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Friday, August 26, 2011

To Stop Corruption, Fight the Power, Not the People

CommonDreams.org

Published on Friday, August 26, 2011 by ColorLines

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and in a world where the gap between the powerful and powerless grows wider each day, corruption in political and economic institutions spreads much faster than shame.

Political power is abused wherever it exists—with scandals ranging from political graft in India to white collar crime on Wall Street to bribery of government regulators in China. Nonetheless, some communities seem especially vulnerable to the cycle of corruption, repression and impunity. And lately, we’ve seen many of them getting fed up with living under regimes that have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Corruption has been one of the major issues driving the unrest across the Middle East and North Africa, and it has catalyzed a Gandhi-esque movement in the streets of New Delhi.

Fight the Power 2

The public’s mental map of official immorality around the world reflects political blindspots: we tend to indict obvious crimes without interrogating structures and historical inequities. (photo: docufotografiti)

Indian activist Anna Hazare has inspired huge demonstrations in support of his hunger strike to promote a strict, controversial anti-corruption measure known as the Jan Lokpal bill. The government’s recent crackdown on Hazare only steeled protesters’ resolve under the slogan “India is Anna, Anna is India.”

Yet not all have been swept up in Hazare fever. Author and activist Arundhati Roy boldly challenged the public framing of the corruption issue, arguing it has been whitewashed by a bourgeois, nationalistic political class.In a commentary in The Hindu, she describes the obsession with the Lokpal bill, which would institute a “draconian” bureaucracy to monitor officials, as a well-managed charade, designed to absorb popular grievances into a more palatable but no less hierarchical concept of “accountability”:

Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality, or in creating yet another power structure that people will have to defer to?

Rukshana Nanayakkara, senior programme coordinator for South Asia with the watchdog group Transparency International, told Colorlines that although the Indian and Arab uprisings may voice the outrage of citizens who feel “helpless and hopeless” about their rulers, their protests won’t necessarily articulate a solution:

While it is an important task to highlight corruption issues or to drive a grassroots movement based on this to overcome barriers to bring change, the real impact would lie within systemic changes and sustained ethical environments.

We can agree that corruption is bad, but can’t agree on what corruption really is. And when those who already have power are allowed to define and regulate corrupt practices, they’re empowered to permit the most dangerous form of impunity—the kind that is ingrained in the very edifice of the state.

Corruption Near and Far

Corruption may be a universal scourge, but media portrayals and civil society surveys suggest that the problem is especially acute in the Global South, which in turn invites facile “cultural” explanations for greed and graft (pointing to, say, gift-giving traditions or inborn backwardness and tribalism of sub-Saharan Africa).

Yet North and South are both plagued by breakdowns of institutional integrity. The banking collapse and everyday machinations of government reveal that the malaise reaches up to the highest offices in Washington. Indeed, much of the dirty money that floods into the Global South trickles down from above, according to a Transparency International paper:

The North also carries part of the responsibility for the situation in the South due to its role as the bribe-payer. After all, it is largely Northern corporate interests that supply the bribe payments. Until recently, governments of the North not only tolerated these corrupt practices, but they even rewarded them with tax deductibility.

The public’s mental map of official immorality around the world reflects political blindspots: we tend to indict obvious crimes without interrogating structures and historical inequities.

“Corruption in the Global South is much talked about as it is part of day-to-day lives of people, as opposed to grand level corruption, which is normally opaque and harder to uncover,” Nanayakkara noted. At the same time, Transparency International says public perceptions of corruption are rising in affluent countries, in part due to the financial crisis.

But official transgressions do cut especially deep in impoverished communities, where rules are slackened to attract private investment or “development aid.” In the Haiti earthquake, for example, Transparency International observed that the extreme death toll could be traced in part to “alleged corruption in the construction of public buildings, including schools and hospitals.” And in the aftermath, suspicions of profiteering continue to swirl around the reconstruction process, now being directed by a shaky national government and the corporate-friendly coffers of the Haiti Interim Recovery Commission.

Environmental disasters can aggravate government malfeasance. Activists warn that policy responses to climate change may create unprecedented opportunities for exploitation and profiteering, particularly in much-hyped development projects for green energy and forest preservation.

