Project Political Dissent

“Saboteur” / Radical Peace: People Refusing War,

2011-12-29T21:47:00.000-08:00

Saboteur

An interview with a domestic insurgent

by William T. Hathaway / December 29th, 2011

I first met the man we’ll call Trucker in 1970 at a rally against the Vietnam War. Our demo was going to start on the Berkeley campus and continue with a march down Telegraph Avenue. This was shortly after the National Guard and police had murdered six demonstrators at Kent State and Jackson State, so the mood was extremely tense. The Berkeley city government had denied us a permit to march and called in police reinforcements from Oakland. The Oakland cops had a reputation for brutality (based on their treatment of the black population), and we were expecting an ugly and possibly violent confrontation. Out of fear, many people decided not to march, but others of us argued that marching was now more important than ever. We needed to defy the government’s attempts to scare us into silence.

After speeches and music in front of Sproul Hall, we marched off the campus and were met by a wall of police sealing off Telegraph Avenue. Some of our hard-cores in front tried to break through the barrier but were clubbed down. Cops began firing what looked liked shotguns, and people started screaming and running in panic, but it turned out to be tear gas.

A demonstrator wearing a biker helmet, swim goggles, and a cloth around his face picked up a gas canister with gloved hands and hurled it back at the police — a classic scene of a brave individual defying tyranny. Inspired, I pulled off my old green beret that I’d been wearing and used it to protect my hands as I scooped up a hot canister and threw it back where it came from. I thought about all the grenades I’d thrown in Vietnam and felt much better about this one.

The first line of cops, those who were firing, wore gas masks, but those behind didn’t, and I felt a surge of triumph seeing them run from their own gas. But the ones in masks kept advancing and firing, looking like robots.

The peace marchers fell back, fleeing down side streets. Agonized from the tear gas, I sank to my knees, hacking convulsively. My eyes were seared, nose and throat raw, skin burning. Through the tears I saw the guy in the biker helmet approaching. He helped me off the street into a doorway and pulled out a first-aid kit. From a squeeze bottle he squirted glycerin water into my eyes and nose, helped me rinse my mouth and throat with regular water from a canteen, then rubbed moist baking soda under my eyes. He was firm but gentle, like a good combat medic. I saw the cloth around his face was a towel wet with vinegar to absorb some of the gas. This man was equipped.

As soon as I could walk better, we straggled away from the scene. The police strategy had worked: the march was broken up, scattered in all directions. We walked down to People’s Park, angry, bitter, exhausted.

The park was full, and no cops dared to show, although they and other agents were probably there undercover. Joints were being passed around, and we got high. Smoking grass back then had an innocence to it that it hasn’t had since. Cannabis helped us to abandon the death world we saw around us and resurrect our child-selves. Stoned people were learning to play again, singing, blowing giant iridescent soap bubbles, juggling pine cones, tossing Frisbees back and forth. But under it seethed a mood of defiance and rebellion. A statement in Ramparts magazine summed up our feelings: “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.” But I would have spelled it a-lie-nation. A group of conga drummers were playing, and their furious, insistent beat seemed to herald a rising tidal wave of protest that would sweep the militarists out of power.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but this wasn’t the beginning of the wave but its crest, and in the next years it would dwindle down. But this was better than no wave at all. It didn’t sink the ship of state, but it did slosh over the deck. And now a new one is rising that may go even higher.

The events of the day bonded Trucker and me as friends, and although our lives took different directions after that, we stayed in touch. Years ago he went totally underground, changing his identity and location, and since then all I’ve had for him is a webmail address, through which we held the following interview.

Hathaway: Why don’t you start by telling us why you became a saboteur.

Trucker: Well, like Jerry Garcia said, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” After you went back to New York I joined an anarchist affinity group, and we worked with the Weather Underground to move demos in the direction of revolt — trashing the headquarters of war corporations, barricading the entrance to the Oakland Army Terminal, throwing rocks at the cops. By then the fuzz had refined their tactics and had special squads that would target the activists, rush into the crowd and grab the hard-cores. They clubbed me, kicked me, punched me, then charged me with assaulting a police officer. I did four months in the Alameda County Jail. Later I found out our group had been infiltrated. One guy who was always pushing us to be more violent was actually an agent. He gave them all our plans, even photos of us he’d made with a hidden camera.

After that I gave up on groups and since then have focused on individual guerrilla insurrection, autonome actions, monkeywrenching the machine. Especially now with the Patriot Act, that’s become the safest way to work. There’s a good book, Leaderless Resistance, on how to organize that without getting smashed. You can’t totally prevent being infiltrated, but you can prevent the agents from knowing much.

Hathaway: I remember back then you were complaining about all the infiltration, and I thought you were paranoid, but it turned out you were right.

Trucker: Yeah, the government took our threat very seriously and did everything they could to smash us. But they couldn’t.

Once the war was finally over, I and lots of other people were totally burnt out. We needed a break, to depressurize. But after a while exhaustion turned to apathy, and many people lost interest in the ongoing struggle.

I remember when Nixon violated the Paris Peace Agreement by refusing to pay the reparations we’d promised to help Vietnam rebuild their infrastructure and buy medical supplies. Refusing this humanitarian aid was an outrageous, criminal act, and some of us tried to organize a mass protest. We ended up with a hundred people on the steps of the San Francisco County Courthouse. The momentum was gone.

I too began to focus more on my personal life. I’d met a woman I wanted to build a future with. We were both tired of being poor. Living on the fringe is a struggle, it wears you down. Neither of us wanted to work for the Man and go the yuppie route, and we wanted something with a bit of adventure to it.

I’d done a little dealing before, but now we got into it in a big way. Just grass and hash, though — natural plants. I never liked hard drugs. Went to Mexico and spent a long time in Michoacán finding a good connection. Not just price and quality, but also good personal vibes.

We moved to San Diego, and I cut my hair and shaved my beard. Customs was using dogs on the border by then, but we came up with a way to beat that. Formed a little company called Baha Divers, stenciled this on the sides of a van. I’d drive south across the border about every other day with the van full of scuba tanks and gear, supposedly to give diving lessons to the tourists at Rosarito Beach. The US border guards thought of course American tourists would rather learn to dive from an American. In Mexico we sealed the stuff inside the tanks. We filled them with hash because it’s more concentrated. I had cut the tanks in the middle and had an airtight way to reseal them. Then we would wash them off with ammonia, to get rid of any smell. The first couple of times I was totally nervous and was afraid the guards would pick up on that, but they didn’t. Pretty dull bunch. After a while they didn’t even bother to put the dog in the van, just waved me through.

People I’d known in the Bay area were now spread all over the West Coast, so before long we were supplying all the way up to Vancouver.

But one day the border guards flagged me into the inspection lane. They knew exactly what they were looking for, took the tanks apart and handcuffed me. It turned out that one of our guys on the Mexican side had got busted by the Federales, and he traded his way into a lower sentence by ratting me out.

It looked bad, like I’d be going back to the Bay area — all the way to San Quentin. But we hired a very good, VERY expensive lawyer, and he got me off. I had to plead guilty as part of a plea bargain but ended up with a suspended sentence.

I decided to get out of the business. By then our savings were enough to buy a spread of land with an old farmhouse in Oregon. We settled down, went back to college, got involved in local issues and environmental organizing.

Then it all exploded in our faces. We let a guy, friend of a friend, stay with us for a couple of weeks. He was going through hard times and needed some peace and quiet out in the country. He was active in the Black Panthers, and so of course the cops were hassling him, but what we didn’t know was that they had warrants on him for the armed robbery of three supermarkets. They tracked him out to our farm and arrested everybody there, charged us all with the robberies. He had some of the loot with him, and he’d given us some bills that turned out to be marked, so that tied us in. Cops found a few pot plants in our garden and added drug charges. They could tell we were radicals, so they wanted to send us away for as long as they could. Considering the other busts, I was looking at major time as a repeat offender.

We decided to scram. Sold the house and land. Our forfeited bail took a huge chunk of that, but since we weren’t going to pay taxes, we came out OK. With the help of some of our old contacts, we transferred the money off shore, then followed it and kept moving, got passports under new names. We thought about staying overseas and becoming ex-pats, but we both missed the USA. The thing is, we like the country. We just don’t like the people running it.

We had some facial surgery — my wife loves her new nose — and after a couple of years came back as different people. We haven’t been back to the West Coast, though, don’t want to push our luck. And we’re super law-abiding, except of course for the small matter of burning military vehicles.

Cutting ties was hard. Both our are families are conservative and had shut us out a long time ago, so that part wasn’t so difficult. That was pain we’d already gone through. But we had to let go of a lot of friendships. We have webmail with a few close and trusted folks like you, but none of them know where we live or our names.

Hathaway: Thanks for including me on your list.

Trucker: Well, we go back a long time. And those were very formative times.

But by the time we came back, the country was deep into the Big Chill. Straight and retro. Women were abandoning feminism and returning to femininity, joining the Fascinating Womanhood movement. Guys were majoring in business and wearing suits with suspenders like their grandfathers. Bill Gates replaced John Lennon as the generational hero. Disgusting.

Maybe as part of our trying to fit into the mainstream, we became tamer ourselves. Got married, in church yet. Stopped smoking dope … pretty much at least.

Politically, we started thinking that the way to bring change was through the Democrats, gradual reforms. Now we see that was a trap.

We turned radical again when Clinton ignored the chance for disarmament that the collapse of the Soviet Union offered. He could’ve turned the end of the Cold War into a new era of peace. Instead he saw the chance for empire and went for it. Modernized the military with high-tech weapons, clamped sanctions on Iraq that led to millions of children dying from lack of medicine, bombed Yugoslavia and built a huge base there. Rather than communists, the people who opposed the empire were now called terrorists.

Domestically he declared war on welfare. Thanks to his policies, millions of single mothers were forced away from their children and into crummy, low-paying jobs. Their kids grew up just as poor but much more neglected.

Underneath the big smile, Clinton was just a loyal servant of the corporations and the military. Both Clintons are masters of giving the impression of working for real change, but it’s just show. And Obama is even better at that show than they are.

The Democratic Party leadership serves the interests of the mercantile side of the business establishment. They support slightly higher wages and unemployment benefits so people will have money to keeping buy stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t go any farther than that. The basic injustice of the system is never challenged. The Democrats just bring mildly expansionist policies to stimulate the economy.

The Republicans bring mildly contractive policies that serve the interests of the fiscal side of business. They keep wages low, which holds costs and inflation down and thus preserves the value of capital.

Although these two tendencies conflict, they’re two complementary ways that corporations maintain their control over us, two sides of the same gold coin. Both are necessary for them, and trading the power back and forth keeps things running in a wobbly balance.

The goal of both parties is to continue this system with little changes here and there, fine tuning. Neither one is going to take it apart and rebuild it, which is what we need. And both parties support an aggressive foreign policy to force US economic and military power into other countries, which is what nobody needs except the corporations they represent.

Although there’s little difference in their policies, there’s a great deal of difference in how the parties are marketed to us. Liberal candidates are sold as figures of great hope. We’re supposed to think, Finally someone who’ll change things. But their changes turn out to be trivial. The system stays mostly the same, and we slump back into disappointment. As the disappointment builds to mass discontent, another fresh liberal face is presented to us with new slogans. But they’re all tied to the system. The only candidates that have a chance of getting nominated are those supported by business. They’re in their pockets. That’s the price of their coming to power.

Look back in the past. The only major changes to come out of congress have been the New Deal in the 1930s, passed to stave off a total economic collapse, and the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, passed under the threat of armed insurrection. And congress has been whittling away at them ever since.

We have to take the power away from both parties, close down their whole show. Or else we’ll keep on being their vassals.

We fall for their shell game because we have a desperate need to believe the USA is a great country and our personal lives will turn out well. So we ignore what our leaders are doing in the rest of the world and cling to their mirage of a better future. That’s comforting. But things are not improving, they’re declining. And that’ll continue until we get rid of this corporation government, both parties. We can’t build a new system until we break the power of the current one.

Hathaway: How are you trying to do that?

Trucker: After Bush & Co invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, I knew I couldn’t just sign petitions and march in demonstrations anymore. That wasn’t going to have any effect on these guys. I had to do what I could to keep them from waging war, to take away their equipment, to bankrupt them. The people running the show are just businessmen. If they see it’s costing them more than they can get out of it, they’ll stop. So I decided to start destroying expensive military items.

I took off in a pickup truck with a camper and a dirt bike to become a domestic insurgent. Slept in the camper so I didn’t leave records at motels. Showered at truck stops. I used the bike to scout out targets and escape routes.

I found out that security around the big bases was tight, so I started checking out National Guard branches. I liked the idea of taking revenge on the Guard for Kent State. I found a unit that had all their trucks and humvees locked in the motor pool behind a chainlink fence, but someone had left a staff car parked behind the building. I guess the colonel didn’t want to have to walk very far.

I decided to go for it, but this first time was damn near my last. I set myself on fire. I made the mistake of starting at the top. I poured gasoline over the trunk of the car above the gas tank, and then more under the tank. But without my knowing it, the gas ran down onto the sleeve of my coat. When I flicked the lighter, my whole arm caught fire. The car did too, of course, and I had to run away from it with a blazing arm. By the time I got the coat off, I had third degree burns. Hurt like hell but I couldn’t scream. Scared to.

But it was great seeing the car go up. When the vapor in the gas tank gets hot enough, it explodes, not a huge explosion, but enough to set off the whole tank, which erupts into a fireball that swallows the car. You can feel the concussion and a blast of heat. Everything is flames. It’s quite a scene, a real charge.

Getting away, I could hardly steer the bike, my arm hurt so much. I didn’t sleep that night because of the pain. Terrible oozing blisters, skin peeling off. I’d brought a first-aid kit with salve and stuff, but this was way past that.

I was afraid to go to the emergency room because they might call the cops — a guy comes in with burns right after an arson fire. But next morning I headed for the down side of downtown.

I had tried heroin once years ago and didn’t like its down, shut-off feeling. But now I needed it. I went to the bus station, knowing that’s a good place to score in most cities. I could pick up on dealer vibes, having been one myself, so I talked to this guy who was hanging out there, standing and looking around rather than just sitting and waiting for a bus. At first he was suspicious, but he sensed I wasn’t a cop. A dealer has to have that instinct or he won’t last long.

I probably paid twice as much as his regular customers, but I got a balloon. Mixed a quarter spoonful with orange juice, drank it down. Bitter. I threw up and had to take some more. But a half hour later I was fine.

I bought the newspaper and read about “Arsonist Torches National Guard” with a picture of the burned-out car. I felt great. I knew that the money it was going to take to replace that car couldn’t be used to bomb Afghanistan. This had a lot more impact than writing a congressman or shouting slogans in a protest march. It made a bottom-line difference. I wanted to save the newspaper, but it could’ve connected me, so I threw it away.

By then I was getting woozy. Went back to the truck and passed out. Pain woke me up in a few hours, I took some more smack and nodded out again.

I’ve still got the scars, patches of turkey skin.

Hathaway: That didn’t make you stop?

Trucker: No, it made me realize what all the people who’ve been hit by US napalm and white phosphorous are going through. Right this moment men, women, and children are crying in agony because of our bombing. And they don’t have the luxury of pain killers.

It’s worse for the kids. They have a lifetime of pain ahead of them, because the scars don’t grow. As the skin around them grows, that stretches the scars. The tissue becomes very thin and sensitive. It hurts for the rest of their lives.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Vietnam and Cambodia are still living with this on a daily basis. And now Iraqi and Afghan children are facing this future.

My pain gave me just a taste of what they are suffering. It also made me aware how terrible it would be if someone got caught in one of my fires. I’d never torch a building. Just vehicles. I even look in those to make sure no one’s sleeping in the back.

My burns made me see that what I was doing was important, trying to stop this war machine.

If Americans knew, I mean really opened our hearts to the mass suffering we’re inflicting on Iraq and Afghanistan at this moment, we’d overthrow this government. Not to mention what we did in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, Indonesia, the Congo, Iran, and so many more. But we don’t want to know. We turn it off — it’s a long ways away. And the media sure don’t want us to tell about it. Their job is to distract us from it with all sorts of nonsense.

We close our eyes to the killing because it conflicts with the patriotic fantasies about America we learned as children. Reality is too disturbing, so we deny it. Our love of country has blinded us.

But deep down we do know. We push it away, but it sinks into our subconscious and festers there and pops out in sick ways. That’s why we have so many crazy shootings.

We’re convinced our society is good, because that’s what we were taught. But good societies don’t kill millions of people. Pathological ones do that. And you don’t cure pathology with reforms. It needs major surgery.

Hathaway: What do you see as your greatest triumph?

Trucker: The Air National Guard watches their planes pretty carefully, but I found one parked at an unguarded airstrip. This was in the middle of the day, and I was hoping it would still be there at night. It was, and no one around. I needed more gas because the flames had to reach higher, and I wasn’t sure where the tanks were. I soaked some boards with gas and laid them against the fuselage and on the wings. The plane went up fine. A beautiful sight. Had a different smell because of the kerosene.

Hathaway: Are you going to get more planes?

Trucker: I hope so, but the vehicles are easier to find. My favorite are the deuce-and-a-halves, those big trucks with canvas covers. They make a huge fireball, and they’re expensive. That’s what this game is about — make the war too expensive, so it becomes bad economics. There’s lots of ways to do that, and this is my way.

A couple of times a year, but not in any regular pattern, I take off and look for targets of opportunity. My wife keeps the home fires burning while I go out and set a fire. I follow the basic principles of guerrilla warfare — pick the time and place to attack, make it quick, and get out before the enemy can react.

Once I almost got caught. I always pick Guard units of the edge of town, somewhat isolated. Those are less likely to be patrolled by the police, and they offer quicker access to escape routes, trails where only the bike can go. This place looked good, and they’d left a truck out. Right after it erupted in flames, though, I heard a siren and saw flashing lights. A patrol car must’ve been cruising nearby.

