and sisters
here and around the world. We can agree together which television news
channel is the least objectionable, and agree to watch only that --for our
watching and buying habits are votes for the kind of world we will live in
. By nudging market share, our small group of dedicated people can
influence great changes. We have the tools now to do this now. It will not
be an easy task, but we have no real alternative if we are to save the
world, and that is what we must decide to do.

Tell your favorite coffee house that, as of Earth Day, 2004, you will only
buy fair trade coffee. Let us give a "fair warning for fair trade" in this
and other areas of products and services. Let us develop the best
information about who is doing what, and let us use our new tools of
electronic democracy to come to consensus regarding which companies
deserve our support -- a reverse boycott on a global scale. I will try to
put information on my website about who is helping in this new effort, and
I will put some little cards there you can print to give a fair warning
for fair trade to your favorite shops and other companies. And let us use
each subsequent Earth Day to push for more improvement on every front,
giving our fair warnings to move progress along. Let Americans and other
people of the earth join us or not. But let them decide and know for
themselves which side they are on.

Yes, let's continue our efforts to reform our government, most especially
with campaign finance reform. But, with revolutionary new tools, we are
capable of redefining democracy at a critical moment. Let us not be shy
about it for time is short. We stand for love and fairness in the world.
That is not gentle work, nor is it painless or bloodless, as so many
people around the world know.

This is, after all, our world and our lives. Do you remember those few
weeks after the 9/11 attacks when we, as an automatic antidote to the
inhumanity of those attacks, sought to reassert our humanity again in a
million little ways? For that moment we came out of the hypnosis we have
come to live under and we saw the Eden of human love and cooperation. We
must not fall back under that hypnosis again, as it is a waste of our
lives. The forces of life and death are in struggle, for those are the
other names for love and fear. Let us choose life and love, and happily
use our selves up in loving service to one another.

Thank you.