The idea of corruption as culturally endemic offers convenient justification for outside intervention in poor countries. In an analysis of public myths about corruption, development scholars Ed Brown, Jon Cloke and Mohammad Sohail argued, “rather than seeing corruption as a complex socio-political phenomenon linked to global processes and specific national cultural and political economies, the issue is often reduced to a kind of political backwardness which needs ‘treatment.’ ”

The potential side effects of this medicine have manifested in neoliberal financial interventions like the IMF restructuring plans that pauperized Haiti and stoked chaos in Greece. The authors point out that so-called “anti-corruption programmes” imposed by free-market experts sometimes aggravate economic damage and ironically end up reaffirming stereotypes of poor countries as innately incompetent.

Symptoms and Causes

Sometimes the popular fixation on officials’ ethical transgressions distracts from the political malaise of which they are a symptom. And political elites are wise to this. In the U.S., the right evokes the canard of “waste, fraud and abuse” to militate against any form of income redistribution by blaming the economic hardship that “deserving” citizens face on imaginary “welfare queens,” patients who use too much Medicaid, civil servants collecting extra disability pay, and other social parasites.

Is corruption just the cost of doing business in a society that traffics in injustice? A recent public opinion study suggests people’s lack of trust in government institutions isn’t just tied to perceptions of official malfeasance, but the degree of social inequality they experience, along with the perceived failure of policymakers to address it.

The rebellions unfolding in North Africa, the Middle East and India reflect righteous resentment at rulers who have made careers out of betraying public trust. Of course, ultimately, Indian officials may fail again to police themselves, and the Arab Spring uprisings may be hijacked by new political orders that just rebrand old patterns of tyranny and kleptocracy. Whatever emerges from the unrest, fundamental inequalities will still reign, as long as entrenched hierarchies remain intact and governance hinges on tiers of privilege.

Our disgust with rotten politicians and Wall Street kingpins is in part anger at their impunity, but maybe there’s a streak of latent jealousy, a dog-eat-doggedness that pervades any competitive capitalist society. Still, even if humans are hard wired to exploit, we’re also hard wired to keep trying to harness power, however naïvely we deploy legislation and revolutionary rhetoric. In the debate over fixing crooked leaders, the definition of corruption often leaves out the root: not the people who misuse authority, but an excess of power itself.

Michelle Chen

Michelle Chen is a contributing editor at In These Times. She is a regular contributor to the labor rights blog Working In These Times, Colorlines.com, and Pacifica's WBAI. Her work has also appeared in Alternet, Ms. Magazine, Newsday, and her old zine, cain.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Anonymous Joins #OCCUPYWALLSTREET



Adbusters Blog

Anonymous Joins #OCCUPYWALLSTREET

"Wall Street, Expect Us!" says video communique.

Image text by Left Righty, Anonymous image by lio leiser

Hey jammers, dreamers, patriots,

Anonymous has just released a video communique endorsing #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. Using language from our first Tactical Briefing, the video calls on protestors to adopt the nonviolent Tahrir-acampadas model. On the 17th of September, it says, "flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months … Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices."

See also signs of support for S17 on Anonymous's Twitter and websites.



Meanwhile S17 is surging ahead internationally. Simultaneous occupations of financial districts are now being planned in New York City, Madrid, Milan, London, Paris and San Francisco. With a bit of luck, this list of participating cities will grow.

If we can pull together just the right mix of nonviolence, tenacity and strategic smarts, S17 could be the beginning of the global revolution we've all been dreaming about for so long … wouldn't that be lovely.

for the wild,

Culture Jammers HQ

occupywallstreet.org // occupywallst.org // Reddit // Facebook

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Do We Need a Militant Movement to Save the Planet (and Ourselves)?

AlterNet.org

ENVIRONMENT

Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Aric McBay call for new strategy to stave off environmental catastrophe.


Environmental groups are trying to build a critical mass around issues like global warming to inspire public action and encourage legislators to get their heads out of the sand. The Sierra Club is working to block new coal burning power plants, a new coalition is organizing actions against a tar sands pipeline, and folks in West Virginia are sitting in trees in an attempt to halt destructive strip mining. It's great work, but what if it's not enough? What if it's too little, too late? What if we never get enough mass for it to ever reach that critical point?

A new book called Deep Green Resistance, by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen, says that we likely won't have enough people interested in saving the planet before we run out of time. So, they're calling for a change in strategy. You may know Jensen from his many books, including Endgame. McBay is the author of Peak Oil Survival: Preparing for Life After Gridcrash, and Keith is the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. The three longtime activists have teamed up to offer a more radical approach to our environmental crisis.