He was between me and my escape route, so I had to take off on the bike in the other direction. He saw me, even though I was running without lights. I was hoping he’d first go to the fire, but no such luck — he charged after me. The bike is fast, but so was he. I kept turning corners because I could do that faster than he could, but he caught up on the straights. I zigzagged back onto the main road towards the escape trail, but by then other sirens were approaching from different directions.

He was right behind me as I got to the trail. I was afraid he was going to run me over and claim it was an accident. As I slowed down to turn left onto the trail, he swung beside me into the oncoming lane and blocked me off. I couldn’t turn, just had to keep going.

Up ahead was an intersection. I sprinted towards it and swung a wide U-turn in the middle of it, so I could get back to the trail. But he turned his car sideways to block the road. His front tires covered the right shoulder I wanted to drive on, and I couldn’t turn sharp enough to get behind him.

I was still going fast and had only a split second to react. I plunged the bike down into the drainage channel next to the shoulder of the road, right in front of his headlights. I could barely hold it stable. I skidded on the wet bottom of the channel, almost laid it down, but kicked out with my foot and managed to stay up. Then I hit an old tire and lost control. The bike bounced up and keeled over, and I scraped through the mud, wrenching my leg and banging my knee, and finally stopped, front wheel still spinning. I was hurting and covered with dreck.

The patrol car was backing around to get me. My engine had stalled, but it started again on the first kick. I roared up the side of the channel at an angle, back onto the pavement.

The cop was closing fast, and I moved onto the shoulder so he couldn’t cut me off from the trail again. Another patrol car was speeding from town, red lights flashing, siren blaring, but he wasn’t close yet. Approaching the trail, I slowed just enough to slue through the turn. As I careened down the trail away from the road, I imagined the cop swearing at me in frustration.

I was on a tractor path leading into a big area of cornfields, and the tall corn swallowed me up in a second, friendly and protective. It was dark in there, but I kept my lights off so they wouldn’t reflect off the stalks and show my position. I slowed down and laughed out loud in the warm, fragrant September night.

The fields ran for miles, gridded with other tractor paths, and I was sure they couldn’t find me here in the dark. The feed corn was so dense that even with a helicopter they’d have to be right above me before they could spot me. I was safe here until dawn.

This was my territory now, but the streets were enemy territory, and I was going to have trouble getting out of here. When I had to try, my best bet would be a road with lots of traffic, so I could blend in. The cops couldn’t be everywhere.

A state highway ran north of town, and I headed for it, now pushing the bike so they couldn’t tell my direction from its sound. It took hours. I had to cross a couple of gravel roads, first waiting out of sight until it felt safe, then running across. Finally I could hear the highway ahead. It was almost dawn, but I wanted to wait until rush-hour traffic, so I lay down and tried to sleep. The ground was cold, I was hungry, my knee hurt, and a field mouse scampered over me, but I managed to doze.

About 7:30 I crept up towards the highway, peering out from my tractor path, afraid again. To my relief, there were enough motorcycles on the road that I figured the cops couldn’t stop them all. I waited until I felt lucky, then started the bike, accelerated along the shoulder, and joined the stream between two big trucks. I saw one cop, but he was going the other way. I kept expecting a patrol car to pull beside me with a shotgun leveled out the window, but it didn’t happen.

I stopped in the next town and hid the bike near a shopping center. I was covered with mud, so I bought new clothes, cleaned up as best I could and changed, then ate a big farmer’s breakfast of steak and eggs, grits, and three cups of coffee. It was the sort of place where cops might stop for doughnuts, but none came in. Poor guys must’ve all had to work overtime.

I took a cab back to near where my truck was parked, drove back to the bike and loaded it in, drove a hundred more miles, and collapsed into the bunk. My body was still clogged with fear, my leg was swollen and aching, I had a nervous tic in my cheek, but I was almost glowing with bliss as I sank into sleep.

It was a long time before I went on another sabotage mission, though.

Once I had a close call at what looked like a perfect set up — a humvee parked behind a Guard admin building, secluded, dark, no one around. As usual I waited an hour after the bars closed, so the streets would be emptier. Also it was a regular work night, so fewer late partygoers. But as soon as I took the lid off the gas can, this car pulls in and two guys get out, drunk. They were fumbling at their zippers to piss when they noticed me by the humvee. They shouted at me — probably thought I was trying to steal it. Seeing their chance to become heroes, they forgot about their bladders and started towards me. One of them pulled out a knife.

Part of me wanted to throw the gas can at them and light it, but I couldn’t do that. I know what burns are like. Instead I threw the can at an angle between us. The gas spewed out in a long trail, and when I lit it, the flames leaped up, high enough to reach their zippers if they’d tried to get through. That stopped their charge long enough for me to take off on the bike while they were shaking their fists and swearing at me.

Never did get that humvee. Went back a year later and everything was locked up.

Once I found two humvees and a truck parked together. What a blaze they made! Someday I’m hoping to get a whole motor pool … or a squadron of planes.

Hathaway: Some people would call that violence.

Trucker: Violence means harming people. I’m very careful not to do that. Destroying war machines is depriving the military of their tools of violence. I’m decreasing their ability to harm people. Since they refuse to disarm, I’m doing it for them.

But I admit I’ve got some psychological quirks. I like fire — the huge eruption of flames is magnificent. Torching is an adrenaline high … like dealing. Apparently I need that. Maybe that makes me neurotic, but if so, I’ve managed to channel my neurosis into a socially useful activity — destroying war machines. The real crazies are those who go along with this system and think they’re sane.

It’s probably true that certain personality traits make people more likely to oppose their society. But conservatives use that to discount the rebels’ objections by branding them abnormal. They say radicals have psychological problems, they’re not well adjusted, they have a bad relationship with their father.

But what does it mean to be well adjusted to a society like this? It means you’ve accepted and internalized its values. If you think about what those values really are, it’s insane to do that. The people who do are normal only in the sense that they’re the majority.

And since most fathers are the spear carriers of patriarchy, since they are the power structure, how can we not oppose them? That kind of authority needs to be defied.

Having a “good” relationship with your father isn’t necessarily good. It tends to make people support the powers that be, to want to please them. Kids who need their father’s approval turn into toadies. That’s the only way to please a patriarch. If we want to build a new kind of person, we have to become different from the old kind, and that usually means displeasing them.

Hathaway: Would you prefer matriarchy?

Trucker: I’d prefer no-archy. No group should have power over another group. That’s what anarchy means.

Conservatives conveniently forget that they’re supporting this culture because of their own personality traits. And look at those — the desire to placate authority rather than defy it, to actually become the authority and have power over others, to preserve with violence if necessary an unjust economic system that denies the majority of humanity the basics of a secure life. Those are conservatives. And if you put them under pressure, they become fascists, as we’re seeing.

Hathaway: You’re in your sixties now. Do you have a protégé, someone to, so to speak, pass the torch on to?

Trucker: No. This business is too risky. I’d feel terrible if something happened to them. Also there’s the security issue. With all the government surveillance and infiltration, this sort of work has to be done alone. No one knows what I do except my wife, and they can’t make her testify against me.

Hathaway: Why tell me?

Trucker: I know you won’t turn me in. And if they waterboarded you — always a possibility these days — well, you don’t know where I live or what my name is now. All you have is a webmail address.

But it is a calculated risk. I want to go public in an anonymous way to let people know what’s happening with the resistance movement. The government is hushing up about all the sabotage that’s going on. It’s not just me. I’m just a small part of it. There’s a growing movement to undermine the machine from within. People are trashing recruiters’ offices, slashing their tires, cutting their phone wires, grafittiing-out their billboards. In universities they’re squirting glue into the locks of ROTC departments, stealing their mail, hacking into their computers. The government and corporations have had to set up internal security units to catch their own people who are sabotaging them — leaking secret memos, destroying equipment, zapping computer files. An autonome threw a log under the wheels of an arms train and derailed it. It’s only a matter of time before a vet sets up a mortar outside an air base and starts blowing up Stealth bombers.

The war is coming home where it belongs. But this is just starting, and the government doesn’t want people to know. They’re scared it’ll spread.

Hathaway: Do you want it to spread?

Trucker: Yes. I’m convinced that’s the only way to stop these wars. Make it too costly for the USA to extend its empire. We need to lame the beast so it can’t attack anymore. We have to maximize chaos on all fronts, a thousand different kinds of uprisings so the country becomes ungovernable. That’s the only way to break their hold and build something new.

Hathaway: That’s going to make things tougher at home.

Trucker: Yep, it will … for a while. And that’s why a lot of people are against it. They don’t want to lose their comfort level. That’s more important to them than the lives of millions of people overseas … and the lives of their own grandchildren.

You can’t blame people for wanting to have a pleasant life, but in times like these that turns them into accomplices with the system. The only way life can stay pleasant now is if you play along. The punishments for opposition are getting increasing unpleasant.

But rebelling is invigorating. It’s an authentic life, not the superficial pleasantries of a lackey life.

Even the lackeys are going to lose their precious comfort level before long. Things are getting worse and worse here because that’s the nature of the system. It devours everything.

The country is run by corporate robots. They’re squeezing the people at home and strangling them overseas. And the military is their enforcer. It’s become a monster rampaging out of control, fighting enemies that it itself created, like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban. This beast knows only to kill, and it does that reflexively, mechanically, massively. The leaders elected to stop it end up serving it. Amerika is running amok in a mania of unconscious killing. Amerika is a berserker battling the universe, a gut-shot hyena devouring its own entrails.

We have to stop doing this … and we can. We don’t need to live this way, by bombing and killing.

I want people to know there’s a movement here to resist militarism. It’s rolling. They can be part of it … in many ways.

Hathaway: Would you recommend that people burn trucks?

Trucker: I would not. It’s very dangerous.

Hathaway: What would you recommend that people do?

Trucker: That’s a question only they can answer.

Hathaway: What if you get caught? Would you shoot it out?

Trucker: No, I don’t have any weapons. I don’t believe in killing people for peace. And cops are still people.

I’d probably spend the rest of my life as a prisoner of war in Guantánamo West, that new supermax in Colorado.

Hathaway: Doesn’t that scare you?

Trucker: You bet it does. But even if that happens, my life will have meant something. I’ll have done what I could to stop this monster from invading more countries and murdering more people.

But I don’t think it will happen. I’m very careful. I want to continue the struggle. As Ed Sanders said, “Resist and Survive.”

*****

“Saboteur” is a chapter from Radical Peace: People Refusing War, which presents the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists in the USA, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Recently published by Trine Day, the book is a journey along diverse paths of nonviolence, the true stories of people working for peace in unconventional ways. Chapters are posted on a page of the publisher’s website.

William T. Hathaway's other books include A World of Hurt (Rinehart Foundation Award), CD-Ring, and Summer Snow. He is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. A selection of his writing is available. Read other articles by William.

This article was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2011 at 8:01am and is filed under Activism, Resistance.

The End of the Consumerist Model

2011-12-04T09:53:00.000-08:00

Big Ideas of 2012

The End of the Consumerist Model

A political and economic imperative.

Bernard Stiegler , 21 Nov 2011

I am writing these reflections in the midst of economic and political debates taking place throughout the world about the necessity of implementing stimulus plans to limit the destructive effects of the First planetary economic crisis of the capitalist world.

Now when, in such debates, “investment stimulus” and “consumption stimulus” are spoken of in opposing terms, two distinct questions become confused, questions that, in fact, do require simultaneous treatment, yet according to two different scales of time, a difficulty which is all the greater, given that the present crisis heralds the end of the consumerist model.

Those who advocate stimulating consumption as the path to economic recovery want neither to hear nor speak about the end of consumerism. Yet, those who advocate stimulating investment are no more willing to call the consumerist industrial model into question. The French version of “stimulating investment” (which seems more subtle when it comes from Barack Obama) argues that the best way to save consumption is through investment, that is, by restoring “profitability,” which will in turn restore an entrepreneurial dynamism itself founded upon consumerism and its counterpart, market-driven productivism.

In other words, this “investment” produces no long-term view capable of drawing any lessons from the collapse of an industrial model based on the automobile, on oil, and on the construction of highway networks, as well as on the Hertzian networks of the culture industries. This ensemble has until recently formed the basis for consumerism, yet today it is obsolete, a fact which became clear during the autumn of 2008. Frankly speaking, this “investment” is not an investment: it is on the contrary a disinvestment, an abdication which consists in doing no more than burying one’s head in the sand.

This “investment policy,” which has no goal other than the reconstitution of the consumerist model, is the translation of a moribund ideology. It is a desperate attempt to prolong the life of a model which has become self-destructive by denying and concealing for as long as possible the fact that the consumerist model is now massively toxic (a toxicity extending far beyond the question of “toxic assets”) because it has reached its limits. This denial is a matter of trying, for as long as possible, to maintain the colossal profits that can be accrued by those capable of exploiting the toxicity of consumerism.

The consumerist model has reached its limits because it has become systemically short-termist, because it has given rise to a systemic stupidity that structurally prevents the reconstitution of a long-term horizon. This “investment” is not an investment according to any terms other than those of pure accounting: it is a pure and simple reestablishment of the state of things, trying to rebuild the industrial landscape without at all changing its structure, still less its axioms, all in the hope of protecting income levels that had hitherto been achievable.

Such may be the hope, but these are the false hopes of those with buried heads. The genuine object of debate raised by the crisis ought to be how to overcome the short-termism to which we have been led by a consumerism intrinsically destructive of all genuine investment, that is, of investment in the future, a short-termism which has systemically, and not accidentally, been translated into the decomposition of investment into speculation.

Whether we must, in order to avoid a major economic catastrophe, and to attenuate the social injustice caused by the crisis, stimulate consumption and the economic machine such as it still is, is a question as urgent as it is legitimate so long as such a policy does not simply aggravate the situation at the cost of millions and billions of euros or dollars while at the same time masking the true question, which is to produce a vision and a political will capable of progressively moving away from the economico-political complex of consumption so as to enter into the complex of a new type of investment. This new kind of investment must be a social and political investment or, in other words, an investment in a common desire, what Aristotle called philia, and which would then form the basis of a new type of economic investment.

Between the absolute urgency which obviously imposes the imperative of salvaging the present situation and of avoiding the passage from a global economic crisis to a global political crisis that might yet unleash military conflicts of global dimensions and the absolute necessity that consists in producing a potential future in the form of a political and social will capable of making a break with the present situation there is clearly a contradiction. Such a contradiction is characteristic of what happens to a dynamic system (in this case, the industrial system and the global capitalist system) once it has begun to mutate.

This question is political as much as it is economic. It is a question of political economy, a matter of knowing in what precisely this mutation consists, and to what political, but also industrial, choices it leads. It is a matter of knowing what new industrial politics is required.

Only such a response is capable of simultaneously dealing with the question of what urgent and immediate steps are necessary in order to salvage the industrial system, and with the question of how such steps must be inscribed within an economic and political mutation amounting to a revolution – if it is true that when a model has run its course, then its transformation, through which alone it can avoid total destruction, constitutes a revolution.

Bernard Stiegler taught himself philosophy while imprisoned for armed robbery between 1978 and 1983. He has since become a leading French philosopher of technology. This article was adapted from his recent book, For a New Critique of Political Economy.

Situating Occupy: Lessons from the revolutionary past.

2011-12-04T09:07:00.000-08:00

The Big Ideas of 2012

Situating Occupy

Lessons from the revolutionary past.

David Graeber , 02 Dec 2011

Perhaps the greatest world historian alive today, Immanuel Wallerstein, has argued that since 1789 all major revolutions have really been world revolutions.

The French revolution might have appeared to only take place in one country, but really it quickly transformed the entire North Atlantic world so profoundly that a mere 20 years later, ideas that had previously been considered lunatic fringe – that social change was good, that governments existed to manage social change, that governments drew their legitimacy from an entity known as the people – had been propelled so deeply into common sense that even the stodgiest conservative had to at least pay lip service to them. In 1848 revolutions broke out almost simultaneously in 50 different countries from Wallachia to Brazil. In no country did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterwards, institutions inspired by the French revolution – universal education systems, for instance – were created pretty much everywhere.

We see the same pattern recur in the 20th century. The “ten days that shook the world” in 1917 took place in Russia, where revolutionaries did manage to seize state power, but what Wallerstein calls the “world revolution of 1968” was more like 1848: it rippled from China to Czechoslovakia to France to Mexico, took power nowhere, but nonetheless began a broad transformation in our sense of what a revolution might even mean.

In a way, though, the 20th-century sequence was very different because ’68 didn’t consolidate the gains of 1917 – in fact it marked the first significant move in the opposite direction. The Russian revolution of course represented the ultimate apotheosis of the Jacobin ideal of transforming society from above. The world revolution of 1968 was more anarchist in spirit. There’s a strange paradox here since by the late ‘60s anarchism itself had largely disappeared as a mass social movement. Yet its spirit pervaded everything: the revolt against bureaucratic conformity, the rejection of party politics, the dedication to the creation of a new, liberatory culture that would allow for genuine individual self-realization.

The most profound and enduring legacy of the world revolution of ’68 was modern feminism. And it was only through the imperatives and sensibilities introduced by radical feminism, the nonhierarchical consciousness-raising circles, the emergence of consensus process, the emphasis on smoking out every form of inequality, no matter how deeply embedded in our everyday existence, that Anarchism – as a social movement – itself began to take form once again.

In recent years we have seen a kind of continual series of tiny ’68s. The uprisings against state socialism that began in Tiananmen Square and culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union began that way, though they were quickly diverted into the culmination of that capitalist recuperation of the spirit of ’60s rebellion that has come to be known as “neoliberalism.” After the Zapatista world revolution – they called it the Fourth World War – began in ’94, such mini-’68s began happening so thick and fast the process almost seemed to have become institutionalized: Seattle, Genoa, Cancun, Quebec, Hong Kong ... And insofar as it was indeed institutionalized, by global networks the Zapatistas had helped set up, it was on the basis of a kind of small-a anarchism based on principles of decentralized direct democracy and direct action. The prospect of facing a genuine global democratic movement seems to have so frightened the US authorities, in particular, that they went into veritable panic mode. There is of course a traditional antidote to the threat of mass mobilization from below. You start a war. It doesn’t really matter who the war is against. The point is just to have one; preferably, on as wide a scale as possible. In this case the US government had the extraordinary advantage of a genuine pretext – a ragtag crew of hitherto largely ineffective right-wing Islamists who, for once in history, had attempted a wildly ambitious terrorist scheme and actually pulled it off. Rather than simply track down those responsible, the US began throwing billions of dollars of armament at anything in sight. Ten years later, the resulting paroxysm of imperial overstretch appears to have undermined the very basis of the American Empire. What we are now witnessing is the process of that empire’s collapse.

