[Peace-discuss] Guess the author (no googling)

[E.Wayne Johnson]

Bombs and flamboyant suicides like immolations and other violent acts are 
one way of getting a message out.

They are very high cost and very high risk.  There is no guarantee that the 
message will be
heard correctly and there are usually no second chances.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: "Stuart Levy" <slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu>
Cc: <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Sent: Saturday, May 08, 2010 8:49 AM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Guess the author (no googling)


> Yes, Chomsky.  And he's not saying that Joe Stark's response is anodyne - 
> specifically, it killed him and at least one other - but that it's 
> understandable.  There are real issues there that can't be dismissed.
>
> "It is easy to ridicule how Joe Stack and others like him articulate their 
> concerns, but it’s far more appropriate to understand what lies behind 
> their perceptions and actions at a time when people with real grievances 
> are being mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger to themselves and 
> to others."
>
>
> On 5/7/10 7:24 PM, Stuart Levy wrote:
>> Yeah, saw this a couple of weeks ago.  Chomsky, right?
>>
>>>> "Encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of business 
>>>> propaganda."
>>
>> Right.  As with Proposition 13 in CA, whose main beneficiaries were
>> businesses, as their property taxes were cut even more than homeowners'.
>>
>>>> It is easy to ridicule how Joe Stack and others like him articulate 
>>>> their
>>>> concerns, but it’s far more appropriate to understand what lies behind
>>>> their perceptions and actions at a time when people with real 
>>>> grievances
>>>> are being mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger to themselves 
>>>> and to
>>>> others.
>>
>> Note that he's not saying that the Tea Party's current direction is 
>> harmless.
>>
>> On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 04:32:31PM -0500, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>> On Feb. 18, Joe Stack, a 53-year-old computer engineer, crashed his 
>>> small
>>> plane into a building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, 
>>> committing
>>> suicide, killing one other person and injuring others.
>>>
>>> Stack left an anti-government manifesto explaining his actions. The 
>>> story
>>> begins when he was a teenager living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pa., 
>>> near
>>> the heart of what was once a great industrial center.
>>>
>>> His neighbor, in her ’80s and surviving on cat food, was the “widowed
>>> wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in 
>>> the
>>> steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and 
>>> the
>>> union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and
>>> medical care to look forward to in his retirement.
>>>
>>> “Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the
>>> incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the
>>> government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All 
>>> she
>>> had was Social Security to live on.”
>>>
>>> He could have added that the super-rich and their political allies 
>>> continue
>>> to try to take away Social Security, too.
>>>
>>> Stack decided that he couldn’t trust big business and would strike out 
>>> on
>>> his own, only to discover that he also couldn’t trust a government that
>>> cared nothing about people like him but only about the rich and 
>>> privileged;
>>> or a legal system in which “there are two `interpretations’ for every
>>> law, one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us.”
>>>
>>> The government leaves us with “the joke we call the American medical
>>> system, including the drug and insurance companies (that) are murdering
>>> tens of thousands of people a year,” with care rationed largely by
>>> wealth, not need.
>>>
>>> Stack traces these ills to a social order in which “a handful of thugs
>>> and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities — and when it’s time
>>> for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and
>>> overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no
>>> difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours.”
>>>
>>> Stack’s manifesto ends with two evocative sentences: “The communist
>>> creed: from each according to his ability, to each according to his 
>>> need.
>>> The capitalist creed: from each according to his gullibility, to each
>>> according to his greed.”
>>>
>>> Poignant studies of the U.S. rustbelt reveal comparable outrage among
>>> individuals who have been cast aside as state-corporate programs close
>>> plants and destroy families and communities.
>>>
>>> An acute sense of betrayal comes readily to people who believed they had
>>> fulfilled their duty to society in a moral compact with business and
>>> government, only to discover they had been only instruments of profit 
>>> and
>>> power.
>>>
>>> Striking similarities exist in China, the world’s second largest 
>>> economy,
>>> investigated by UCLA scholar Ching Kwan Lee.
>>>
>>> Lee has compared working-class outrage and desperation in the discarded
>>> industrial sectors of the U.S. and in what she calls China’s rustbelt —
>>> the state socialist industrial center in the Northeast, now abandoned 
>>> for
>>> state capitalist development of the southeast sunbelt.
>>>
>>> In both regions Lee found massive labor protests, but different in
>>> character. In the rustbelt, workers express the same sense of betrayal 
>>> as
>>> their U.S. counterparts — in their case, the betrayal of the Maoist
>>> principles of solidarity and dedication to development of the society 
>>> that
>>> they thought had been a moral compact, only to discover that whatever it
>>> was, it is now bitter fraud.
>>>
>>> Around the country, scores of millions of workers dropped from work 
>>> units
>>> “are plagued by a profound sense of insecurity,” arousing “rage and
>>> desperation,” Lee writes.
>>>
>>> Lee’s work and studies of the U.S. rustbelt make clear that we should 
>>> not
>>> underestimate the depth of moral indignation that lies behind the 
>>> furious,
>>> often self-destructive bitterness about government and business power.
>>>
>>> In the U.S., the Tea Party movement — and even more so the broader
>>> circles it reaches — reflect the spirit of disenchantment. The Tea
>>> Party’s anti-tax extremism is not as immediately suicidal as Joe
>>> Stack’s protest, but it is suicidal nonetheless.
>>>
>>> California today is a dramatic illustration. The world’s greatest public
>>> system of higher education is being dismantled.
>>>
>>> Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he’ll have to eliminate state health and
>>> welfare programs unless the federal government forks over some $7 
>>> billion.
>>> Other governors are joining in.
>>>
>>> Meanwhile a newly powerful states’ rights movement is demanding that the
>>> federal government not intrude into our affairs — a nice illustration of
>>> what Orwell called “doublethink”: the ability to hold two contradictory
>>> ideas in mind while believing both of them, practically a motto for our
>>> times.
>>>
>>> California’s plight results in large part from anti-tax fanaticism.
>>> It’s much the same elsewhere, even in affluent suburbs.
>>>
>>> Encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of business
>>> propaganda. People must be indoctrinated to hate and fear the 
>>> government,
>>> for good reasons: Of the existing power systems, the government is the 
>>> one
>>> that in principle, and sometimes in fact, answers to the public and can
>>> constrain the depredations of private power.
>>>
>>> However, anti-government propaganda must be nuanced. Business of course
>>> favors a powerful state that works for multinationals and financial
>>> institutions — and even bails them out when they destroy the economy.
>>>
>>> But in a brilliant exercise in doublethink, people are led to hate and 
>>> fear
>>> the deficit. That way, business’s cohorts in Washington may agree to cut
>>> benefits and entitlements like Social Security (but not bailouts).
>>>
>>> At the same time, people should not oppose what is largely creating the
>>> deficit — the growing military budget and the hopelessly inefficient
>>> privatized healthcare system.
>>>
>>> It is easy to ridicule how Joe Stack and others like him articulate 
>>> their
>>> concerns, but it’s far more appropriate to understand what lies behind
>>> their perceptions and actions at a time when people with real grievances
>>> are being mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger to themselves and 
>>> to
>>> others.
>>>
>>> ###
>
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