They use words like "militant" and "resistance" a lot. And they critique the Left a lot. And they review the semantics of "violence." "I would urge the following distinctions," writes Keith, "the violence of hierarchy vs. the violence of self-defense, violence against actual people vs. violence against property, and the violence as self-actualization vs. the violence of political resistance."

And if you're firmly in the nonviolence-is-the-answer camp, don't get scared off (yet), because there is a ton of crucial information in this book. And just because they mention violence doesn't mean it's the best policy. You may not want to sign up to lead their underground army, but you should hear them out. Because the planet is being destroyed. Each day 200 species go extinct, Jensen writes in the preface. And if you can't wrap your head around that number, how about "90 percent of the large fish in the ocean are gone, there is ten times as much plastic as phytoplankton in the oceans, 97 percent of native forests are destroyed, 98 percent of native grasslands are destroyed ..." and Jensen continues with the bad news from there.

In a couple of decades, we may be looking at the end of life as we know it on this planet. "What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair?" asks Keith in the first chapter. It's not just global warming but a confluence of catastrophes that cannot be blamed on Republicans or climate deniers or rich people with their personal jets, but on all of us, together. The culprit is industrial civilization, say the writers. "This culture destroys landbases. That's what it does," writes Jensen. "And it won't stop because we ask it nicely."

And so how do we save the world (and along with it ourselves)? Well, naturally we take down industrial civilization, they say. Yeah, no small feat. Especially when so many of us actually live quite comfortably in this civilization — roofs over our heads, running water, flushing toilets, access to medical care, decent food to eat, cars to drive, electronics to play with, vacations to take. And, of course, the most powerful people live in a penthouse, far above relative standards of comfort and have zero desire to pack up and move out.

So this taking down of civilization will not be easy, of course. But according to Jensen, Keith and McBay, it is necessary because no other response out there even comes close to matching the scale of the problem we face. And we can no longer afford to simply make personal changes to bike more and eat local. And we can no longer afford to be grieved by polluted rivers or angered by short-sighted politicians without doing everything we can to stop it. So what do we do? Their 500-plus page book attempts to map out a strategy for their vision and also provide a critique of historical resistance movements — what works, what doesn't work.

In a phone call with all three authors, I asked them more about whether or not they are advocating for militant action, what is involved in creating a culture of resistance, and what a post-industrial world would look like?

Tara Lohan: The book focuses on achieving a culture of resistance. What do you mean by that?

Lierre Keith: Right now on the Left what we have is an alternative culture, and I would say that is kind of a subculture where you can withdraw from the mainstream and hang out with people who think pretty much like you do and have a whole lot of alternative institutions, but none of your actions and none of your institutions pose a threat to the power structure. You can have a nice life that way and certainly keep your sanity by hanging out with people who agree with you. I think this is a place where a lot of political movements go to die. There are obvious reasons people do this — it is scary to fight back. It feels overwhelming, and I think most people just want comfort. But in the end, we are going to have to dismantle the power structure that is destroying the planet.

So what we have right now is the alternative culture, but what we need is a culture of resistance — we need a culture that is self-consciously oppositional to things like corporate power, capitalism, industrialization and ultimately civilization, because that is the arrangement of power on this planet right now.

Derrick Jensen: In addition, so much of the so-called opposition to the destruction is what I would really term a loyal opposition instead of a real resistance. A couple of ways to look at it — one of them is that what do all the so-called solutions to global warming have in common that are presented in the mainstream in the United States? What they all have in common is, they all take industrial capitalism as a given.

A really great example of this is, back in 1997, I interviewed members of MRTA, a rebel group who had taken over the Japanese ambassador's house in Peru. I was excited to write an article about it. I sent an email to a leading progressive magazine, saying that I was talking to this guy, and I got a call from the editor within a half hour, saying "Hey, this is great. We're really excited about it. What's the article going to be like?" I said it will be about what their demands are for Peru. What they wanted was very simple — to grow and distribute their own food. They already knew how to do that — they just wanted to be allowed to do it. I was talking about that, and she was very excited, and I said, "Also, the core of this is that to really stop empire, you can't just have people in the margins fighting empire, but we have to fight empire at home — we have to breakdown capitalism at its core." Hello? Hello? The response went from enthusiasm to "I need to talk to my editorial board." So I got an email a half hour later, saying "Thanks, but no thanks." There is all this really great talk about how it's important to resist some place else, but when one actually talks about resistance here in the United States, then stone-cold silence.