It only makes sense then that the World Revolution of 2011 should have begun as a rebellion against US client states, in much the same way as the rebellions that brought down Soviet power began in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia. The wave of rebellion soon spread across the Mediterranean from North Africa to Southern Europe, and then, much more uncertainly at first, across the Atlantic to New York. But once it had, in a matter of weeks it had exploded everywhere. At this point it’s extremely difficult to predict how far all this will ultimately go. Truly historical events, after all, consist of precisely those moments that could not have been predicted beforehand. Could we be in the presence of a fundamental shift like 1789 – a shift not only in global power relations but in our elementary political common sense? It’s impossible to say, but there are reasons to be optimistic.

Let me end by listing three:

First, in no previous world revolution has the main center of mobilization been in the imperial center itself. Great Britain, the great imperial power of the 19th century, was barely affected by the uprisings of 1789 and 1848. In the same way, the US remained largely immune from the great revolutionary moments of the 20th century. The decisive street battles typically happen not in the imperial center, nor in the super-exploited margins, but in what might be termed the second tier: not London but Paris, not Berlin but St. Petersburg. The 2011 revolution started according to that familiar pattern, but it has actually spread to the imperial center itself. If this is sustained, it will be quite unprecedented.

Also, this time the power elite can’t start a war. They already tried that. They’re basically out of cards to play in this respect. This makes an enormous difference.

Lastly, the spread of feminist and anarchist sensibilities has opened up the possibility of a genuine cultural transformation. Here is the big question: Can we create a genuinely democratic culture? Can we change our fundamental conceptions of what politics must necessarily be like? For me, the image of middle-aged white guys in suits, in places like Denver or Minneapolis, patiently learning consensus process from pagan priestesses or members of groups like Anarchist People of Color so as to take part in their local General Assemblies (and there are … it’s true! I’ve heard reports) may well be the single most dramatic image to have come out of the Occupy movement so far.

Of course this could be the first moment in yet another round of recuperation and defeat. But if we are witnessing another 1789, a moment where our most basic assumptions about politics, economics, society, are about to be transformed – this is precisely how it would have to begin.

David Graeber, a professor and anarchist activist, has been called “the best anthropological theorist of his generation.” He helped organize #OCCUPYWALLSTREET on the ground in New York. His latest book is Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

Drawing Conclusions on the Wall

2011-12-03T16:34:00.000-08:00

Drawing Conclusions on the Wall

A Review of On the Ground:An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S.

by Ron Jacobs / December 3rd, 2011

There were two types of media my high school friends and I truly looked forward to on our colonial outpost in what was then West Germany. The first was the appearance in the post exchange of the latest album from our favorite band. The other was when one of us received the latest issue of an underground paper from the US. Since we came from towns and cities all over the nation those of us that were so inclined could read undergrounds from all over the nation. I always had a few hidden away in my bedroom to peruse: Quicksilver Times, Kaleidoscope, Berkeley Tribe and Barb, Georgia Straight from Vancouver, BC, and so on. These papers served a multitude of purposes. Like those record albums mentioned above, they kept us abreast of what was going on back in the States culturally (counterculture, that is), politically, and otherwise. In addition, they helped us frame our understanding of our situation in an overseas US military community. They also inspired us to create our own media and protests.

There have been a number of books written about this underground press. The granddaddy of them all is most certainly Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press by retired Northwestern University professor Abe Peck, who began his journalism career as a member of Chicago’s groundbreaking Seed. More recent endeavors include John McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America and the just-released On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. Edited by Sean Stewart, On the Ground is essentially an oral history that features the recollections of several people that were involved with underground papers from around the United States. Unlike McMillan’s work which runs toward the academic side of things, Stewart’s text has a populist feel to it. The recollections are straight from the speakers’ mouths; sometimes angry, sometimes humorous and always honest.

The best part of the book are the graphics. As I read through the memories of the folks Stewart spoke with for On the Ground I was repeatedly surprised at how well I remembered various illustrations and photographs Stewart reprinted throughout the text. Like the papers his interviewees are remembering, the most striking thing about On the Ground is the layout. Even though I know the book was composed on a computer screen, the book looks as if it were laid out via the old cut and paste method by folks possibly stoned on weed and a day or two with minimal sleep–just like many issues of almost every paper Stewart discusses.

Being in the Movement and the counterculture was generally an upbeat experience. So was being in the Sixties underground media. Most folks were young and full of hope and those that were not necessarily young in years were where it counted–in their approach to life. Reporters did not cover stories as much as they took part in them and then wrote about it afterward. As Abe Peck says about working at The Seed: “We were very determined and unless something terrible happened–like [the murder of] Fred Hampton–up, just pretty upbeat.” Politics was omnipresent, whether it was at a very political paper like The Black Panther or a paper that had a more countercultural bent like The LA Free Press. This was because, as far as the authorities were concerned, everyone involved with the underground press–writers, printers, cartoonists, sellers and readers–were on the wrong side of the law and had to be watched. Sometimes, they were dealt with by methods legal and otherwise. This meant things like the stores selling papers being harassed by police and vigilantes; the withdrawal of advertising because of pressure from the FBI and other agencies; and assaults against persons involved by cops and others.

When Richard Nixon took over the White House in 1969 the repression of the Movement and counterculture intensified. Naturally, this meant that the media that represented these phenomena would be under greater attack. Black Panther papers were destroyed enroute to cities across the country and even to military bases overseas. Storefronts that newspapers worked out of were firebombed by vigilantes and shot at by police. Obscenity charges were brought against newspapers that then tied up the papers’ funds in court costs. High school underground press writers were thrown out of school and administrators suspended students selling and reading those papers. Although the reasons given for the expulsions usually had to do with attendance and other disciplinary infractions, the reality was that high school disciplinarians resented the threat to their authority and power. A friend of mine in Montgomery County, Maryland was suspended from the progressive John F. Kennedy High School for selling The Washington Free Press on campus. The issue in question featured a cartoon of a judge that had been involved in efforts to shut down the paper. The drawing showed the judge masturbating. Underneath the drawing was the phrase (made popular by the TV show Laugh-In) “here com da judge.” The cartoon was a response to a series of rulings made by the judge forbidding the distribution of the Free Press on high school grounds. These rulings and the school board decisions that preceded them were being challenged by the ACLU.

As the 1960s turned over into the 1970s, many folks that had been on the front lines began to retreat for the sake of their sanity. Others just fell into the trap of individualism and self-satisfaction–an easy trap to fall into in the US of A. By 1974 or thereabouts, the curse of identity politics had taken over much of the political discourse on the left and effectively limited the reach of the Movement as people separated according to their gender, sexuality, and ethnic origins. Intentionally or not, this trend hastened the demise of the underground press and the movements it was a part of. However, its legacy remains. There are many websites and even some print journals that are more than observers of the protests and movements they report on. Journalist Alice Embree notes that “The underground press was the connective tissue; it spread the news …” When the papers began to fail, the connectiveness was lessened. The underground press was a vital part of what happened in the sixties. Sean Stewart’s wonderfully edited text On the Ground lets the reader know how and why that remains true. The striking graphics and compelling recollections in this text are at once a popular history and an inspiration.

Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Read other articles by Ron.

This article was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2011 at 8:02am and is filed under Activism, Anti-war, Arts and Entertainment, Book Review, Cartoon, Censorship, Civil Liberties, FBI, History, Media, Resistance.

Occupy Movement Solidarity: Where are the Professors?

2011-10-19T19:28:00.000-07:00

Occupy Movement Solidarity: Where are the Professors?

by Matt Reichel / October 19th, 2011

Absent from the occupy protests throughout this country, as with most meaningful movements in recent memory, are faculty of our major universities. Aside from the symbolic arrest of Cornel West and passive words of support from Noam Chomsky, the academic profession has been notably absent from this exhilarating movement.

This is particularly bothersome because one of the primary grievances of the protestors is the cost of higher education, and the larger role of indebtedness in informing the present precariousness of young people. Education debt, even more than housing debt, plays a repugnant role in this society, insofar as it preys on the young and ambitious, ultimately leaving citizens shackled to the financial industry for the bulk of their adult lives. Before anyone is capable of making sound fiscal decisions in life, they find themselves five-figures in the red, just for doing what they grew up believing to be the “right thing.”

When British students rallied against fee increases last year, professors were present alongside. The same goes for several waves of protests dealing with fees and the precariousness of youth in France, dating back to the CPE protests of 2006. These alliances between students and faculty were integral to the growth and widespread popularity of these movements. Meanwhile, the student-professor alliance has historically explained the affordability of higher education throughout Western Europe.

In the United States, we see no such alliance. Professors will offer themselves as speakers at rallies or teach-ins, maintaining a top-down relationship with students, but will rarely support as brothers-in-arms. This stems from a social authoritarianism in this culture, where the opinions of the credentialed are taken more seriously than the “commoner.” As someone who has experienced living on both sides of the Atlantic, I can say that Americans have a problem trusting your average person. Rather than judging someone based on the merit of their argument, the American tends to ignore the argument and judge based on ceremonial merit (such as whether the person has a PhD or not.) As such, professors have generally only been involved as credibility lending figureheads in American social movements.

I am happy that Dr. West has participated in this protest, but wish that it wasn’t such a breaking story. He possesses no more intrinsic value than the other 99%, and should be busily organizing his colleagues at Princeton to join along on next visit. The same goes for Chomsky and his colleagues at MIT. If this vigorously anti-totalitarian movement is to thrive, we need the academic egos to dissipate and the academic masses to bring numbers to the protests.

For this to occur, they will have to identify their support as a moral imperative rather than mere intellectual exercise. By allowing the present system of higher education to continue without their condemnation, professors become complicit in the overarching moral crisis this country is facing. Since the beginning of the 80s, American wages have been stagnant, while the average cost of a college education has risen over 4-fold (adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile, we have seen nary a peep of moral outrage from faculty. By excluding Americans of modest means from the enrichment of the university experience, this country is hampering the human potential of millions of young people. By not providing quality higher education to all Americans for free (or a nominal fee), we remain a second-rate society.

Academics are ostensibly progressive in nature: you would expect such of open, intelligent minds. However, they have proven particularly meek in the United States. There are several reasonable explanations for this. For one, we have a climate of repression and anti-intellectualism that is simply not known throughout Western Europe. The recent experiences of Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein are evidence enough of this. Furthermore, large American research institutions tend to be located in small “campus towns” rather than inside major urban hubs, thus dislocating professors from the bulk of the industrial workforce. This design has served to de-radicalize labor through the last century, and also explains the lack of involvement of professors in the ongoing protests (though there are a few notable universities on Manhattan). Moreover, many professors enjoy tenure and six-figure salaries, thus outpacing their Western European counterparts. This serves to supplement their geographic isolation from labor with added socioeconomic distance.

Nonetheless, this professorial passivity must end: not solely for the aforementioned moral reasons, but also because professors have an important stake in this political moment. As austerity measures have placed an increasing pinch on the higher education system, knowledge is treated as more of a commodity than a social good. Universities are forced to run more like businesses than loci of the grands discours. This commodification of knowledge has resulted in the increasing social alienation of professors. Tight university systems, intent on cutting costs and increasing class sizes, will increasingly see professors as expendable. You compound this with the growing authoritarianism in post 9-11 America and professors will increasingly feel pressured to conform or produce favorable results (a la the University of Chicago Economics Department).

Lastly, professors possess great power to change the financial racket that poses as higher education in this country. They are the mode of production for that industry. A national professor’s strike committed to the long-haul will force states to close their budget shortfalls through progressive tax measures or sane monetary policy. The latter is just one way to address systemic pre-tax injustices in our economic system: spend money into existence rather than charging the people interest by lending into existence. Either way, forced with a non-compliant faculty at their flagships school, states will have to learn to get innovative, if that is possible with the class of charlatans that governs from both political parties.

Professors largely supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election. As with most other progressives in this country, they fell into the passivity of hope. At this juncture, we need them to muster the courage for action. It is their moral imperative, and also in their own interest. In order to defend the integrity of the academic profession, the vision of education as a social good and a right to all regardless of class, professors need to join the 99%. When is it going to happen?

Matt Reichel is a writer currently living in New Orleans. He can be reached at: mereichel@gmail.com. Read other articles by Matt, or visit Matt's website.

This article was posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Activism, Education, Solidarity.

Occupy the future: Eight steps to being the 99 per cent

2011-10-18T11:02:00.000-07:00

Occupy the future: Eight steps to being the 99 per cent

By Michael Kaufman

| October 18, 2011

The genius of the Occupy movement is the proclamation, from the outset, that it represents 99 per cent of the population.

That stands as a far cry from the huge youth movement in the late 1960s/early 1970s. We made a fundamental mistake in those days: we were not only content but we were thrilled to be a minority. We loved being different and outsiders. True, this gave us energy and a collective identity against a culture we despised and mistrusted. But we effectively abandoned the mainstream to the right.

This was more than a shame. It paved the way for 30 years of increasing social disparities and cuts to social services. At that time, the majority of people were what we'd now think of as liberal; many identified with ideas that now seem on the left. Even most conservatives of the day would have shuddered to hear the rhetoric of the Tea Party and their slightly less-lunatic cousins in governments from the United States to Canada, England and beyond. It should have been a golden time for progressive forces to permanently shift the social and economic landscape. True, we helped stop the war in Vietnam and true, we launched powerful movements (feminism, gay rights, environmental) and supported others (civil rights) that live on and have indeed reshaped mainstream thought. But in many ways, we failed.

The Occupy movement, now just at its beginning, has the potential to go beyond the New Left. After all, not since the U.S. right wing proclaimed itself the "Moral Majority" in the mid-1970s has anyone had the temerity to do two things: First, at a time when they were a minority, the right wing boldly declared itself the majority. Second, while the actual majority was questioning the morality of war, discrimination and inequality, the right wing claimed and captured moral momentum and the moral high ground.

The Occupy movement is boldly going beyond a statement that we are the majority by proclaiming we are the 99 per cent.

And here, then, is the biggest challenge: It's one thing to say we're the 99 per cent, it's quite another to be the 99 per cent.

Eight steps to being the 99 per cent

Advertising

1. To be the 99 per cent means, by definition, that we are claiming the mainstream.

We should not fear to be mainstream. Rather, if we believe that our ideas are good and just, then we should want those ideas to be accepted by the mainstream. If we know that our ideal of a low-carbon, sustainable economy is both necessary and practical, then we should want this ideal to be part of the status quo. If we know that a much more egalitarian society is a more humane, less violent, and more productive one, then we know these are ideals for everyone.

2. Claiming the mainstream does not mean, however, we have to fit into what the mainstream currently defines as "realistic."

Social, economic and political realism is what we collectively create. The current mainstream does not see it as realistic to spend billions to prevent the worst effects of climate change or to provide safe drinking water to the people of the world, but thinks it is "realistic" to spend trillions on wars or to bail out private banks. Our job is to help redefine what is realistic.

3. Creating bridges to the mainstream.

This is the biggest challenge to becoming the 99 per cent. It literally requires reaching that 99 per cent with our message. It requires facilitating a process for others to identify with our ideals -- to truly be the 99 per cent. In the months and years ahead, we need to find ways to create those bridges. We have to see ourselves as the bridge-builders: since we're coming from the outside with a new social and economic vision, we can't expect, in advance, that our sisters and brothers of the 99 per cent will automatically see things our way. It is our job to reach out to them. This has many practical implications: It means going to where people are to engage in a respectful discussion to win them to our views; to places of worship and classrooms, shopping centres and workplaces, unions and service clubs, seniors homes and community groups, and the media. We will be confronted with many who disagree, even demonize us. Our job is to model respect, refuse to demonize others, and to present our ideas in language that each group can most easily identify with and see as their own. Why? So they will best discover ways to articulate our common vision to those around them.

4. Creating bridges also means forming common cause with people and organizations we may not agree with about many things but with whom we can find principled areas for a united voice.

This can be uncomfortable and difficult for us to accept! But, for example, a trade union might support an environmentally disastrous industry, but we can find common cause to speak with one voice about social and economic inequalities. Similarly, a church group may oppose abortion rights, but we can find ways to speak together for measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or for public health care. A student association may support military spending, but we can work with them to insist that education should be available to all. Those things we disagree about are indeed critical issues and for those who've been active so far in the Occupy movement, we know these issues are all linked to our concerns. But if we truly want to be the 99 per cent, we have to see that the 99 per cent includes many people we disagree with about fundamental matters. The question is how to engage in a healthy discussion with them? How do we work together to advance our common objectives? Working together, we can agree to disagree on things dear to both our hearts, but also strive to have an ongoing and respectful conversation about those differences. Again, if we truly believe our ideas should and will be the ideas of the majority, we need to have some faith in our long-term capacity to have an impact on others. Nothing greater will threaten the 1 per cent than forms of unity, in spite of many differences, among the 99 per cent!

5. Don't worry about the naysayers who criticize us for not having "clear demands."

The most powerful thing about the Occupy movement is that it is unleashing a society-wide conversation about social inequality and, to a lesser extent, a range of other human rights, social, political, and economic issues. That in itself is a huge victory in only a month. A big part of our work is to nurture that conversation.

6. At the same time, it is important that we continue to encourage streams of conversations about economic, social and political alternatives.

