[Peace-discuss] Progressives Seek to Close "Enthusiasm Gap" for Evil

[John W.]

"No!"

NOW what do I do?



On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 12:09 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:

  Say No or Surrender: Progressives Seek to Close "Enthusiasm Gap" for
Evil<http://chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/2038-say-no-or-surrender-progressives-seek-to-close-qenthusiasm-gapq-for-evil.html>
 [image:
> PDF]<http://chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/2038-say-no-or-surrender-progressives-seek-to-close-qenthusiasm-gapq-for-evil.pdf>  [image:
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> E-mail]<http://chris-floyd.com/component/mailto/?tmpl=component&link=aHR0cDovL2NocmlzLWZsb3lkLmNvbS9hcnRpY2xlcy8xLWxhdGVzdC1uZXdzLzIwMzgtc2F5LW5vLW9yLXN1cnJlbmRlci1wcm9ncmVzc2l2ZXMtc2Vlay10by1jbG9zZS1xZW50aHVzaWFzbS1nYXBxLWZvci1ldmlsLmh0bWw%3D>     Written
> by Chris Floyd      Tuesday, 26 October 2010 12:14
>
> <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>
>
> [image: alt]
>
> 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, Scott Horton at Harper's<http://harpers.org/archive/2010/10/hbc-90007762>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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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:
>
>  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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Chris Hedges has much to say<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/>on this point:
>
>  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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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. ...
>
> 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. ....
>
> 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.
>
> 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. ...
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> ... 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!”
>
> 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.
>
>
> The Democratic Party has become the enabler -- and the eager, avid *enactor
> *-- 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> As Arthur Silber has said so many times, why do you support<http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/12/honor-of-being-human-why-do-you-support.html>such things? Will you go on "making
> friends with evil<http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2010/05/ii-story-for-children-making-friends.html>"?
> Will you give your support to it yet again? Or, in Silber's words: "Will
> you say, 'No''?"<http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2010/05/iii-life-in-shadow-of-death-and-power.html>Will you, at last, say No to this bipartisan cycle of horror?
>
> 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.
>
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