TL: What you're talking about is the end of life as we know it. This is the only civilization that we've known. In your minds, what does a post-industrial civilization look like? Where does food come from, energy?

Aric McBay: If we are talking about a post-industrial society, then I think we have to draw on the examples of traditional, indigenous societies, so I think the answer will look very different, depending on where you live and what your landbase is. So, if I'm here on an island in the St. Lawrence River, where I am now, then my answer to that question will be very different than if I live where Lierre and Derrick are on the coast of California, or if I live in the Amazon rainforest. I think one of the problems with industrial society in general is that it tries to come up with some answer that it can impose everywhere on the planet, and that just doesn't work. But in general, I think that the kind of society we would envision is based on democratic, small communities that can obtain their food locally and use energy that the land around them can provide.

The future that we want isn't going to come about automatically or accidentally. People have to think about where this culture is leading us and what we have to do to get a livable future. If we continue on with business as usual, which is the drawdown of freshwater supplies, the destruction of soil, the burning of every fossil fuel source that can be dug or ground out of the planet, then the endpoint is something that looks like what is happening in the Horn of Africa right now. I mean, that's what happens when colonialism reaches its endpoint and the soil and water are destroyed. That is the kind of future that is going to happen if we don't take action and effective resistance.

Global warming is not the sort of thing where you can delay action and say, "OK, when it gets bad, we'll stop burning fossil fuels," because the planet's climate just doesn't work that way. If we pass certain tipping points that we're already passing, then global warming will become irreversible even if we stop burning fossil fuels. Tipping points like methane being melted and released from the floor of the Arctic ocean, which is already happening now. Or the Amazon rainforest, which produces its own climate, drying out and turning into a desert. There have been prolonged droughts already there. We are really on the edge of when we can take action and still be effective. Of course, that is the business as usual scenario but there are other scenarios where people take action and disrupt the system that is exploiting the poor globally and destroying the planet. And then we have a chance to build the kind of communities that not only will be sustainable but will meet the basic human needs that so many people aren't having met right now.

LK: The grasslands are 98 percent gone, and the prairies of the world are 99 percent gone, and they've been destroyed for agriculture. So, if we can repair those perennial polycultures, especially the grasslands, and return them to the prairies, they would be with their full community members. In this country, that would be the bison. Those are the animals that need to be here. If we could do that over 75 percent of the world's trashed-out rangelands, it would take about 15 years, but we could sequester all of the carbon that's been released since the beginning of the industrial age. That's a tremendous amount of carbon, but that's how good prairies are at building topsoil. The basic building block of soil is carbon. This is not hopeful. There is a lot of hope, though, in terms of learning to participate once more with the planet as members of those biotic communities, but it means we have to stop destroying and remember what our place really is in that cycle of life.

TL: I hear a lot of talk about sustainable agriculture. In your view, is there any kind of agriculture that is sustainable?

LK: No, and I'm going to quote both Toby Hemenway, the permaculture guy, and Richard Manning, who is a wonderful scholar of prairies.Both use the same sentence, which is: Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron.

TL: So then we would be going back to a hunting/gathering system for food?

LK: You could have hunter/gatherer, you can have horticulturism, you could have pastoralism. In some way those are all variations on a theme. It's based on perennial polycultures. But the moment that you clear away those biotic communities, you destroy those perennial plants. Then, you are talking about agriculture, and that is inherently destructive.

DJ: The important thing to remember through all of this is that the land is primary. Indigenous people in California and certainly elsewhere have changed their landscape, but they did so with the recognition that they're going to be in that place for the next 500 years. If you are planning on living in place for the next 500 years, you're going to make radical land-use decisions. I can't imagine anyone who would plan on living in place for 500 years who would allow mountaintop removal or agriculture, for that matter, or who would allow rivers to be poisoned or dammed. We have to recognize that life is based on the land and that one can't allow the land to be destroyed, because if the land is destroyed, then you're destroyed.

TL: The foresight that people seem to have today is about the length of an election cycle. How can we get folks to take a longer view?

DJ: So many indigenous people have said to me, the first thing we need to do is decolonize our hearts and minds. Another way to look at this is to say, "What is it that you want?" If what you are wanting is the results of an extractive economy, then you're facing an insoluble problem, because you can't have the financial benefits of empire without empire. So one of the reasons we lose so often is that I think a lot of us are not very clear about what we want. So the first thing is for people to be clear on what they want. I want to live in a world that has more wild salmon every year than the year before.