There's nothing wrong with having answers! What are some practical measures to greatly reduce social and economic disparities? What does a more democratic society look like? How can we deepen political democracy and extend democracy to control of the economy? What parts of the economy should be public services and not in private hands? How can we develop effective global income taxes and global responses to climate change and economic disparities? How can public policies encourage the growth of diverse economic models including more cooperatives, more public ownership, more small business, and more non-profits with the type of power and impact that large corporations now monopolize? What do we need to do to ensure sustainable economies? And much, much more.

7. Be suspicious of those who want to polarize and of those who preach violence or the destruction of property (no matter how venal are the owners of that property).

Such actions are the dead ends of social movements. They are the hallmarks of powerlessness. They will isolate us. They will stop us from becoming the 99 per cent.

8. Trust our capacity to live the changes we believe in. Trust our capacity to win over the great majority to our beliefs.

Trust that we can model respect and compassion. Trust that we have the capacity to build bridges and patiently change minds. Trust that we will be part of finding new answers. Trust that we can truly be the 99 per cent.

Michael Kaufman is a writer, educator, and the co-founder of the White Ribbon Campaign, the largest effort in the world of men working to end violence against women. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter @GenderEQ.

Tags:

Occupy Wall Street Occupy Toronto Occupy Canada grassroots organizing

Statement from Occupy Wall St

2011-10-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

Winter Patriot Community Blog

Statement from Occupy Wall St

Wed, 10/05/2011 - 10:02 — newjesustimes

I received this in my email this morning from a mailing list I'm on called NationofChange. I endorse this message

Dear Readers,

What follows is the first official, collective statement of the protesters in Zuccotti Park:

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

* They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
* They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
* They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
* They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
* They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
* They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
* They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
* They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers' healthcare and pay.
* They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
* They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
* They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
* They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
* They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
* They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
* They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
* They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
* They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people's lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
* They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
* They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
* They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
* They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
* They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
* They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government ontracts.*

To the people of the world, We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

NationofChange has been an unfiltered media resource for the Occupy Wall Street movement even while the mainstream media has ignored, censored, and undermined the progress of the people.

What to do if you're arrested or stopped by the police

2011-10-17T20:30:00.000-07:00

MICHAEL BLUEJAY

award-winning writer

"The seventh-best site on the web!"
-- Cockeyed.com

What to do if you're arrested or stopped by the police

When you're stopped by the police, you run the risk of being arrested or hurt, or both. Most officers will not act improperly, but whether they act properly or not you still need to protect your rights and keep yourself safe.

If you're stopped or arrested, try to avoid conflict to keep the police calm. The following tips may help. They're combined from several sources (including the ACLU and myself). I'm not a lawyer and I can't tell you anything beyond what I have listed here. -- M. Bluejay, 7-00

What to do when you are stopped

Stay calm and in control of your words, body language, and emotions.
Do not run or walk away. Keep your hands where police can see them -- don't put them in your pockets. (Don't make the police nervous by wondering if you have a weapon.) Don't make any sudden movements. Never touch a police officer.
Be polite and respectful.
Give your name and address only if you're asked to, but remember you don't need to say anything more. (The caveat is that if the police are annoyed by your refusal to say more, they may take you to the station out of spite.) Remember, anything you say or do can be used against you later.
To search you or your vehicle the police must have a warrant, or have arrested you, or have probable cause that you committed a crime. If the police lack these they may ask you for permission to search. If you GIVE them permission, then you can't argue later in court that they performed an illegal search.
Try to remember the officers' physical decriptions. Try to memorize badge numbers, names, license plate numbers, and police car numbers. Once the police stop questioning you, write all this down as soon as you are able.
Ask bystanders to stand at a discreet distance and observe. The police are less likely to do something wrong if there are people watching. People have a right to stand at a reasonable distance and observe as long as they do not interfere. (The police may consider that bystanders repeatedly asking them questions constitutes "interference".) Get the names and phone numbers of the witnesses afterward in case you need them in the future.
If you are being abused, don't resist. Once multiple officers start hurting you, you can't stop them by resisting, and struggling may only encourage them. Think of a cat playing with a mouse -- while the mouse is struggling, the cat is excited, but when the mouse stops moving, the cat loses interest. In some cases, the police may continue to abuse you even if you don't struggle, but since struggling can't help you, it's best not to try.
If the police let you go and you are injured, take photographs of the injuries as soon as possible, but make sure you seek medical attention first.
If you feel your rights have been violated, file a written complaint. Keep a copy of the complaint, and make sure a family member or close friend has a copy.

If you're arrested


1. Do not resist arrest, even if you believe you are innocent. You will be arrested anyway, and then you'll have the additional charge of Resisting Arrest. Also, the police are more likely to hurt people who resist arrest.
2. If you are told that you are under arrest, give only the name, address, and telephone number of you, your immediate family, and your employer. This information is needed in setting bail.

3. You have a right to remain silent. Say only, "I want to talk to a lawyer." If the police continue to question you, do not answer. Also, do not speak on a video tape or to a district attorney about anything. Remember, it's in the police officers' best interest to get you to incriminate yourself. If you're arrested with somebody else, don't talk with them about the incident in the back of the police car even when the police are not in the car; many police cars now secretly make video or audio recordings of such conversations.

4. You have a right to make one phone call to your family, lawyer, or organization (remember the phone you use may be tapped).

5. Do not act defiant or talk about filing complaints. You do not want the police to retaliate against you while you're in their custody.

6. You will be handcuffed searched, photographed, and finger-printed.

7. Try to get the names and badge numbers of the police who arrested you or deal with you in the police station. (This information is your right.)

If your friend is arested


1. Write down the officers' names, badge numbers, and car number. The police do not have to give you their badge numbers unless you're the one being arrested, though. Be polite and don't threaten to file a complaint; you don't want them to arrest you too out of spite. I've seen it happen.

2. Write down the time, date, and place of the incident.

3. Get the names and phone numbers of witnesses.

4. If possible, photograph or videotape the incident.

5. Get a name of a relative to contact if the person is arrested.

6. Ask on what charge your friend was arrested and where (s)he is being taken.

Cell Phone Guide for Occupy Wall Street Protesters (and Everyone Else)

2011-10-17T20:20:00.000-07:00

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Defending your rights in the digital world

October 14, 2011 - 6:05pm | By Eva Galperin

Cell Phone Guide for Occupy Wall Street Protesters (and Everyone Else)

Occupy Wall Street has called for a global day of action on October 15, and protesters are mobilizing all over the world. In the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement has already spawned sizeable protests in New York, Washington DC, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Austin, and other cities. Several of these movements have faced opposition from their local police departments, including mass arrests.

Protesters of all political persuasions are increasingly documenting their protests -- and encounters with the police -- using electronic devices like cameras and cell phones. The following tips apply to protesters in the United States who are concerned about protecting their electronic devices when questioned, detained, or arrested by police. These are general guidelines; individuals with specific concerns should talk to an attorney.

1. Protect your phone before you protest

Think carefully about what’s on your phone before bringing it to a protest. Your phone contains a wealth of private data, which can include your list of contacts, the people you have recently called, your text messages, photos and video, GPS location data, your web browsing history and passwords, and the contents of your social media accounts. We believe that the police are required to get a warrant to obtain this information, but the government sometimes asserts a right to search a phone incident to arrest -- without a warrant. (And in some states, including California, courts have said this is OK.) To protect your rights, you may want to harden your existing phone against searches. You should also consider bringing a throwaway or alternate phone to the protest that does not contain sensitive data and which you would not mind losing or parting with for a while. If you have a lot of sensitive or personal information on your phone, the latter might be a better option.

Password-protect your phone - and consider encryption options. To ensure the password is effective, set the “password required” time to zero, and restart phone before you leave your house. Be aware that merely password-protecting or locking your phone is not an effective barrier to expert forensic analysis. Some phones also have encryption options. Whispercore is a full-disk encryption application for Android, and Blackberry also has encryption tools that might potentially be useful. Note that EFF has not tested these tools and does not endorse them, but they are worth checking into.

Back up the data on your phone. Once the police have your phone, you might not get it back for a while. Also, something could happen, whether intentional or not, to delete information on your phone. While we believe it would be improper for the police to delete your information, it may happen anyway.

2. You’re at the protest – now what?

Maintain control over your phone. That might mean keeping the phone on you at all times, or handing it over to a trusted friend if you are engaging in action that you think might lead to your arrest.

Consider taking pictures and video. Just knowing that there are cameras watching can be enough to discourage police misconduct during a protest. EFF believes that you have the First Amendment right to document public protests, including police action. However, please understand that the police may disagree, citing various local and state laws. If you plan to record audio, you should review the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press helpful guide Can We Tape?.

3. Help! Help! I’m being arrested

Remember that you have a right to remain silent -- about your phone and anything else. If questioned by police, you can politely but firmly ask to speak to your attorney.

If the police ask to see your phone, you can tell them you do not consent to the search of your device. They might still legally be able to search your phone without a warrant when they arrest you, but at least it’s clear that you did not give them permission to do so.

If the police ask for the password to your electronic device, you can politely refuse to provide it and ask to speak to your lawyer. Every arrest situation is different, and you will need an attorney to help you sort through your particular circumstance. Note that just because the police cannot compel you to give up your password, that doesn’t mean that they can’t pressure you. The police may detain you and you may go to jail rather than being immediately released if they think you’re refusing to be cooperative. You will need to decide whether to comply.

4. The police have my phone, how do I get it back?

If your phone or electronic device was illegally seized, and is not promptly returned when you are released, you can file a motion with the court to have your property returned. If the police believe that evidence of a crime was found on your electronic device, including in your photos or videos, the police can keep it as evidence. They may also attempt to make you forfeit your electronic device, but you can challenge that in court.

Cell phone and other electronic devices are an essential component of 21st century protests. Whether at Occupy Wall Street or elsewhere, all Americans can and should exercise their First Amendment right to free speech and assembly, while intelligently managing the risks to their property and privacy.

Ten Things Not To Do If Arrested

2011-10-17T20:13:00.000-07:00

Ten Things Not To Do If Arrested

TEN THINGS NOT TO DO IF ARRESTED

I have been practicing criminal law for 24 years and have seen a wide variety of reactions by people who are being arrested. Some of these reactions are unwise but understandable. Others are self defeating to the point of being bizarre. No one plans to be arrested, but it might help to think just once about what you will do and not do if you ever hear the phrase “Put your hands behind you.” The simplest “to do” rule is to do what you are told. Simple, but somehow it often escapes someone who is either scared or intoxicated. More important to guarding your rights and interests are ten things you SHOULD NOT do:

1. Don’t try to convince the officer of your innocence. It’s useless. He or she only needs “probable cause” to believe you have committed a crime in order to arrest you. He does not decide your guilt and he actually doesn’t care if you are innocent or not. It is the job of the judge or jury to free you if he is wrong. If you feel that urge to convince him he’s made a mistake, remember the overwhelming probability that instead you will say at least one thing that will hurt your case, perhaps even fatally. It is smarter to save your defense for your lawyer.

2. Don’t run. It’s highly unlikely a suspect could outrun ten radio cars converging on a block in mere seconds. I saw a case where a passenger being driven home by a drunk friend bolted and ran. Why? It was the driver they wanted, and she needlessly risked injury in a forceful arrest. Even worse, the police might have suspected she ran because she had a gun, perhaps making them too quick to draw their own firearms. Most police will just arrest a runner, but there are some who will be mad they had to work so hard and injure the suspect unnecessarily.

3. Keep quiet. My hardest cases to defend are those where the suspect got very talkative. Incredibly, many will start babbling without the police having asked a single question. My most vivid memory of this problem was the armed robbery suspect who blurted to police: “How could the guy identify me? The robbers was wearing masks.” To which the police smiled and responded, “Oh? Were they?” Judges and juries will discount or ignore what a suspect says that helps him, but give great weight to anything that seems to hurt him. In 24 years of criminal practice, I could count on one hand the number of times a suspect was released because of what he told the police after they arrested him.

4. Don’t give permission to search anywhere. If they ask, it probably means they don’t believe they have the right to search and need your consent. If you are ordered to hand over your keys, state loudly “You do NOT have my permission to search.” If bystanders hear you, whatever they find may be excluded from evidence later. This is also a good reason not to talk, even if it seems all is lost when they find something incriminating.

5. If the police are searching your car or home, don’t look at the places you wish they wouldn’t search. Don’t react to the search at all, and especially not to questions like “Who does this belong to?”

6. Don’t resist arrest. Above all, do not push the police or try to swat their hands away. That would be assaulting an officer and any slight injury to them will turn your minor misdemeanor arrest into a felony. A petty shoplifter can wind up going to state prison that way. Resisting arrest (such as pulling away) is merely a misdemeanor and often the police do not even charge that offense. Obviously, striking an officer can result in serious injury to you as well.

7. Try to resist the temptation to mouth off at the police, even if you have been wrongly arrested. Police have a lot of discretion in what charges are brought. They can change a misdemeanor to a felony, add charges, or even take the trouble to talk directly to the prosecutor and urge him to go hard on you. On the other hand, I have seen a client who was friendly to the police and talked sports and such on the way to the station. They gave him a break. Notice he did not talk about his case, however.

8. Do not believe what the police tell you in order to get you to talk. The law permits them to lie to a suspect in order to get him to make admissions. For example, they will separate two friends who have been arrested and tell the first one that the second one squealed on him. The first one then squeals on the second, though in truth the second one never said anything. An even more common example is telling a suspect that if he talks to the police, “it will go easier”. Well, that’s sort of true. It will be much easier for the police to prove their case. I can’t remember too many cases where the prosecutor gave the defendant an easier deal because he waived his right to silence and confessed.

9. If at home, do not invite the police inside, nor should you “step outside”. If the police believe you have committed a felony, they usually need an arrest warrant to go into your home to arrest you. If they ask you to “step outside”, you will have solved that problem for them. The correct responses are: “I am comfortable talking right here.”, “No, you may not come in.”, or “Do you have a warrant to enter or to arrest me in my home?” I am not suggesting that you run. In fact, that is the best way to ensure the harshest punishment later on. But you may not find it so convenient to be arrested Friday night when all the courts and law offices are closed. With an attorney, you can perhaps surrender after bail arrangements are made and spend NO time in custody while your case is pending.

10. If you are arrested outside your home, do not accept any offers to let you go inside to get dressed, change, get a jacket, call your wife, or any other reason. The police will of course escort you inside and then search everywhere they please, again without a warrant. Likewise decline offers to secure your car safely.

That’s it: Ten simple rules that will leave as many of your rights intact as possible if you are arrested.

How about a short test? You have a fight with your live-in girlfriend and the police come and find you on the sidewalk two houses down from the apartment. The girlfriend points you out and the police arrest you for assault. They tell you they don’t intend to question you. They just want your name and address. Do you answer? Well, you shouldn’t. Your address is the single most damaging admission you could make. If you admit living with her, you have just converted a misdemeanor assault into a felony punishable by state prison. When you are arrested it is their game, and you don’t know the rules. It is best to be silent and let the attorney handle it later. The bottom line is that if the police have enough evidence to arrest, they will. If they don’t have that evidence, you could easily provide it by talking.

This article was authored by Brian Dinday, a member of the California Bar, with an office in San Francisco, California.

To the Occupy Movement: You Have Met the Enemy and They Do Not Care

2011-10-17T11:22:00.000-07:00

To the Occupy Movement

by James Keye / October 17th, 2011

The following argument will not be popular; it is not popular with me. It is, however, necessary because it has the greatest chance of being true.

Unless the Occupy Movement contains the roots of real behavioral change it will be a flash in the pan. People will become excited by the possibility of regaining control of the forces that surround them, but unless they are clear on what is required, they will, of necessity, fall back into the behaviors that support the economic elite rather than discover the actions that will chasten them.

Being heard is not winning. The plutocrats know that the masses are being abused; they are the abusers, for Christ’s sake (take that last as you will). These are not people who are unaware of the consequences of their actions; they do not care that hundreds, thousands, millions, even billions of people’s lives are damaged or destroyed: they do not care! Their behaviors will not change if their actions are pointed out to them.

The plutocracy is concerned that their behaviors might become generally known to an increasingly informed populace, but only in the sense that they would then have to own-up to being an aristocracy, a nobility, that can more easily do as it wishes when the people are ignorant, but just as willing to exercise its power directly over the people if it has to. The Occupy Movement may be effective in exposing power relationships, but without its own participants’ willingness for personal changes, there will be no greater result.

If the goal of the Occupy Movement is the resurrection of the American Dream and the Great Middle Class, it will fail fast. The economic elite owns that road and controls all the tollbooths. They are wired into that path like the brain is wired into the muscles. No; the elite must be starved out by the formation of self-sufficient heterogeneous human communities all over this country and the world who are willing, even desirous, to live a simpler life, a life in which the economic elite and their tollbooths can be avoided.

We have no targeted “antibiotic” for the disease of plutocracy. Like pre-penicillin medical “cures”, the pathogen must be attacked with a poison, designed in its dosage and application to kill it, before the patient is too seriously damaged. That is where we are now in our understanding and capacity to deal with the machinations of run-away economics and growth. It is now time to take our medicine, though there is very little likelihood that we will, preferring rather to die of the disease.

As long as each person absolutely has to sell some large bit of his or her life and labor in order to not die, the world will always turn out as it has. As long as food, shelter and other essentials for life are obtainable only by purchase using money gained with labor sold to someone else, no governing design, no system of laws will support the masses, but will always become the tools of enslavement to an elite who will use the masses as instruments for their desires. This is quite independent of any ‘ism’ under which the people labor.

The selling of labor must, at some level, be voluntary for human societies to be both stable and healthy. This means that real viable options for satisfactorily meeting essential needs be part of the “ecology” of the society. When ‘work’ that no member of a society will do voluntarily becomes necessity, especially for some members, then a few must be forced to do it. Patterns of social conflict, slavery and war – the stuff of our human history – are the result; patterns that we can no longer afford.

