[Peace-discuss] Mean Streets (2)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I'm sure the panel will agree.  --CGE]

	Get Your Populist Rage On
	By Paul Street, Mar 30, 2009

...We need to situate the new administration in the world of power as it is, not 
the world of power as so many us wish it to be....

...A lot of us are starting to figure out that Status QuObama was hired by the 
corporate and military establishment to (among other things) put us all to sleep 
on the left. Its about time. Its like this guy Scott Horton said on Antiwar.com 
a few weeks back: "those who bought into the slogans ‘Hope' and ‘Change' last 
fall should have read the fine print. We were warned."

...The message from the new Washington regime and from the dominant corporate 
media that sold it to us is very clear. Our instructions are to calm down. Stand 
down. Chill out. Be cool. We are supposed to understand that our anger is 
dangerous and dysfunctional. Our "populist rage" is making things worse. If you 
want decent and democratic policies like single payer national health insurance, 
union organizing rights, public control of the financial system, the removal of 
Wall Street perpetrators, the prosecution of war crimes, the slashing of the 
bloated Pentagon budget, a real peace dividend......if you want all these things 
and are ready to fight for them beyond the supervision of your corporate and 
political masters, then you are a suitable case for psychiatric treatment .You 
are threat to civilized decency. You are too "emotional" and too "angry." You 
are not being "helpful." You need to be quiet so that the new supposedly 
non-ideological system-coordinators -- so that unmitigated corporate assholes 
like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner --- can "get things done."

You are the Jack Nicholson character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. You 
need Nurse Ratchet to give you a tranquilizer and schedule you for a nice 
corporate-neoliberal Obama Lobotomy - an Obotomy.

Just ask some of these know-it-all fake-progressive whipped-dog liberals around 
here in Iowa City. They'll lecture you to death about it, justifying their own 
stupidity and laziness and co-optation and cowardice along the way...

Tell them to keep that power-worshipping bullshit over in the faculty lounge. 
Tell them you will not be tranquilized, mesmerized. and Obotomized. Tell them 
you are not cool with fauxBama's determination to sustain a $ 1 trillion 
dollar-a-year Pentagon budget that maintains more than 760 bases located across 
more than 130 countries, an empire that account for half the military spending 
in the world - all in the name of something they call "defense."

...Sorry, I am not kosher, I am not down, and I am not cool with the bipartisan 
Empire spending hundreds of billions of dollars on illegal wars of colonial 
invasion while more than 40 million Americans live in poverty and while tent 
cities containing thousands of homeless families are springing up across this 
country. I am not cool with "my" government funneling trillions of dollars to 
Wall Street while 50 million Americans lack basic health coverage and while 
millions of disadvantaged U.S. citizens lack minimally adequate food, clothing, 
shelter, education, and social respect.

...I am not cool with historic handouts of taxpayer money from Bush and now from 
Status QuObama to financial tycoons and to so-called "defense" contractors while 
schools go under-funded, while millions more Americans are foreclosed and pushed 
into destitution and while workers and unions and the environment go 
under-protected....

...Don't let all these whipped-dog pseudo-liberal upper-middle-class Nurse 
Ratchet know-it-alls around here get you down. It's time to get your "populist 
rage" on ... You must connect your opposition to militarism to your struggle for 
social justice and economic equality. We don't have to choose between fighting 
the wars and fighting for economic justice. Empire and Inequality are two sides 
of the same coin of oppression at home and abroad.

Fight the rich, not their wars.

<http://www.zmag.org/blog/view/2946>