A lof of environmentalists want to protect a piece of ground but do not question why the land is being destroyed. If they do, that leads to the question of why is land in general being destroyed, and then that leads to the question of why do you have an economy where more land always needs to be destroyed. But different questions will also lead you to the same direction. If you ask why do men rape women, and you keep asking that question, it is going to lead you to the foundation of the patriarchy. If you ask about racism, what are the roots of it, keep asking the question. You end up going back to some fundamental problem.

The whole point is that people increasingly recognize that we don't live in a democracy and that the government actually serves corporations instead of human beings. I ask people all the time — does the U.S. government better serve individual human beings or corporations? Nobody ever says individual people, nobody. When I go talk to a local computer store owner, I don't talk about salmon, because he doesn't care. What I talk about is Walmart, because he now has to get a second job in addition to his computer store. And this is true — he now has to get a second job as a guard at prison because Walmart can sell computers cheaper than he can buy them. So Walmart has essentially driven him out of business. We can find those wedges. We don't just have to get people thinking long-term. The first thing I think we have to do is to find a way — that they already hate the system, and use that as an entree to begin talking.

LK: I have a slightly different answer, which is that I don't think we're ever going to have a mass movement, and social change does not actually happen by mass movements, generally. Usually, there is only a small percentage of the population that will rise up and take on the power structure, and that is usually about 2 percent. So, I'm after the 2 percent. I want the people who understand that this is going to be a long, drawn-out and not particularly easy or fun kind of project, and what they are looking for is a strategy. They know that things are really bad, and the powerful are not going to give up willingly. So what I've tried to do is provide guidance about what that strategy might look like. Those are the people that I'm speaking to. I'm not speaking to mainstream America. I don't know how to talk to those people, and there is no point in me trying.

AM: I think one of the things we need to do to get people looking long-term is to build that culture of resistance and to build radical organizations that are capable of doing that, because the agenda of even the progressive kind of Left is really one that is still set by people who don't question the existence of capitalism, or who don't question the existence of these basic systems that are destroying the planet. Chris Hedges wrote a book called the Death of the Liberal Class, documenting the ways in which radical thought had been purged from the Left over the last almost 100 years.

TL: In the book you mention militant action. Can you explain what you mean by militant, so we're all on the same page? And why you see this as being the most effective way to work for change?

AM: Well, militant action for me means fighting; it doesn't have to mean physical fighting or fist fights, but it means actually fighting those systems of power. It could be in economic terms. There are militant strikes that have taken place for a long time, going back to the Wobblies and before. It is about force — that's the key idea here. It is about using force and not about using persuasion.

LK: I think one of the basic insights of radicalism is that oppression is not a misunderstanding. It doesn't end because someone has a personal epiphany or some kind of spiritual enlightenment. It happens when you take power away from the powerful and redistribute it to the dispossessed. With the militant thing, we're always told, "Oh, you're going to alienate people. You can't do this." It's not true, and the suffragists in Britain proved that. When you have somebody actually saying the truth and approaching the problem with some kind of program that matches the scale of the horrors of what is happening, people respond well.

AM: I think that that kind of pattern is something that shows up again and again in all kinds of social movements and anti-colonial movements. It showed up in Ireland, in South Africa. You saw these militant groups that really helped things take off in their areas, but because of this kind of radical purging on the Left, I think there is a misunderstanding of how social change actually happens. And I think that militancy is one of the key ways to build a movement that is going to work, whether or not that militancy is the endpoint that you're looking for.

I was reading about the anti-apartheid university sit-ins in the 1980s, and in one case, a group was having a lot of trouble getting people to come out to meetings and sign petitions. People were getting tired, and so they decided to do this sit-in at the university administration to risk getting arrested. But they worried, since no one is even showing up to our petition nights, how is this going to work? They decided to do it anyway. What they found was that they had a huge turnout. The original group got there, and then hundreds and hundreds of more people came, because they thought this was a tactic that might actually work. I think that most people who are sympathetic to environmental concerns or to concerns of social oppression are not taking action, because they know that the typical things that we're suppose to do on the Left — sign a petition or write to your member of parliament or Congressperson — they know that that is not going to work, and we're not going to have a movement that is going to take off until people are using tactics that have a chance of success.

DJ: I wrote an essay a couple of years ago about how when I go to some event like Bioneers or Greenfest that I'm supposed to end up feeling all rejuvenated and inspired, but the truth is that when I've been to those, I've always ended up feeling discouraged, defeated and lied to. And the reason is because there were all these people talking about all these so-called solutions, but I was the only person there who gave a presentation that included power or psychopathology, and how can you possibly talk about social change without talking about the understanding that those in power have and what power means?