The mass movements evident around the world, of which the Occupy Movement is a part, are possibly the last chance that the species has to make adaptations to our real situation on the earth before the biophysical processes that support the present structure of life are so perturbed that ecological collapse is inevitable. If the energy of these movements is devoted solely to wresting power and wealth from the present elite, which would be most easily facilitated by starting a struggle to gather wealth and power into the hands of a new elite, then the pot will have only been stirred with no change in our actual circumstances.

What we require may be impossible, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t require it: a drowning man requires a breath of air; the degree of need doesn’t determine that he will get it. Rather than uncritically redistributing wealth and power in some manner acceptable to the ‘movement leaders’, these instruments of human maladjustment must be redefined as community and environmental property. This redefinition must happen in the minds of the people. The Occupy Movement cannot, in its heart of hearts, have as a goal that “the people” will take over power from the elite, but must understand that the present forms and structures of power will only create, in no time, new elite communities that are just as mad and self-serving as the present ones.

It must be recognized and acted on that the human unit is the heterogeneous human community; the economic and power elite form or buy “communities”, but demand that the masses confront elite collective action as individuals without power, like a single person confronting a street gang. We see this everywhere: the company “bargains” with the employee or with the customer; the petty criminal confronts the police, the DA’s office and the court; the home buyer is delivered the developer’s covenants, the speeder talks with the cop representing ‘The Law.’ Collective action that does not support elite community needs and desires is co-opted, marginalized or criminalized.

As long as a critical mass of the masses desires to have what the economic elite has, as long as they honor the result of elite behavior, then they will be ripe targets to be persuaded to support elite methods. Belief that individuals have the right, even the responsibility, to collect excess wealth into their absolute control is a destructive insanity; any unbiased look at history associated with competent reasoning demonstrates the consequences. And when a society makes the individual collection of excess, not just desirable, but essential for both safety and acceptability in that society, there is no other outcome than the one we currently face.

The Occupy Movement and the other mass movements worldwide challenge status quo beliefs and habits; this is the best possible time to begin planting the seeds for the beliefs and understandings that just might allow the species to get out of the trap we have constructed. It is almost certainly too much to ask that the movement message include a major shift of societal story; so much simpler to stay with the same story and only attempt to reassign the players. But the effort must still be made.

Here are three, somewhat overlapping, lists of changes in thinking that need to begin to percolate into the new societal story; all more fully explicated in previous essays posted on the Dissident Voice site.

A new Seven Deadly Sins:

1) Progress

2) Economic growth

3) Property

4) Excess

5) Censorship

6) Repression

7) Religion

Five foundational beliefs and actions to replace our current hodgepodge (from What We Must Do):

1) All life is important.

2) The value of a life is in the daily living of it, not in the tallying up of duration.

3) No one is to live from the fruits of another’s labor.

4) We must not make the assumption that the ‘life style’ (really level of consumption) that is average for the highest consuming population is the one we should adopt as our standard.

5) We must finally come to a socially and intellectually mature relationship with our “religious instincts.”

Eight foundational beliefs and understandings to replace our current hodgepodge (from Extremism in the Defense of Survival)

1) Humans are animals that must integrate their behaviors into ecological processes.

2) Nothing can be owned by anything; all claims of property and ownership are relationships in which one party is arbitrarily devalued based on short-term power imbalances.

3) Wealth accumulation is an aberrant behavior – a form of psychopathology.

4) The measure of normal in the world must be from places and processes that are uninfluenced by human action.

5) There are no normal or natural human behaviors, group or individual, of any scale remaining in the human repertoire.

6) Humans are a community-based organism.

7) Our understandings of and relationships to health, illness and death have become terribly distorted.

8) Our spiritual understandings and habits are the distorted products of the pre-scientific forest life made to serve the interests of kings and other authoritarians.

I add this final thought:

Individualism is the opposite of valuing individual human beings. Individuals are supremely valuable and that value is only formed and sustained in community.

James Keye is the nom de plume of a biologist and psychologist who after discovering a mismatch between academe and himself went into private business for many years. His whole post-pubescent life has been focused on understanding at both the intellectual and personal levels what it is to be of the human species; he claims some success. Email him at: jkeye1632@gmail.com. Read other articles by James, or visit James's website.

This article was posted on Monday, October 17th, 2011 at 8:01am and is filed under Activism, Economy/Economics, Philosophy.

Occupy Wall Street and "The American Autumn": Is It a "Colored Revolution"? Part I

2011-10-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street and "The American Autumn": Is It a "Colored Revolution"? Part I

by Michel Chossudovsky



Global Research, October 13, 2011

There is a grassroots protest movement unfolding across America, which includes people from all walks of life, from all age groups, conscious of the need for social change and committed to reversing the tide.

The grassroots of this movement constitutes a response to the "Wall Street agenda" of financial fraud and manipulation which has served to trigger unemployment and poverty across the land.

Does this movement constitute in its present form an instrument of meaningful reform and social change in America?

What is the organizational structure of the movement? Who are its main architects?

Has the movement or segments within this movement been co-opted?

This is an important question, which must be addressed by those who are part of the Occupy Wall Street Movement as well as those who, across America, support real democracy.

Introduction

Historically, progressive social movements have been infiltrated, their leaders co-opted and manipulated, through the corporate funding of non-governmental organizations, trade unions and political parties. The ultimate purpose of "funding dissent" is to prevent the protest movement from challenging the legitimacy of the economic elites:

"In a bitter irony, part of the fraudulent financial gains on Wall Street in recent years have been recycled to the elites' tax exempt foundations and charities. These windfall financial gains have not only been used to buy out politicians, they have also been channelled to NGOs, research institutes, community centres, church groups, environmentalists, alternative media, human rights groups, etc.

The inner objective is to "manufacture dissent" and establish the boundaries of a "politically correct" opposition. In turn, many NGOs are infiltrated by informants often acting on behalf of western intelligence agencies. Moreover, an increasingly large segment of the progressive alternative news media on the internet has become dependent on funding from corporate foundations and charities.

The objective of the corporate elites has been to fragment the people's movement into a vast "do it yourself" mosaic." (See Michel Chossudovsky, Manufacturing Dissent: the Anti-globalization Movement is Funded by the Corporate Elites, Global Research, September 20, 2010)

"Manufacturing Dissent"

At the same time, "manufactured dissent" is intent upon promoting political and social divisions (e.g. within and between political parties and social movements). In turn, it encourages the creation of factions within each and every organization.

With regard to the anti-globalization movement, this process of division and fragmentation dates back to the early days of the World Social Forum. (See Michel Chossudovsky, Manufacturing Dissent: The Anti-globalization Movement is Funded by the Corporate Elites, Global Research, September 20, 2010)

Most of the progressive organizations of the post-World War II period, including the European "Left" have, in the course of the last thirty years, been transformed and remoulded. The "Free Market" system (Neoliberalism) is the consensus of the "Left". This applies, among others, to the Socialist Party in France, the Labour Party in Britain, the Social Democrats in Germany, not to mention the Green Party in France and Germany.

In the US, bi-partisanship is not the result of the interplay of Congressional party politics. A handful of powerful corporate lobby groups control both the Republicans and the Democrats. The "bi-partisan consensus" is established by the elites who operate behind the scenes. It is enforced by the main corporate lobby groups, which exert a stranglehold over both major political parties.

In turn, the leaders of the AFL-CIO have also been co-opted by the corporate establishment against the grassroots of the US labor movement.

The leaders of organized labor attend the annual meetings of the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF). They collaborate with the Business Roundtable. But at the same time, the grassroots of the US labor movement has sought to to carry out organizational changes which contribute to democratizing the leadership of individual trade unions.

The elites will promote a "ritual of dissent" with a high media profile, with the support of network TV, the corporate news as well as the internet.

The economic elites -- which control major foundations -- also oversee the funding of numerous civil society organizations, which historically have been involved in the protest movement against the established economic and social order. The programs of many NGOs (including those involved in the Occupy Wall Street Movement) rely heavily on funding from private foundations including the Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, Tides foundations, among others.

Historically, the anti-globalization movement which emerged in the 1990s has opposed Wall Street and the Texas oil giants controlled by Rockefeller, et al. Yet the foundations and charities of Rockefeller, Ford et al have, over the years, generously funded progressive anti-capitalist networks as well as environmentalists (opposed to Big Oil) with a view to ultimately overseeing and shaping their various activities.

"Colored Revolutions"

In the course of the last decade, "colored revolutions" have emerged in several countries. The "colored revolutions" are US intelligence ops which consist in covertly supporting protest movements with a view to triggering "regime change" under the banner of a pro-democracy movement.

"Colored revolutions" are supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House, among others. The objective of a "colored revolution" is to foment social unrest and use the protest movement to topple the existing government. The ultimate foreign policy goal is to instate a compliant pro-US government (or "puppet regime").

"The Arab Spring"

In Egypt's "Arab Spring", the main civil society organizations including Kifaya (Enough) and The April 6 Youth Movement were not only supported by US based foundations, they also had the endorsement of the US State Department. (For details see Michel Chossudovsky, The Protest Movement in Egypt: "Dictators" do not Dictate, They Obey Orders, Global Research, January 29, 2011)

Egyptian dissidents, Fellows of Freedom House in Washington DC (2008)

"In a bitter irony, Washington supported the Mubarak dictatorship, including its atrocities, while also backing and financing its detractors,... Under the auspices of Freedom House, Egyptian dissidents and opponents of Hosni Mubarak (see above) were received in May 2008 by Condoleezza Rice ... and White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley." (See Michel Chossudovsky, The Protest Movement in Egypt: "Dictators" do not Dictate, They Obey Orders, Global Research, January 29, 2011)

The following year (May 2009), a delegation of Egyptian dissidents was received by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (See below)

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks with "Egyptian activists promoting freedom and democracy", prior to meetings at the State Department in Washington, DC, May 28, 2009.
Compare the two pictures. Part of the 2008 delegation meeting Condoleeza Rice is part of the 2009 delegation meeting Hillary Clinton

OTPOR and the Centre for Applied Non Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS)

Dissidents of Egypt's April 6 Youth Movement, which, for several years, was in permanent liaison with the US Embassy in Cairo, were trained by Serbia's Centre for Applied Non Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), a consulting and training firm specializing in "Revolution" supported by FH and the NED.

CANVAS was established in 2003 by OTPOR, a CIA supported Serbian organization which played a central role in the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic in the wake of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Barely two months after the end of the 1999 bombings of Yugoslavia, OTPOR was spearheaded into playing a central role in the installation of a US-NATO sponsored "caretaker" government in Serbia. These developments also paved the way towards the secession of Montenegro from Yugoslavia, the establishment of the US Bondsteel military base and the eventual formation a Mafia State in Kosovo.

In August 1999, the CIA is reported to have set up a training program for OTPOR in Bulgaria's capital Sofia:

"In the summer of 1999, the head of the CIA, George Tenet, set up shop in Sofia, Bulgaria to “educate” the Serb opposition. Last August. 28 [2000], the BBC confirmed that a special 10-day class had been given to the Otpor militants, also in Sofia.

The CIA program is a program in successive phases. Early on, they flatter the Serbs' patriotism and spirit of independence, acting as if they respect these qualities. But after having sown confusion and broken the unity of the country, the CIA and NATO would go much further."

(Gerard Mugemangano and Michel Collon, "To be partly controlled by the CIA ? That doesn’t bother me much.", Interview with two activists of the Otpor student movement, International Action Center (IAC), To be partly controlled by the CIA ? October 6, 2000. See also "CIA is tutoring Serbian group, Otpor", The Monitor, Sofia, translated by Blagovesta Doncheva, Emperors Clothes, September 8, 2000 )

"The Revolution Business"

OTPOR's Centre for Applied Non Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) describes itself as "an International network of trainers and consultants" involved in the "Revolution Business". Funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), it constitutes a consulting outfit, advising and training US sponsored opposition groups in more than 40 countries.

OTPOR played a key role in Egypt.

Egypt Tahir Square: What appeared to be a spontaneous democratization process was a carefully planned intelligence operation. View video below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXbA6yZY-8

Egypt. The Logo of the April 6 Movement

Egypt’s “April 6 Youth Movement,” the same fist logo, Source Infowars

Both the April 6 Movement and Kifaya (Enough!) received prior training from CANVAS in Belgrade "in the strategies of non-violent revolution". "According to Stratfor, The tactics used by the April 6 Movement and Kifaya "were straight out of CANVAS's training curriculum." (Quoted in Tina Rosenberg, Revolution U, Foreign Policy, February 16, 2011 )

It is worth noting the similarity of the logos as well as the names involved in CANVAS-OTPOR sponsored "Colored Revolutions" The April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt used the clenched fist as its logo, Kifaya ("Enough!") has the same name as the Youth Protest movement supported by OTPOR in Georgia which was named Kmara! ("Enough!"). Both groups were trained by CANVAS.

Georgia's Kmara ("Enough!")

The Role of CANVAS-OTPOR in the Occupy Wall Street Movement

CANVAS-OPTOR is currently involved in the Occupy Wall Street Movement (#OWS).

Several key organizations currently involved in The Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) movement played a significant role in "The Arab Spring". Of significance, "Anonymous", the social media "hacktivist" group, was involved in waging cyber-attacks on Egyptian government websites at the height of "The Arab Spring".(http://anonops.blogspot.com, see also http://anonnews.org/)

In May 2011, "Anonymous" waged cyberattacks on Iran and last August, it waged similar cyber-attacks directed against the Syrian Ministry Defense. These cyber-attacks were waged in support of the Syrian "opposition" in exile, which is largely integrated by Islamists. (See Syrian Ministry Of Defense Website Hacked By 'Anonymous', Huffington Post, August 8, 2011).

The actions of "Anonymous" in Syria and Iran are consistent with the framework of the "Colored Revolutions". They seek to demonize the political regime and create political instability. (For analysis on Syria's Opposition, see Michel Chossudovsky, SYRIA: Who is Behind The Protest Movement? Fabricating a Pretext for a US-NATO "Humanitarian Intervention" Global Research, May 3, 2011)

Both CANVAS and Anonymous are now actively involved in the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

The precise role of CANVAS in the Occupy Wall Street Movement remains to be assessed.

Ivan Marovic, a leader of CANVAS recently addressed the Occupy Wall Street protest movement in New York City. Listen carefully to his speech. (Bear in mind that his organization CANVAS is supported by NED).

Click link below to listen to Ivan Marovic’s address to Occupy Wall Street in New York City

Ivan Marovic addresses Occupy Wall Street
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkM3BBtc7N0

Marovic acknowledged in an earlier statement that there is nothing spontaneous in the planning of a "revolutionary event":

"It looks like people just went into the street. But it's the result of months or years of preparation. It is very boring until you reach a certain point, where you can organize mass demonstrations or strikes. If it is carefully planned, by the time they start, everything is over in a matter of weeks." (Quoted in Tina Rosenberg, Revolution U, Foreign Policy, February 16, 2011)

This statement by OTPOR's spokesperson Ivan Marovic would suggest that the protest movements in the Arab World did not spread spontaneously from one country to another, as portrayed by the Western media. The national protest movements were planned well in advance. The chronology and sequencing of these national protest movements were also planned.

Similarly, Maravic's statement also suggests that The Occupy Wall Street movement was also the object of careful advanced planning by a number of key organizations on tactics and strategy.

It is worth noting that one of OTPOR's tactics is "not try to avoid arrests", but rather to "provoke them and use them to the movement's advantage." as a PR strategy. (Ibid)

Occupy Wall Street Clenched Fist on http://occupywallst.org

PORA; Its Time!

KMARA Enough!

OBORONA Defense

KELKEL New epoch

PART II of this article will examine the mainstay of the Occupy Wall Street movement, including the role of NGO organizers.
Global Research Articles by Michel Chossudovsky

Occupy Wall Street and the History of Democratic Finance Protest

2011-10-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

AlterNet.org

Occupy Wall Street and the History of Democratic Finance Protest

Given some of my key subjects, I can’t help but be interested in the “occupy” movement that, at the moment, has a few hundred protesters [UPDATE: Now a lot more; I was there on Tuesday] more or less living in Zuccotti Park near the New York Stock Exchange in lower Manhattan, and is apparently starting to engage in similar protests in other cities. You can’t find out much about this action via “mainstream media,” and even much of the left media, such as it is, has been critical in some cases, and outright dismissive in others, regarding the movement’s evident formlessness and absence of specific goals.

That absence is pretty much undeniable. Still, in Salon, Glenn Greenwald has shrewdly criticized liberal-Democrat scorn for Occupy Wall Street. On the other hand, Mother Jones criticizes the movement on bases other than those that Greenwald attacks. . . .

But I write about the deep, founding roots of rowdy, American populist protest and insurrection, often visionary and even utopian, yet informed and practical too, specifically over money, credit, and the purpose and nature of public and private finance. And despite my pop-narrative books on the subject, and despite my articles here, and in such place as Newdeal20.org (articles picked up by AlterNet, Huffington, Salon, Naked Capitalism, and others), key indicators of my relative impact (like royalty statements!) give me a sneaking suspicion that most people still don’t connect the American founding period with a rugged drive on the part of ordinary people for equal access to the tools of economic development and against the hegemony of the high-finance, inside-government elites who signed the Declaration and framed the Constitution and made us a nation.

Sometimes people even ascribe democratic ideas to the famous upscale American Revolutionaries, who to a man actually hated democracy and popular finance. Paine, the exception, was ultimately rebuked and scorned by all of the others.

The difficulty in dealing with our founding battle for democratic economics arises in part because the movement was not against England but against the very American banking and trading elites who dominated the resistance to England. That complicates our founding myth, possibly unpleasantly. Also, it was a generally losing battle. With ratification of the Constitution, Hamiltonian finance triumphed, and people looking to Jefferson and Madison for finance and economic alternatives to Hamilton are barking up the wrong tree, since what those men knew, or even really cared, about finance could be written on a dime. (Anyway, in pushing for creating a nation, Madison supported Hamiltonian finance down the line. Their differences came later.) When Occupy Wall Street protesters say “It’s We the People!” they’re actually referring to a preamble, intending no hint of economic democracy, to a document that was framed specifically to push down democratic finance and concentrate American wealth for national purposes. Not very edifying, but there it is.

