[Peace-discuss] Reversing military & economic policy

[C. G. ESTABROOK]

"But when the people cease to believe in a political game in which the  
dice are loaded, when they see that governments are stripped of their  
sovereignty, when they demand that banks be brought into line, when  
they mobilize without knowing where their anger will lead, then the  
left is still very much alive."

That comment from Serge Halimi, the director of Le Monde diplomatique,  
refers to Europe but is applicable to the US as well. The way our   
"government is stripped of is sovereignty" is by the installation of a  
tool of Wall Street as Chief Magistrate and the wholesale purchase of  
a Congress, now capable of passing (last week) an atrocity like the  
National Defense Authorization Act. Two-thirds of the Congress  
supports a Mideast War that two-thirds of the populace opposes. And  
that war serves the interests of only the 1%.

More insidious is the propagation of the notion that the government is  
powerless to end the recession, curb the banks, reverse the  
accelerating concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1% - or  
provide jobs, housing, and income to Americans at large.

Liberal demands to "get money out of politics" seem unequal to the  
task. The executive, legislature, and judiciary that we have now must  
be forced to do the right things - as they were in the civil rights  
and anti-war struggles of two generations ago. Those (limited)  
victories were accomplished not by changing the occupants of  
government offices but by forcing incumbents to act correctly. E.g.,  
the revolt of the US expeditionary force in Vietnam forced the  
withdrawal of ground forces from SE Asia and the end of the draft.

We are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation, or  
any nation so composed and so contrived, can long endure. But it is  
not a war between equivalent forces; it is a war between the 1% and  
the rest, "between those who believe in and prosecute war as a way of  
life, as an economy, and those who do not. The permanent capitalist  
state of war erupts every now and then into a major killing war, but  
its so-called peacetime is just war carried on by other means..."

--CGE
  
  
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