When we talk about militants, everyone talks about violence, but one of the baselines we have to talk about that people don't acknowledge is that empire is based on violence in the first place, and there is tremendous violence going on right now. We can't talk about any sort of militant resistance without acknowledging that brown people the world over are being bombed to serve empire.

There is violence not just of direct bombs but the violence of dispossession in order to take land to be used for cash crops exports. Remember what the rebel group in Peru wanted — they wanted the people of Peru to grow their own food. They already knew how to do it. They only need to be allowed to do so. What that means is that they were not being allowed to have food self-sufficiency, which happens the world over. Right now farmers are being driven off their land in India, because the water is being stolen for Coca-Cola. I have a friend that used to be married to someone from Bangladesh. Even 20 years ago, his mother would say to him to get some lunch, and he would go get some fish from the river. Now people in the entire village cannot fish because the river is so polluted that they have to buy their fish from Iceland. That is the process of being forced into the wage economy.

If we want to talk about violence, let's talk the 20 million to 1 ratio of human attacks on sharks to shark attacks on humans. Let's talk about the Mekong River catfish that is going to be extricated by dams. Part of the problem is that violence that is higher on the hierarchy we don't see at all, or if we do see it, it is fully rationalized. That is something that needs to be brought to any conversation. There is tremendous violence being forced down the hierarchy, but the fact that we don't notice a lot of it is because we're in a position of privilege.

LK: I would just add to that, if you live in one of the rich nations, you live behind a military barricade, and the only reason that you don't know that every single thing you buy is based on violence is because of that military barricade. So we can turn away in complete denial to the real cost of every single piece of food we eat and everything we buy — the cell phones, the ipods, the cars, whatever. There are a whole bunch of dead people and dead bioregions behind everything that we buy. And it is that military barricade that keeps us safe and keeps us in a complete land of dreams. But it is all based on violence. All we are saying is that we want to stop the violence. We don't want to make violence.

My friend Gail Dines has a lot of students that work at places like Old Navy and the Gap, and they regularly find, when they're unpacking the jeans and the T-shirts, little notes stuffed into the pockets that say "Please help us." This is from the factory workers in China or Taiwan or wherever.

TL: You are talking about wanting to stop the violence, but you're also talking about violence as a tool — violence against property and against people. In what ways do you think they're useful and in what scenarios?

AM: Well, I think that in the book we don't really talk about violence against people too much except to critique it and discuss the issues around that. In terms of property destruction, the main physical expression of this system has to do with infrastructure. Everything in this society — from the tar sands and the mountaintop removal to military expeditions and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan — it's all about fossil fuel energy, cheap energy. That cheap energy allows a small group of people to project power and dominance in a way that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

And so, if we want to stop that system, if we want to stop the planet from being baked alive, one of the most important things that needs to be done is to actually physically disrupt those systems, and that infrastructure is very vulnerable. One of the things that resistance movements need to think about is about leverage, is about how much change you can make with how many people you have, because resistance movements are inherently outnumbered. And so they really need to look for the place with the most leverage. So far, the Left in North America has focused on areas where they have the least leverage — things like ethical consumerism.

DJ: I will add that infrastructure destruction has long been part of every military strategy as well — attempting to destroy one's enemy's capacity to wage war is central to any strategy. And, really, what we're talking about in this case is attempting to destroy the enemy's capacity to wage war on the poor and on the planet.

LK: Political change happens because it is forced upon the powerful, and the question that comes much later is, are you going to use violence to exert that force or something else? But you have to acknowledge that this is always a question of force. It does not happen by personal ephipany or persuasion or rational argument but by power. And usually what you're up against is a pretty sociopathic kind of system. I think about the French labor strikes that happened last October, where, in about three weeks, they had shut down the entire French economy simply by blockading the oil depots. No one got hurt. Yhey used human bodies and burning tires and trucks, and they blockaded the oil depots and the refineries. They stopped the basic energy from coming into the country, so that in three weeks, it was pretty much grinding to a halt. Given a realistic assessment of what we do have, the only strategy that matches the scale of the problem in the time frame that we have left to us, which is maybe 50 years, is direct attacks on infrastructure, so that's the strategy we are proposing. If you can show me a million people who are willing to blockade oil depots day after day and willing to block roads into West Virginia to stop mountaintop removal day after day after day, we can talk about using nonviolence, because I think it's a very elegant political technique.