The Tea Party, meanwhile, has taken up founding economic issues from a right-wing point of view, associating itself with the upper-middle-class Boston patriots (often mistaken for populist democrats) who led a movement against overrreaching British trade acts in the 1760′s and were important to the impulse toward American independence. I’ve written fairly extensively about where and how I think the Tea Party goes wrong on the history of the founding period. But at least they’re framing their objections to current policy, and framing the historical roots of their ideas, not mainly in cultural but in economic terms.

Like it or not, though, it is Occupy Wall Street that has the most in common, ideologically, not with those Boston merchants and their supporters but with the less well-known, less comfortably acknowledged people who, throughout the founding period, cogently proposed and vigorously agitated for an entirely different approach to finance and monetary policy than that carried forward by the famous founders. Amid horrible depressions and foreclosure crises, from the 1750′s through the 1790′s, ordinary people closed debt courts, rescued debt prisoners, waylaid process servers, boycotted foreclosure actions, etc. (More on that here and here.) They were legally barred from voting and holding office, since they didn’t have enough property, so they used their power of intimidation to pressure their legislatures for debt relief and popular monetary policies. Their few leaders in legit politics included the visionary preacher Herman Husband, the weaver William Findley, and the farmer Robert Whitehill.

They had high hopes for American independence. In the 1770′s, their “out-of-doors” collaboration with the famous elites was critical to enabling the Declaration of Independence — even though none of their names appears there (well, Benjamin Rush’s does, but by then he’d become unradicalized). Their democratic, egalitarian hopes dashed, in the 1780′s, in western Massachusetts, they marched on the state’s armory in Springfield to reverse regressive finance policies that had again plunged ordinary people into debt peonage and foreclosure while bailing out rich creditors (elites called that populist action, reductively, Shays’s Rebellion). In the 1790′s, with the Constitution in force, and Hamilton’s economics the law of a powerful new nation (partly in direct reaction to the Shays action), populists took over the militia and debt-court system throughout western Pennsylvania and western counties of neighboring states, flew their own flag, and tried to secede from the United States and form an economically egalitarian country. Hamilton dubbed that action, again in a successful effort to reduce it, the Whiskey Rebellion, and he and President Washington responded, naturally enough, by occupying western Pennsylvania with federal troops.

It is my possibly vain hope that reading up on such historical matters might inspire efforts like Occupy Wall Street to greater cogency and a deeper, more solid foundation in longstanding (if embattled and problematic) American values than they now seem to possess. You don’t have to look as late as the 19th-century Populists and the 1930′s labor movement, for example, to find an American left deeply immersed in both economic issues and an ambitious vision of a better country. Those things were present at the creation.

Occupy Wall Street probably doesn’t, when you shake it down, want to secede from the union like the whiskey rebels — happily enough. But those rebels didn’t start out by wanting to secede, either; they’d fought in the awful front lines of the Revolution in hopes that those sacrifices might lead to something for them and their families; it didn’t. Occupy Wall Street does seem to want to secede, somehow, from the hopeless-feeling regurgitation, through the two political parties, of elite finance theories and policies that never seem sincerely dedicated to any fundamental improvement of opportunity for what they call, not wrongly, “the 99%.”

The problem for Occupy Wall Street is that their founding-period political ancestors, who were indeed good at “occupying,” almost always accompanied their efforts with, for one thing, published resolutions registering specific demands and objections (not “this situation sucks” — which of course it does — but “replace a regressive tax with a progressive one,” “give us access to the franchise,” ”issue paper money,” “take away Robert Morris’s bank charter,” etc.). On Twitter I’ve tried to collect some specific goals from Occupy people. Generally those who respond seem interested not in anarchist dismantling of government or sweeping stuff like ending capitalism but, say, real regulation. Which is cool if only because my early American democratic-finance activists called themselves “regulators”!

But a lot of efforts to state a goal for the protest itself devolve in sloganeering about the economic situation and self-admiring paeans to the virtues of protesting. Wouldn’t galvanizing this stuff require… leadership? Our founding democratic-finance activists weren’t such communitarians that they refused to have leaders and set achievable goals. They were used to being rank-and-file — even though as miltiamen, they elected their leaders.

And they knew where they’d succeeded and failed. This thing in Zuccotti Park is open-ended. It has no declared closing date. How can it ever declare victory, get the hell out, build its organization, and come back to fight another day?

By William Hogeland | Sourced from Hysteriography

Posted at October 1, 2011, 8:06 am

The Nuts and Bolts of Occupy Wall Street

2011-09-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

The Nuts and Bolts of Occupy Wall Street

by Pham Binh / September 30th, 2011

On day 12 of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), I helped moderate a meeting of the “open source” OWS working group by keeping a list of speakers and co-chairing. I am not sure what the open source group is supposed to do exactly, but I decided to attend this meeting after watching a middle-aged man call in the General Assembly for developing demands and goals on the OWS live feed and people in the crowd telling him the open source working group was tasked with this.

After the daily 1 p.m. General Assembly meeting ended, OWS divided into its working groups, including media, labor, outreach, and a number of others. I walked over and sat down next to the point person (or “ leader”) of the working group, a young white guy in his twenties who looked like a 60s throwback with his long, straight hippy-style hair, rainbow tights, fatigue shirt, and Ziploc bag of rolling papers. Of course, you can never judge a book by its cover — he is also a student of behavioral economics and mentioned that academic studies have shown that the OWS’s decentralized, highly participatory, and lengthy process of dialogue is the best way to organize.

The open source meeting swelled very quickly to 20 or 30 people, an indication that a lot of people want to figure out what OWS’s demands should be. The group moderator remarked that the group was so big it was practically a “second General Assembly.” His brief introduction to the process whereby OWS would define its vision (he repeatedly used the phrase “visioning”) was interrupted as many hands went up, asking to be called on; at least 10 people wanted to speak and each was allowed a minute and a half.

What emerged from the discussion was that there is no consensus that demands are even necessary. Quite a few protesters argued along the lines that this is movement or process of dialogue is the demand/goal and that therefore demands are not necessary; one said our demand to the world should that they “join us.” Two older people, one in his sixties, the other in his thirties, spoke out for having clear, specific demands as being a very necessary step to creating a sustainable protest, much less a movement.

I argued that a few concrete, achievable demands were important, citing the “Day of Wrath” protest on January 25, 2011 that began the revolution in Egypt that demanded raising the minimum wage, an end to the dictatorship’s “emergency laws,” the firing of the interior minister, and a two term presidency. I explained that Mubarak’s ouster was not one of their original demands, but it became a demand once millions of people became involved in the movement, and therefore demands can and should change depending on circumstances. My suggested demand was to raise taxes on the 1%, something the New York state legislature and the city council could vote to do immediately.

One woman argued against having demands on the grounds that the media wanted us to do exactly that, that it would be a way for them to put us in a nice neat little confining box the better to ignore us; instead, she proposed we copy the model used to write grant proposals and draw up a mission statement, goals, and objectives. The moderator took to this and we dispersed into six groups of five or so to discuss what motivated us to protest and what our “visions” (or goals, long and short term) were; after the break out, we would reconvene to sum up and share what each of our groups had come up with in the hopes of finding some type of consensus that would inform some sort of statement to the world.

The OWS political process is very participatory, cumbersome, and time-consuming. One strength of their process is that it avoids the top-down control that Wisconsin’s union leaders exercised to scuttle the protests and developing strike wave that shook the state in favor of harmless (and ultimately fruitless) recall efforts.

To participate and help shape OWS politically requires dedicating many, many waking hours every day to ongoing, continuous debates and discussions. This is not necessarily a bad thing but in practice ends up favoring the participation of those who can afford to skip work and/or school for a week or more. With unemployment over 9% (a figure even higher for the 18-25 age group), it should be no surprise that these are the people taking the fight to the enemy’s lair.

It may be that OWS never develops a clear set of demands. OWS seems to be headed toward issuing a general statement akin to the Port Huron Statement by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962, although it will probably be less wordy and much darker. Port Huron spoke moralistically of the highly privileged lives led by America’s post-World War Two college students that stood in start contrast to the conditions facing black and brown people in the Jim Crow south, America’s urban ghettos, and the Third World. Today, students face the prospect of lifelong debt, serial dead-end jobs, and holding two or even three part-time jobs just to keep up with the bills and rent, just like the non-college educated working class.

Whatever OWS decides with regards to demands, they deserve credit for putting their finger on the real enemy and being brave enough to defy the police and break the law to make the voices of their generation heard.

Everyone who can should go and help occupy Wall Street.

Pham Binh is an activist and recent graduate of Hunter College in NYC. His articles have been published at Znet, Asia Times Online, Dissident Voice, and Monthly Review Online. He can be reached at: anita_job@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Pham, or visit Pham's website.

This article was posted on Friday, September 30th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Activism.

Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962

2011-09-30T15:05:00.000-07:00

Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962

Courtesy Office of Sen. Tom Hayden.

THE PORT HURON STATEMENT OF THE STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introductory Note: This document represents the results of several months of writing and discussion among the membership, a draft paper, and revision by the Students for a Democratic Society national convention meeting in \cf2 Port Huron\cf0 , Michigan, June 11-15, 1962. It is represented as a document with which SDS officially identifies, but also as a living document open to change with our times and experiences. It is a beginning: in our own debate and education, in our dialogue with society.

published and distributed by Students for a Democratic Society 112 East 19 Street New York 3, New York GRamercy 3-2181

INTRODUCTION: AGENDA FOR A GENERATION

We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.

As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.

While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration "all men are created equal . . . rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.

We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nationstates seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than "of, by, and for the people."

Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. The worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology -- these trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval.

Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority -- the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will "muddle through", beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.

Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity -- but might it not better be called a glaze above deeplyfelt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.

Values

Making values explicit -- an initial task in establishing alternatives -

is an activity that has been devalued and corrupted. The conventional moral terms of the age, the politician moralities -- "free world", "people's democracies" -- reflect realities poorly, if at all, and seem to function more as ruling myths than as descriptive principles. But neither has our experience in the universities brought as moral enlightenment. Our professors and administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is called unscholastic. The questions we might want raised -- what is really important? can we live in a different and better way? if we wanted to change society, how would we do it? -- are not thought to be questions of a "fruitful, empirical nature", and thus are brushed aside.

Unlike youth in other countries we are used to moral leadership being exercised and moral dimensions being clarified by our elders. But today, for us, not even the liberal and socialist preachments of the past seem adequate to the forms of the present. Consider the old slogans; Capitalism Cannot Reform Itself, United Front Against Fascism, General Strike, All Out on May Day. Or, more recently, No Cooperation with Commies and Fellow Travellers, Ideologies Are Exhausted, Bipartisanship, No Utopias. These are incomplete, and there are few new prophets. It has been said that our liberal and socialist predecessors were plagued by vision without program, while our own generation is plagued by program without vision. All around us there is astute grasp of method, technique -- the committee, the ad hoc group, the lobbyist, that hard and soft sell, the make, the projected image -- but, if pressed critically, such expertise is incompetent to explain its implicit ideals. It is highly fashionable to identify oneself by old categories, or by naming a respected political figure, or by explaining "how we would vote" on various issues.

Theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old -- and, unable to reconstitute theoretic order, men have condemned idealism itself. Doubt has replaced hopefulness -- and men act out a defeatism that is labeled realistic. The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today. The reasons are various: the dreams of the older left were perverted by Stalinism and never recreated; the congressional stalemate makes men narrow their view of the possible; the specialization of human activity leaves little room for sweeping thought; the horrors of the twentieth century, symbolized in the gas-ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness. To be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded. To have no serious aspirations, on the contrary, is to be "toughminded".

In suggesting social goals and values, therefore, we are aware of entering a sphere of some disrepute. Perhaps matured by the past, we have no sure formulas, no closed theories -- but that does not mean values are beyond discussion and tentative determination. A first task of any social movement is to convenience people that the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values is complex but worthwhile. We are aware that to avoid platitudes we must analyze the concrete conditions of social order. But to direct such an analysis we must use the guideposts of basic principles. Our own social values involve conceptions of human beings, human relationships, and social systems.

We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In affirming these principles we are aware of countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs. We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things -- if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to "posterity" cannot justify the mutilations of the present. We oppose, too, the doctrine of human incompetence because it rests essentially on the modern fact that men have been "competently" manipulated into incompetence -- we see little reason why men cannot meet with increasing skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, if society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making.

Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic: a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved: one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn.

This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism -- the object is not to have one's way so much as it is to have a way that is one's own. Nor do we deify man -- we merely have faith in his potential.

Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human interdependence is contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be willed however, as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social relations. Personal links between man and man are needed, especially to go beyond the partial and fragmentary bonds of function that bind men only as worker to worker, employer to employee, teacher to student, American to Russian.

Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.

As the individualism we affirm is not egoism, the selflessness we affirm is not self-elimination. On the contrary, we believe in generosity of a kind that imprints one's unique individual qualities in the relation to other men, and to all human activity. Further, to dislike isolation is not to favor the abolition of privacy; the latter differs from isolation in that it occurs or is abolished according to individual will. Finally, we would replace power and personal uniqueness rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.

As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.

In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles:

that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings;
that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;
that politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life;
that the political order should serve to clarify problems in a way instrumental to their solution; it should provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration; opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilities the attainment of goals; channels should be commonly available to related men to knowledge and to power so that private problems -- from bad recreation facilities to personal alienation -- are formulated as general issues.

The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles:

that work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival. It should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; selfdirect, not manipulated, encouraging independence; a respect for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social responsibility, since it is this experience that has crucial influence on habits, perceptions and individual ethics;
that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the individual must share in its full determination;
that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.

Like the political and economic ones, major social institutions -- cultural, education, rehabilitative, and others -- should be generally organized with the well-being and dignity of man as the essential measure of success.

In social change or interchange, we find violence to be abhorrent because it requires generally the transformation of the target, be it a human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized object of hate. It is imperative that the means of violence be abolished and the institutions -- local, national, international -- that encourage nonviolence as a condition of conflict be developed.

These are our central values, in skeletal form. It remains vital to understand their denial or attainment in the context of the modern world.

The Students

In the last few years, thousands of American students demonstrated that they at least felt the urgency of the times. They moved actively and directly against racial injustices, the threat of war, violations of individual rights of conscience and, less frequently, against economic manipulation. They succeeded in restoring a small measure of controversy to the campuses after the stillness of the McCarthy period. They succeeded, too, in gaining some concessions from the people and institutions they opposed, especially in the fight against racial bigotry.

The significance of these scattered movements lies not in their success or failure in gaining objectives -- at least not yet. Nor does the significance lie in the intellectual "competence" or "maturity" of the students involved -- as some pedantic elders allege. The significance is in the fact the students are breaking the crust of apathy and overcoming the inner alienation that remain the defining characteristics of American college life.

If student movements for change are rarities still on the campus scene, what is commonplace there? The real campus, the familiar campus, is a place of private people, engaged in their notorious "inner emigration." It is a place of commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool. It is a place of mass affirmation of the Twist, but mass reluctance toward the controversial public stance. Rules are accepted as "inevitable", bureaucracy as "just circumstances", irrelevance as "scholarship", selflessness as "martyrdom", politics as "just another way to make people, and an unprofitable one, too."

Almost no students value activity as a citizen. Passive in public, they are hardly more idealistic in arranging their private lives: Gallup concludes they will settle for "low success, and won't risk high failure." There is not much willingness to take risks (not even in business), no setting of dangerous goals, no real conception of personal identity except one manufactured in the image of others, no real urge for personal fulfillment except to be almost as successful as the very successful people. Attention is being paid to social status (the quality of shirt collars, meeting people, getting wives or husbands, making solid contacts for later on); much too, is paid to academic status (grades, honors, the med school rat-race). But neglected generally is real intellectual status, the personal cultivation of the mind.

"Students don't even give a damn about the apathy," one has said. Apathy toward apathy begets a privately-constructed universe, a place of systematic study schedules, two nights each week for beer, a girl or two, and early marriage; a framework infused with personality, warmth, and under control, no matter how unsatisfying otherwise.

Under these conditions university life loses all relevance to some. Four hundred thousand of our classmates leave college every year.

But apathy is not simply an attitude; it is a product of social institutions, and of the structure and organization of higher education itself. The extracurricular life is ordered according to in loco parentis theory, which ratifies the Administration as the moral guardian of the young. The accompanying "let's pretend" theory of student extracurricular affairs validates student government as a training center for those who want to spend their lives in political pretense, and discourages initiative from more articulate, honest, and sensitive students. The bounds and style of controversy are delimited before controversy begins. The university "prepares" the student for "citizenship" through perpetual rehearsals and, usually, through emasculation of what creative spirit there is in the individual.

The academic life contains reinforcing counterparts to the way in which extracurricular life is organized. The academic world is founded in a teacher-student relation analogous to the parent-child relation which characterizes in loco parentis. Further, academia includes a radical separation of student from the material of study. That which is studied, the social reality, is "objectified" to sterility, dividing the student from life -- just as he is restrained in active involvement by the deans controlling student government. The specialization of function and knowledge, admittedly necessary to our complex technological and social structure, has produced and exaggerated compartmentalization of study and understanding. This has contributed to: an overly parochial view, by faculty, of the role of its research and scholarship; a discontinuous and truncated understanding, by students, of the surrounding social order; a loss of personal attachment, by nearly all, to the worth of study as a humanistic enterprise.

There is, finally, the cumbersome academic bureaucracy extending throughout the academic as well as extracurricular structures, contributing to the sense of outer complexity and inner powerlessness that transforms so many students from honest searching to ratification of convention and, worse, to a numbness of present and future catastrophes. The size and financing systems of the university enhance the permanent trusteeship of the administrative bureaucracy, their power leading to a shift to the value standards of business and administrative mentality within the university. Huge foundations and other private financial interests shape under-financed colleges and universities, not only making them more commercial, but less disposed to diagnose society critically, less open to dissent. Many social and physical scientists, neglecting the liberating heritage of higher learning, develop "human relations" or morale-producing" techniques for the corporate economy, while others exercise their intellectual skills to accelerate the arms race.

Tragically, the university could serve as a significant source of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes. But the actual intellectual effect of the college experience is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel -- say, a television set -- passing on the stock truths of the day. Students leave college somewhat more "tolerant" than when they arrived, but basically unchallenged in their values and political orientations. With administrators ordering the institutions, and faculty the curriculum, the student learns by his isolation to accept elite rule within the university, which prepares him to accept later forms of minority control. The real function of the educational system -- as opposed to its more rhetorical function of "searching for truth" -- is to impart the key information and styles that will help the student get by, modestly but comfortably, in the big society beyond.

The Society Beyond

Look beyond the campus, to America itself. That student life is more intellectual, and perhaps more comfortable, does not obscure the fact that the fundamental qualities of life on the campus reflect the habits of society at large. The fraternity president is seen at the junior manager levels; the sorority queen has gone to Grosse Pointe: the serious poet burns for a place, any place, or work; the once-serious and never serious poets work at the advertising agencies. The desperation of people threatened by forces about which they know little and of which they can say less; the cheerful emptiness of people "giving up" all hope of changing things; the faceless ones polled by Gallup who listed "international affairs" fourteenth on their list of "problems" but who also expected thermonuclear war in the next few years: in these and other forms, Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any collective effort at directing their own affairs.

Some regard this national doldrums as a sign of healthy approval of the established order -- but is it approval by consent or manipulated acquiescence? Others declare that the people are withdrawn because compelling issues are fast disappearing -- perhaps there are fewer breadlines in America, but is Jim Crow gone, is there enough work and work more fulfilling, is world war a diminishing threat, and what of the revolutionary new peoples? Still others think the national quietude is a necessary consequence of the need for elites to resolve complex and specialized problems of modern industrial society -- but, then, why should business elites help decide foreign policy, and who controls the elites anyway, and are they solving mankind's problems? Others, finally, shrug knowingly and announce that full democracy never worked anywhere in the past -- but why lump qualitatively different civilizations together, and how can a social order work well if its best thinkers are skeptics, and is man really doomed forever to the domination of today?

There are no convincing apologies for the contemporary malaise. While the world tumbles toward the final war, while men in other nations are trying desperately to alter events, while the very future qua future is uncertain -- America is without community, impulse, without the inner momentum necessary for an age when societies cannot successfully perpetuate themselves by their military weapons, when democracy must be viable because of its quality of life, not its quantity of rockets.

The apathy here is, first subjective -- the felt powerlessness of ordinary people, the resignation before the enormity of events. But subjective apathy is encouraged by the objective American situation -- the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant knowledge, from pinnacles of decision-making. Just as the university influences the student way of life, so do major social institutions create the circumstances in which the isolated citizen will try hopelessly to understand his world and himself.

The very isolation of the individual -- from power and community and ability to aspire -- means the rise of a democracy without publics. With the great mass of people structurally remote and psychologically hesitant with respect to democratic institutions, those institutions themselves attenuate and become, in the fashion of the vicious circle, progressively less accessible to those few who aspire to serious participation in social affairs. The vital democratic connection between community and leadership, between the mass and the several elites, has been so wrenched and perverted that disastrous policies go unchallenged time and again.

Politics without Publics

The American political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers speak. In actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing the individual citizen, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of military and business interests.

A crucial feature of the political apparatus in America is that greater differences are harbored within each major party than the differences existing between them. Instead of two parties presenting distinctive and significant differences of approach, what dominates the system if a natural interlocking of Democrats from Southern states with the more conservative elements of the Republican party. This arrangement of forces is blessed by the seniority system of Congress which guarantees congressional committee domination by conservatives -- ten of 17 committees in the Senate and 13 of 21 in House of Representatives are chaired currently by Dixiecrats.

The party overlap, however, is not the only structural antagonist of democracy in politics. First, the localized nature of the party system does not encourage discussion of national and international issues: thus problems are not raised by and for people, and political representatives usually are unfettered from any responsibilities to the general public except those regarding parochial matters. Second, whole constituencies are divested of the full political power they might have: many Negroes in the South are prevented from voting, migrant workers are disenfranchised by various residence requirements, some urban and suburban dwellers are victimized by gerrymandering, and poor people are too often without the power to obtain political representation. Third, the focus of political attention is significantly distorted by the enormous lobby force, composed predominantly of business interests, spending hundreds of millions each year in an attempt to conform facts about productivity, agriculture, defense, and social services, to the wants of private economic groupings.

What emerges from the party contradictions and insulation of privatelyheld power is the organized political stalemate: calcification dominates flexibility as the principle of parliamentary organization, frustration is the expectancy of legislators intending liberal reform, and Congress becomes less and less central to national decision-making, especially in the area of foreign policy. In this context, confusion and blurring is built into the formulation of issues, long-range priorities are not discussed in the rational manner needed for policymaking, the politics of personality and "image" become a more important mechanism than the construction of issues in a way that affords each voter a challenging and real option. The American voter is buffeted from all directions by pseudo-problems, by the structurally-initiated sense that nothing political is subject to human mastery. Worried by his mundane problems which never get solved, but constrained by the common belief that politics is an agonizingly slow accommodation of views, he quits all pretense of bothering.

A most alarming fact is that few, if any, politicians are calling for changes in these conditions. Only a handful even are calling on the President to "live up to" platform pledges; no one is demanding structural changes, such as the shuttling of Southern Democrats out of the Democratic Party. Rather than protesting the state of politics, most politicians are reinforcing and aggravating that state. While in practice they rig public opinion to suit their own interests, in word and ritual they enshrine "the sovereign public" and call for more and more letters. Their speeches and campaign actions are banal, based on a degrading conception of what people want to hear. They respond not to dialogue, but to pressure: and knowing this, the ordinary citizen sees even greater inclination to shun the political sphere. The politicians is usually a trumpeter to "citizenship" and "service to the nation", but since he is unwilling to seriously rearrange power relationships, his trumpetings only increase apathy by creating no outlets. Much of the time the call to "service" is justified not in idealistic terms, but in the crasser terms of "defending the free world from communism" -- thus making future idealistic impulses harder to justify in anything but Cold War terms.

In such a setting of status quo politics, where most if not all government activity is rationalized in Cold War anti-communist terms, it is somewhat natural that discontented, super-patriotic groups would emerge through political channels and explain their ultra-conservatism as the best means of Victory over Communism. They have become a politically influential force within the Republican Party, at a national level through Senator Goldwater, and at a local level through their important social and economic roles. Their political views are defined generally as the opposite of the supposed views of communists: complete individual freedom in the economic sphere, non-participation by the government in the machinery of production. But actually "anticommunism" becomes an umbrella by which to protest liberalism, internationalism, welfarism, the active civil rights and labor movements. It is to the disgrace of the United States that such a movement should become a prominent kind of public participation in the modern world -- but, ironically, it is somewhat to the interests of the United States that such a movement should be a public constituency pointed toward realignment of the political parties, demanding a conservative Republican Party in the South and an exclusion of the "leftist" elements of the national GOP.

The Economy

American capitalism today advertises itself as the Welfare State. Many of us comfortably expect pensions, medical care, unemployment compensation, and other social services in our lifetimes. Even with one-fourth of our productive capacity unused, the majority of Americans are living in relative comfort -- although their nagging incentive to "keep up" makes them continually dissatisfied with their possessions. In many places, unrestrained bosses, uncontrolled machines, and sweatshop conditions have been reformed or abolished and suffering tremendously relieved. But in spite of the benign yet obscuring effects of the New Deal reforms and the reassuring phrases of government economists and politicians, the paradoxes and myths of the economy are sufficient to irritate our complacency and reveal to us some essential causes of the American malaise.

We live amidst a national celebration of economic prosperity while poverty and deprivation remain an unbreakable way of life for millions in the "affluent society", including many of our own generation. We hear glib reference to the "welfare state", "free enterprise", and "shareholder's democracy" while military defense is the main item of "public" spending and obvious oligopoly and other forms of minority rule defy real individual initiative or popular control. Work, too, is often unfulfilling and victimizing, accepted as a channel to status or plenty, if not a way to pay the bills, rarely as a means of understanding and controlling self and events. In work and leisure the individual is regulated as part of the system, a consuming unit, bombarded by hardsell soft-sell, lies and semi-true appeals and his basest drives. He is always told what he is supposed to enjoy while being told, too, that he is a "free" man because of "free enterprise."

The Remote Control Economy. We are subject to a remote control economy, which excludes the mass of individual "units" -- the people -- from basic decisions affecting the nature and organization of work, rewards, and opportunities. The modern concentration of wealth is fantastic. The wealthiest one percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock. From World War II until the mid-Fifties, the 50 biggest corporations increased their manufacturing production from 17 to 23 percent of the national total, and the share of the largest 200 companies rose from 30 to 37 percent. To regard the various decisions of these elites as purely economic is short-sighted: their decisions affect in a momentous way the entire fabric of social life in America. Foreign investments influence political policies in under-developed areas -- and our efforts to build a "profitable" capitalist world blind our foreign policy to mankind's needs and destiny. The drive for sales spurs phenomenal advertising efforts; the ethical drug industry, for instance, spent more than $750 million on promotions in 1960, nearly for times the amount available to all American medical schools for their educational programs. The arts, too, are organized substantially according to their commercial appeal aesthetic values are subordinated to exchange values, and writers swiftly learn to consider the commercial market as much as the humanistic marketplace of ideas. The tendency to over-production, to gluts of surplus commodities, encourages "market research" techniques to deliberately create pseudo-needs in consumers -- we learn to buy "smart" things, regardless of their utility -- and introduces wasteful "planned obsolescence" as a permanent feature of business strategy. While real social needs accumulate as rapidly as profits, it becomes evident that Money, instead of dignity of character, remains a pivotal American value and Profitability, instead of social use, a pivotal standard in determining priorities of resource allocation.

Within existing arrangements, the American business community cannot be said to encourage a democratic process nationally. Economic minorities not responsible to a public in any democratic fashion make decisions of a more profound importance than even those made by Congress. Such a claim is usually dismissed by respectful and knowing citations of the ways in which government asserts itself as keeper of the public interest at times of business irresponsibility. But the real, as opposed to the mythical, range of government "control" of the economy includes only:

some limited "regulatory" powers -- which usually just ratify industry policies or serve as palliatives at the margins of significant business activity;
a fiscal policy build upon defense expenditures as pump-priming "public works" -- without a significant emphasis on "peaceful public works" to meet social priorities and alleviate personal hardships;
limited fiscal and monetary weapons which are rigid and have only minor effects, and are greatly limited by corporate veto: tax cuts and reforms; interest rate control (used generally to tug on investment by hurting the little investor most); tariffs which protect noncompetitive industries with political power and which keep less-favored nations out of the large trade mainstream, as the removal of barriers reciprocally with the Common Market may do disastrously to emerging countries outside of Europe; wage arbitration, the use of government coercion in the name of "public interest" to hide the tensions between workers and business production controllers; price controls, which further maintains the status quo of big ownership and flushes out little investors for the sake of "stability";
very limited "poverty-solving" which is designed for the organized working class but not the shut-out, poverty-stricken migrants, farm workers, the indigent unaware of medical care or the lower-middle class person riddled with medical bills, the "unhireables" of minority groups or workers over 45 years of age, etc.
regional development programs -- such as the Area Redevelopment Act
- which have been only "trickle down" welfare programs without broad authority for regional planning and development and public works spending. The federal highway program has been more significant than the "depressed areas" program in meeting the needs of people, but is generally too remote and does not reach the vicious circle of poverty itself.

In short, the theory of government "countervailing" business neglects the extent to which government influence is marginal to the basic production decisions, the basic decision-making environment of society, the basic structure or distribution and allocation which is still determined by major corporations with power and wealth concentrated among the few. A conscious conspiracy -- as in the case of pricerigging in the electrical industry -- is by no means generally or continuously operative but power undeniably does rest in comparative insulation from the public and its political representatives.

The Military-Industrial Complex. The most spectacular and important creation of the authoritarian and oligopolistic structure of economic decision-making in America is the institution called "the militaryindustrial complex" by former President Eisenhower, the powerful congruence of interest and structure among military and business elites which affects so much of our development and destiny. Not only is ours the first generation to live with the possibility of world-wide cataclysm -- it is the first to experience the actual social preparation for cataclysm, the general militarization of American society. In 1948 Congress established Universal Military Training, the first peacetime conscription. The military became a permanent institution. Four years earlier, General Motor's Charles E. Wilson had heralded the creation of what he called the "permanent war economy," the continuous use of military spending as a solution to economic problems unsolved before the post-war boom, most notably the problem of the seventeen million jobless after eight years of the New Deal. This has left a "hidden crisis" in the allocation of resources by the American economy.

Since our childhood these two trends -- the rise of the military and the installation of a defense-based economy -- have grown fantastically. The Department of Defense, ironically the world's largest single organization, is worth $160 billion, owns 32 million acres of America and employs half the 7.5 million persons directly dependent on the military for subsistence, has an $11 billion payroll which is larger than the net annual income of all American corporations. Defense spending in the Eisenhower era totaled $350 billions and President Kennedy entered office pledged to go even beyond the present defense allocation of sixty cents from every public dollar spent. Except for a war-induced boom immediately after "our side" bombed Hiroshima, American economic prosperity has coincided with a growing dependence on military outlay -- from 1941 to 1959 America's Gross National Product of $5.25 trillion included $700 billion in goods and services purchased for the defense effort, about one-seventh of the accumulated GNP. This pattern has included the steady concentration of military spending among a few corporations. In 1961, 86 percent of Defense Department contracts were awarded without competition. The ordnance industry of 100,000 people is completely engaged in military work; in the aircraft industry, 94 percent of 750,000 workers are linked to the war economy; shipbuilding, radio and communications equipment industries commit forty percent of their work to defense; iron and steel, petroleum, metal-stamping and machine shop products, motors and generators, tools and hardware, copper, aluminum and machine tools industries all devote at least 10 percent of their work to the same cause.

The intermingling of Big Military and Big Industry is evidenced in the 1,400 former officers working for the 100 corporations who received nearly all the $21 billion spent in procurement by the Defense Department in 1961. The overlap is most poignantly clear in the case of General Dynamics, the company which received the best 1961 contracts, employed the most retired officers (187), and is directed by a former Secretary of the Army. A Fortune magazine profile of General Dynamics said: "The unique group of men who run Dynamics are only incidentally in rivalry with other U.S. manufacturers, with many of whom they actually act in concert. Their chief competitor is the USSR. The core of General Dynamics corporate philosophy is the conviction that national defense is a more or less permanent business." Little has changed since Wilson's proud declaration of the Permanent War Economy back in the 1944 days when the top 200 corporations possessed 80 percent of all active prime war-supply contracts.

Military Industrial Politics. The military and its supporting business foundation have found numerous forms of political expression, and we have heard their din endlessly. There has not been a major Congressional split on the issue of continued defense spending spirals in our lifetime. The triangular relation of the business, military and political arenas cannot be better expressed than in Dixiecrat Carl Vinson's remarks as his House Armed Services Committee reported out a military construction bill of $808 million throughout the 50 states, for 1960-61: "There is something in this bill for everyone," he announced. President Kennedy had earlier acknowledged the valuable anti-recession features of the bill.

Imagine, on the other hand, $808 million suggested as an anti-recession measure, but being poured into programs of social welfare: the impossibility of receiving support for such a measure identifies a crucial feature of defense spending: it is beneficial to private enterprise, while welfare spending is not. Defense spending does not "compete" with the private sector; it contains a natural obsolescence; its "confidential" nature permits easier boondoggling; the tax burdens to which it leads can be shunted from corporation to consumer as a "cost of production." Welfare spending, however, involves the government in competition with private corporations and contractors; it conflicts with immediate interests of private pressure groups; it leads to taxes on business. Think of the opposition of private power companies to current proposals for river and valley development, or the hostility of the real estate lobby to urban renewal; or the attitude of the American Medical Association to a paltry medical care bill; or of all business lobbyists to foreign aid; these are the pressures leading to the schizophrenic public-military, private-civilian economy of our epoch. The politicians, of course, take the line of least resistance and thickest support: warfare, instead of welfare, is easiest to stand up for: after all, the Free World is at stake (and our constituency's investments, too).

Automation, Abundance, and Challenge. But while the economy remains relatively static in its setting of priorities and allocation of resources, new conditions are emerging with enormous implications: the revolution of automation, and the replacement of scarcity by the potential of material abundance.

Automation, the process of machines replacing men in performing sensory, motoric and complex logical tasks, is transforming society in ways that are scarcely comprehensible. By 1959, industrial production regained its 1957 "pre-recession" level -- but with 750,000 fewer workers required. In the Fifties as a whole, national production enlarged by 43 percent but the number of factory employees remained stationary, seventenths of one percent higher than in 1947. Automation is destroying whole categories of work -- impersonal thinkers have efficiently labeled this "structural unemployment" -- in blue-collar, service, and even middle management occupations. In addition it is eliminating employment opportunities for a youth force that numbers one million more than it did in 1950, and rendering work far more difficult both to find and do for people in the forties and up. The consequences of this economic drama, strengthened by the force of post-war recessions, are momentous: five million becomes an acceptable unemployment tabulation, and misery, uprootedness and anxiety become the lot of increasing numbers of Americans.