But I don't see the numbers. You're asking the most privileged people on the planet to give up that privilege, and I don't think that is going to happen. In other countries, yes. In other countries, if their neck is being stepped on by the boot of power, yes, they know what is at stake, and you may be able to get enough numbers for a nonviolent resistance,. But in this country, I don't have a lot of hope for it.

TL: Derrick, you wrote that all the people associated with the Gulf Spill should be executed. That's going a little beyond property destruction.

DJ: If I were to write that now, I would take out the word "all" and put in the word "many." A couple of jokes I used to tell that aren't that funny: What do you get when you cross a long drug habit, a quick temper and a gun? The answer is two life terms for murder, earliest release date 2026. On the other hand, what do you get when you cross two nation states, a large corporation, three tons of poison and 8,000 dead human beings? The answer is, retirement with full pay and benefits.

Years ago, I was doing a benefit for a group trying to keep a toxic waste dump out of their community in Mexico. It was a poor Hispanic community. Many of the people who were blockading were being arrested by their neighbors, so the cops would protect distant economic interests over the health of their community. So we started having this conversation about what would happen if the police actually enforced cancer-free zones. Or the police actually enforced rape-free zones. What if the police enforced monopoly-free zones? And we all laughed, because we knew that was never going to happen. And then we thought, what if we had community police forces that were actually set up to enforce rape-free zones, toxic-free zones, that would not allow corporations to come in and poison our homes. And what would it look like to have a community defense force that is allowed to do that? Well, what that looks like is revolution. My point is that if those in power are not going to protect us from the Tony Haywards, then we in our communities need to protect ourselves from the Tony Haywards and the corporations they wield as tools.

TL : So what is your strategy for ending industrial civilization?

AM: I think the strategy is two-pronged. On one hand, we need to build up egalitarian communities, movements for democracy, local self-sufficiency, a lot of the things that progressives are trying to do right now, things like the Transition Town movements. But then, at the same time, we actually need to have another prong, and their job is to break things down, to break down the structures that are destroying the planet. You can't just have one. You can't just have people building their own alternative communities. You know, I live on an organic farm, we grow most of our own food, and we build soil with perennial polycultures and all of that sort of thing, but if we don't stop runaway global warming, then none of this is going to work. We just had several weeks without rain, and that is without severe climate change. The grass was all yellow, and the cows were very thirsty. So we can't just have one side of the prong, because the communities that we're trying to build won't survive.

And the two prongs need to undertake things very differently if you are talking about building democratic communities. And then, that is something that people do above ground, by building networks, building coalitions. On the other hand, if you are talking about disrupting or destroying systems that are killing the planet and people, then that is something that is traditionally done by the underground wing of the movement, by clandestine groups. Especially now with the amount of surveillance in our everyday lives, people who want to take direct action against systems of power have to do so secretly. That is the smaller part in terms of numbers but an essential part of the strategy.

DJ: I know that every prediction about global warming is that they underestimate it on the previous one, and I know that those in power are looking with what can only be described as lust at the melting of the Arctic ice caps. They are not looking with horror. They are not looking with shame. They are not looking with sorrow. They are not looking to change things. They are looking with lust at the access to resources. Anyone who thinks that they are going to stop before every living being on this planet has been killed is not paying any attention.

Every cell in my body wants there to be a voluntary transition to a sustainable way of living, but I'm not going to base the future of the planet on that anymore than I am going to base it on unicorns jumping over the moon and farting pixie dust. It is just not going to happen. Those in power are insatiable. They are insane. They care more for increasing power and making money than life on the planet. I can't bear to live in a world being murdered, and I can't understand how anyone who even remotely considers themselves a living being can not oppose this with every bit of energy that they have, through whatever means are necessary to save life on the planet. I don't understand why it is even controversial to talk about dismantling industrial civilization when it has shown itself for 6,000 years to be destroying the planet and to be systemically committing genocide. I mean this is not even a new idea.

LK: Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato all talked about how the world is being destroyed by agriculture — the soil was washing down the hills into rivers and killing the rivers. This is as old as civilization because that's what civilization is. We are not the first people to realize this. We talk about the oceans — two-thirds of all animal breaths are made possible by the plankton that the oceans produce, and the plankton populations are collapsing now, because the oceans are dying. If the oceans go down, we go down with them. There will not be life on land if the plankton go. This is what we are facing now, and it does require a solution that is commensurate with the problem. So all of this withdrawal into your own backyard garden is not in any way going to address the fact that the plankton are collapsing, and that is why we need a resistance, not a withdrawal. Personal solutions aren't political solutions, and it is only through political solutions that we can take apart the political institutions that are actually murdering our planet.

Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet and editor of the new book Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraLohan.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Time for Main Street to Occupy Wall Street?

Adbusters Blog

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET

A shift in revolutionary tactics.
#OCCUPYWALLSTREET

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET

Alright you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,

A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future. The spirit of this fresh tactic, a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain, is captured in this quote:

"The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people."

— Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University
Barcelona, Spain

The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.

The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.

On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.

Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated demand?

The most exciting candidate that we've heard so far is one that gets at the core of why the American political establishment is currently unworthy of being called a democracy: we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we're doomed without it.

This demand seems to capture the current national mood because cleaning up corruption in Washington is something all Americans, right and left, yearn for and can stand behind. If we hang in there, 20,000-strong, week after week against every police and National Guard effort to expel us from Wall Street, it would be impossible for Obama to ignore us. Our government would be forced to choose publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the corporations.

This could be the beginning of a whole new social dynamic in America, a step beyond the Tea Party movement, where, instead of being caught helpless by the current power structure, we the people start getting what we want whether it be the dismantling of half the 1,000 military bases America has around the world to the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act or a three strikes and you're out law for corporate criminals. Beginning from one simple demand – a presidential commission to separate money from politics – we start setting the agenda for a new America.

Post a comment and help each other zero in on what our one demand will be. And then let's screw up our courage, pack our tents and head to Wall Street with a vengeance September 17.

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ


Adbusters #97: Post Anarchism – How To Live Without Dead Time (with #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign materials inside), hits newsstands on August 2. Go to adbusters.org/subscribe and subscribe!


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Is America Ripe for a Tahrir Moment?


Adbusters Blog

Is America Ripe for a Tahrir Moment?

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET goes viral.

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET

Hey you rebels, radicals and utopian dreamers out there,

Our call to #OCCUPYWALLSTREET on September 17 shook up a tsunami of spontaneous enthusiasm. Jammers from all over the nation (and a few Canadians!) have sent word that they will be there. Meanwhile various activist organizers have realized the potential of this event, rolled up their sleeves and gotten to work. While some techies have teamed up to build an indie open source website for organizing carpools to the event (occupywallst.org), others are thinking through the logistics of feeding everyone and defending the first days of the occupation. Through it all, a deluge of solidarity messages have been pouring in from Spain, Egypt and elsewhere.

Will you be there?

Imagine … the dawn of the 13th day of the occupation … you're tired, not sleeping or eating too great … you've been harassed, maybe tear gassed and beaten. Bloomberg is threatening to call in the National Guard, Obama is hemming and hawing, but you are sitting tight because much of the nation is cheering you on. Al Jazeera and the BBC are beaming your struggle to a captivated world and the tension is building for Obama to break his silence. It feels much like it did in Tahrir Square moments before Mubarak caved. You've never felt so alive!

What had the power to inspire all this?

It was our one simple demand that Barack Obama must ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence that corporate money has over our representatives in Washington. Our one simple demand is: STOP THE MONIED CORRUPTION AT THE HEART OF OUR DEMOCRACY!

Achieving this Presidential Reform Commission will be the crucial first step towards opening a political space for a flurry of further people's demands like, total transparency in all government affairs, a Tobin Tax on financial transactions, a grand strategy for reducing America's carbon footprint …

September 17 could be the beginning of an American Spring … the moment we the people turn the tables on our would-be corporate masters and start acting like free empowered citizens once again.

Are you with us? Bring a tent.

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ


Get Involved:

Call to Artists:

We call on Helmut Smits, Darius and Downey, Mark Jenkins, JR, Bansky and cultural creatives everywhere to create pieces that embolden the September 17th revolt. Send to kono@adbusters.org

Call to International Jammers:

We call on jammers across the world to occupy financial districts on September 17:

#OCCUPYBAYSTREET in Toronto, Canada
#OCCUPYCANARYWHARF in London, UK
#OCCUPYMARTINPLACE in Sydney, Australia
#OCCUPYMARUNOUCHI in Tokyo, Japan
#OCCUPYBANKENVIERTEL in Frankfurt, Germany
… and elsewhere!

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