But while automation is creating social dislocation of a stunning kind, it paradoxically is imparting the opportunity for men the world around to rise in dignity from their knees. The dominant optimistic economic fact of this epoch is that fewer hands are needed now in actual production, although more goods and services are a real potentiality. The world could be fed, poverty abolished, the great public needs could be met, the brutish world of Darwinian scarcity could be brushed away, all men could have more time to pursue their leisure, drudgery in work could be cut to a minimum, education could become more of a continuing process for all people, both public and personal needs could be met rationally. But only in a system with selfish production motives and elitist control, a system which is less welfare than war-based, undemocratic rather than "stockholder participative" as "sold to us", does the potentiality for abundance become a curse and a cruel irony:

Automation brings unemployment instead of mere leisure for all and greater achievement of needs for all people in the world -- a crisis instead of economic utopia. Instead of being introduced into a social system in a planned and equitable way, automation is initiated according to its profitability. American Telephone and Telegraph holds back modern telephone equipment, invented with public research funds, until present equipment is financially unprofitable. Colleges develop teaching machines, mass-class techniques, and TV education to replace teachers: not to proliferate knowledge or to assist the qualified professors now, but to "cut costs in education and make the academic community more efficient and less wasteful." Technology, which could be a blessing to society, becomes more and more a sinister threat to humanistic and rational enterprise.
Hard-core poverty exists just beyond the neon lights of affluence, and the "have-nots" may be driven still further from opportunity as the high-technology society demands better education to get into the production mainstream and more capital investment to get into "business". Poverty is shameful in that it herds people by race, region, and previous condition of infortune into "uneconomic classes" in the so-called free society -- the marginal worker is made more insecure by automation and high education requirements, heavier competition for jobs, maintaining low wages or a high level of unemployment. People in the rut of poverty are strikingly unable to overcome the collection of forces working against them: poor health, bad neighborhoods, miserable schools, inadequate "welfare" services, unemployment and underemployment, weak politician and union organization.
Surplus and potential plenty are waste domestically and producers suffer impoverishment because the real needs of the world and of our society are not reflected in the market. Our huge bins of decomposing grain are classic American examples, as is the steel industry which, in the summer of 1962, is producing at 53 percent of capacity.

The Stance of Labor. Amidst all this, what of organized labor, the historic institutional representative of the exploited, the presumed "countervailing power" against the excesses of Big Business? The contemporary social assault on the labor movement is of crisis proportions. To the average American, "big labor" is a growing cancer equal in impact to Big Business -- nothing could be more distorted, even granting a sizable union bureaucracy. But in addition to public exaggerations, the labor crisis can be measured in several ways. First, the high expectations of the newborn AFL-CIO of 30 million members by 1965 are suffering a reverse unimaginable five years ago. The demise of the dream of "organizing the unorganized" is dramatically reflected in the AFL-CIO decision, just two years after its creation, to slash its organizing staff in half. From 15 million members when the AFL and the CIO merged, the total has slipped to 13.5 million. During the post-war generation, union membership nationally has increased by four million -- but the total number of workers has jumped by 13 million. Today only 40 percent of all non-agricultural workers are protected by any form or organization. Second, organizing conditions are going to worsen. Where labor now is strongest -- in industries -- automation is leading to an attrition of available work. As the number of jobs dwindles, so does labor's power of bargaining, since management can handle a strike in an automated plant more easily than the older mass-operated ones.

More important perhaps, the American economy has changed radically in the last decade, as suddenly the number of workers producing goods became fewer than the number in "nonproductive" areas -- government, trade, finance, services, utilities, transportation. Since World War II "white collar" and "service" jobs have grown twice as fast as have, "blue collar" production jobs. Labor has almost no organization in the expanding occupational areas of the new economy, but almost all of its entrenched strength in contracting areas. As big government hires more, as business seeks more office workers and skilled technicians, and as growing commercial America demands new hotels, service stations and the like, the conditions will become graver still. Further, there is continuing hostility to labor by the Southern states and their industrial interests -- meaning " runaway plants, cheap labor threatening the organized trade union movement, and opposition from Dixiecrats to favorable labor legislation in Congress. Finally, there is indication that Big Business, for the sake of public relations if nothing more, has acknowledged labor's "right" to exist, but has deliberately tried to contain labor at its present strength, preventing strong unions from helping weaker ones or from spreading or unorganized sectors of the economy. Business is aided in its efforts by proliferation of "right-to-work" laws at state levels (especially in areas where labor is without organizing strength to begin with), and anti-labor legislation in Congress.

In the midst of these besetting crises, labor itself faces its own problems of vision and program. Historically, there can be no doubt as to its worth in American politics -- what progress there has been in meeting human needs in this century rests greatly with the labor movement. And to a considerable extent the social democracy for which labor has fought externally is reflected in its own essentially democratic character: representing millions of people, no millions of dollars; demanding their welfare, not eternal profit. Today labor remains the most liberal "mainstream" institution -- but often its liberalism represents vestigial commitments self-interestedness, unradicalism. In some measure labor has succumbed to institutionalization, its social idealism waning under the tendencies of bureaucracy, materialism, business ethics. The successes of the last generation perhaps have braked, rather than accelerated labor's zeal for change. Even the House of Labor has bay windows: not only is this true of the labor elites, but as well of some of the rank-and-file. Many of the latter are indifferent unionists, uninterested in meetings, alienated from the complexities of the labor-management negotiating apparatus, lulled to comfort by the accessibility of luxury and the opportunity of long-term contracts. "Union democracy" is not simply inhibited by labor leader elitism, but by the unrelated problem of rankand -file apathy to the tradition of unionism. The crisis of labor is reflected in the coexistence within the unions of militant Negro discontents and discriminatory locals, sweeping critics of the obscuring "public interest" marginal tinkering of government and willing handmaidens of conservative political leadership, austere sacrificers and business-like operators, visionaries and anachronisms -- tensions between extremes that keep alive the possibilities for a more militant unionism. Too, there are seeds of rebirth in the "organizational crisis" itself: the technologically unemployed, the unorganized white collar men and women, the migrants and farm workers, the unprotected Negroes, the poor, all of whom are isolated now from the power structure of the economy, but who are the potential base for a broader and more forceful unionism.

Horizon. In summary: a more reformed, more human capitalism, functioning at three-fourths capacity while one-third of America and two-thirds of the world goes needy, domination of politics and the economy by fantastically rich elites, accommodation and limited effectiveness by the labor movement, hard-core poverty and unemployment, automation confirming the dark ascension of machine over man instead of shared abundance, technological change being introduced into the economy by the criteria of profitability -- this has been our inheritance. However inadequate, it has instilled quiescence in liberal hearts -- partly reflecting the extent to which misery has been over-come but also the eclipse of social ideals. Though many of us are "affluent", poverty, waste, elitism, manipulation are too manifest to go unnoticed, too clearly unnecessary to go accepted. To change the Cold War status quo and other social evils, concern with the challenges to the American economic machine must expand. Now, as a truly better social state becomes visible, a new poverty impends: a poverty of vision, and a poverty of political action to make that vision reality. Without new vision, the failure to achieve our potentialities will spell the inability of our society to endure in a world of obvious, crying needs and rapid change.

THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE WARFARE STATE

Business and politics, when significantly militarized, affect the whole living condition of each American citizen. Worker and family depend on the Cold War for life. Half of all research and development is concentrated on military ends. The press mimics conventional cold war opinion in its editorials. In less than a full generation, most Americans accept the military-industrial structure as "the way things are." War is still pictured as one more kind of diplomacy, perhaps a gloriously satisfying kind. Our saturation and atomic bombings of Germany and Japan are little more than memories of past "policy necessities" that preceded the wonderful economic boom of 1946. The facts that our once-revolutionary 20,000 ton Hiroshima Bomb is now paled by 50 megaton weapons, that our lifetime has included the creation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, that "greater" weapons are to follow, that weapons refinement is more rapid than the development of weapons of defense, that soon a dozen or more nations will have the Bomb, that one simple miscalculation could incinerate mankind: these orienting facts are but remotely felt. A shell of moral callous separates the citizen from sensitivity of the common peril: this is the result of a lifetime saturation with horror. After all, some ask, where could we begin, even if we wanted to? After all, others declare, we can only assume things are in the best of hands. A coed at the University of Kentucky says, "we regard peace and war as fairy tales." And a child has asked in helplessness, perhaps for us all, "Daddy, why is there a cold war?"

Past senselessness permits present brutality; present brutality is prelude to future deeds of still greater inhumanity; that is the moral history of the twentieth century, from the First World War to the present. A half-century of accelerating destruction has flattened out the individual's ability to make moral distinction, it has made people understandably give up, it has forced private worry and public silence.

To a decisive extent, the means of defense, the military technology itself, determines the political and social character of the state being defended -- that is, defense mechanism themselves in the nuclear age alter the character of the system that creates them for protection. So it has been with American, as her democratic institutions and habits have shriveled in almost direct proportion to the growth of her armaments. Decisions about military strategy, including the monstrous decision to go to war, are more and more the property of the military and the industrial arms race machine, with the politicians assuming a ratifying role instead of a determining one. This is increasingly a fact not just because of the installation of the permanent military, but because of constant revolutions in military technology. The new technologies allegedly require military expertise, scientific comprehension, and the mantle of secrecy. As Congress relies more and more on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the existing chasm between people and decision-makers becomes irreconcilably wide, and more alienating in its effects.

A necessary part of the military effort is propaganda: to "sell" the need for congressional appropriations, to conceal various business scandals, and to convince the American people that the arms race is important enough to sacrifice civil liberties and social welfare. So confusion prevails about the national needs, while the three major services and the industrial allies jockey for power -- the Air Force tending to support bombers and missilery, the Navy, Polaris and carriers, the Army, conventional ground forces and invulnerable nuclear arsenals, and all three feigning unity and support of the policy of weapons and agglomeration called the "mix". Strategies are advocated on the basis of power and profit, usually more so than on the basis of national military needs. In the meantime, Congressional investigating committees -- most notably the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee -- attempt to curb the little dissent that finds its way into off-beat magazines. A huge militant anticommunist brigade throws in its support, patriotically willing to do anything to achieve "total victory" in the Cold War; the government advocates peaceful confrontation with international Communism, then utterly pillories and outlaws the tiny American Communist Party. University professors withdraw prudently from public issues; the very style of social science writing becomes more qualified. Needs in housing, education, minority rights, health care, land redevelopment, hourly wages, all are subordinated -- though a political tear is shed gratuitously -- to the primary objective of the "military and economic strength of the Free World."

What are the governing policies which supposedly justify all this human sacrifice and waste? With few exceptions they have reflected the quandaries and confusion, stagnation and anxiety, of a stalemated nation in a turbulent world. They have shown a slowness, sometimes a sheer inability to react to a sequence of new problems.

Of these problems, two of the newest are foremost: the existence of poised nuclear weapons and the revolutions against the former colonial powers. In the both areas, the Soviet Union and the various national communist movements have aggravated internation relations in inhuman and undesirable ways, but hardly so much as to blame only communism for the present menacing situation.

Deterrence Policy

The accumulation of nuclear arsenals, the threat of accidental war, the possibility of limited war becoming illimitable holocaust, the impossibility of achieving final arms superiority or invulnerability, the approaching nativity of a cluster of infant atomic powers; all of these events are tending to undermine traditional concepts of power relations among nations. War can no longer be considered as an effective instrument of foreign policy, a means of strengthening alliances, adjusting the balance of power, maintaining national sovereignty, or preserving human values. War is no longer simply a forceful extension of foreign policy; it can obtain no constructive ends in the modern world. Soviet or American "megatonnage" is sufficient to destroy all existing social structures as well as value systems. Missiles have (figuratively) thumbed their nosecones at national boundaries. But America, like other countries, still operates by means of national defense and deterrence systems. These are seen to be useful so long as they are never fully used: unless we as a national entity can convince Russia that we are willing to commit the most heinous action in human history, we will be forced to commit it.

Deterrence advocates, all of them prepared at least to threaten mass extermination, advance arguments of several kinds. At one pole are the minority of open partisans of preventive war -- who falsely assume the inevitability of violent conflict and assert the lunatic efficacy of striking the first blow, assuming that it will be easier to "recover" after thermonuclear war than to recover now from the grip of the Cold War. Somewhat more reluctant to advocate initiating a war, but perhaps more disturbing for their numbers within the Kennedy Administration, are the many advocates of the "counterforce" theory of aiming strategic nuclear weapons at military installations -- though this might "save" more lives than a preventive war, it would require drastic, provocative and perhaps impossible social change to separate many cities from weapons sites, it would be impossible to ensure the immunity of cities after one or two counterforce nuclear "exchanges", it would generate a perpetual arms race for less vulnerability and greater weapons power and mobility, it would make outer space a region subject to militarization, and accelerate the suspicions and arms build-ups which are incentives to precipitate nuclear action. Others would support fighting "limited wars" which use conventional (all but atomic) weapons, backed by deterrents so mighty that both sides would fear to use them -- although underestimating the implications of numerous new atomic powers on the world stage, the extreme difficulty of anchoring international order with weapons of only transient invulnerability, the potential tendency for a "losing side" to push limited protracted fighting on the soil of underdeveloped countries. Still other deterrence artists propose limited, clearly defensive and retaliatory, nuclear capacity, always potent enough to deter an opponent's aggressive designs -- the best of deterrence stratagems, but inadequate when it rests on the equation of an arms "stalemate" with international stability.

All the deterrence theories suffer in several common ways. They allow insufficient attention to preserving, extending, and enriching democratic values, such matters being subordinate rather than governing in the process of conducting foreign policy. Second, they inadequately realize the inherent instabilities of the continuing arms race and balance of fear. Third, they operationally tend to eclipse interest and action towards disarmament by solidifying economic, political and even moral investments in continuation of tensions. Fourth, they offer a disinterested and even patriotic rationale for the boondoggling, belligerence, and privilege of military and economic elites. Finally, deterrence stratagems invariably understate or dismiss the relatedness of various dangers; they inevitably lend tolerability to the idea of war by neglecting the dynamic interaction of problems -- such as the menace of accidental war, the probable future tensions surrounding the emergence of ex-colonial nations, the imminence of several new nations joining the "Nuclear Club," the destabilizing potential of technological breakthrough by either arms race contestant, the threat of Chinese atomic might, the fact that "recovery" after World War III would involve not only human survivors but, as well, a huge and fragile social structure and culture which would be decimated perhaps irreparably by total war.

Such a harsh critique of what we are doing as a nation by no means implies that sole blame for the Cold War rests on the United States. Both sides have behaved irresponsibly -- the Russians by an exaggerated lack of trust, and by much dependence on aggressive military strategists rather than on proponents of nonviolent conflict and coexistence. But we do contend, as Americans concerned with the conduct of our representative institutions, that our government has blamed the Cold War stalemate on nearly everything but its own hesitations, its own anachronistic dependence on weapons. To be sure, there is more to disarmament than wishing for it. There are inadequacies in international rule-making institutions -- which could be corrected. There are faulty inspection mechanisms -- which could be perfected by disinterested scientists. There is Russian intransigency and evasiveness -- which do not erase the fact that the Soviet Union, because of a strained economy, an expectant population, fears of Chinese potential, and interest in the colonial revolution, is increasingly disposed to real disarmament with real controls. But there is, too, our own reluctance to face the uncertain world beyond the Cold War, our own shocking assumption that the risks of the present are fewer than the risks of a policy re-orientation to disarmament, our own unwillingness to face the implementation of our rhetorical commitments to peace and freedom.

Today the world alternatively drifts and plunges towards a terrible war

when vision and change are required, our government pursues a policy of macabre dead-end dimensions -- conditioned, but not justified, by actions of the Soviet bloc. Ironically, the war which seems to close will not be fought between the United States and Russia, not externally between two national entities, but as an international civil war throughout the unrespected and unprotected human civitas which spans the world.

The Colonial Revolution

While weapons have accelerated man's opportunity for self-destruction, the counter-impulse to life and creation are superbly manifest in the revolutionary feelings of many Asian, African and Latin American peoples. Against the individual initiative and aspiration, and social sense of organicism characteristic of these upsurges, the American apathy and stalemate stand in embarrassing contrast.

It is difficult today to give human meaning to the welter of facts that surrounds us. That is why it is especially hard to understand the facts of "underdevelopment": in India, man and beast together produced 65 percent of the nation's economic energy in a recent year, and of the remaining 35 percent of inanimately produced power almost three-fourths was obtained by burning dung. But in the United States, human and animal power together account for only one percent of the national economic energy -- that is what stands humanly behind the vague term "industrialization". Even to maintain the misery of Asia today at a constant level will require a rate of growth tripling the national income and the aggregate production in Asian countries by the end of the century. For Asians to have the (unacceptable) 1950 standard of Europeans, less than $2,000 per year for a family, national production must increase 21-fold by the end the century, and that monstrous feat only to reach a level that Europeans find intolerable.

What has America done? During the years 1955-57 our total expenditures in economic aid were equal to one-tenth of one percent of our total Gross National Product. Prior to that time it was less; since then it has been a fraction higher. Immediate social and economic development is needed -- we have helped little, seeming to prefer to create a growing gap between "have" and "have not" rather than to usher in social revolutions which would threaten our investors and out military alliances. The new nations want to avoid power entanglements that will open their countries to foreign domination -- and we have often demanded loyalty oaths. They do not see the relevence of uncontrolled free enterprise in societies without accumulated capital and a significant middle class -- and we have looked calumniously on those who would not try "our way". They seek empathy -- and we have sided with the old colonialists, who now are trying to take credit for "giving" all the freedom that has been wrested from them, or we "empathize" when pressure absolutely demands it.

With rare variation, American foreign policy in the Fifties was guided by a concern for foreign investment and a negative anti-communist political stance linked to a series of military alliances, both undergirded by military threat. We participated unilaterally -- usually through the Central Intelligence Agency -- in revolutions against governments in Laos, Guatemala, Cuba, Egypt, Iran. We permitted economic investment to decisively affect our foreign policy: fruit in Cuba, oil in the Middle East, diamonds and gold in South Africa (with whom we trade more than with any African nation). More exactly: America's "foreign market" in the late Fifties, including exports of goods and services plus overseas sales by American firms, averaged about $60 billion annually. This represented twice the investment of 1950, and it is predicted that the same rates of increase will continue. The reason is obvious: Fortune said in 1958, "foreign earnings will be more than double in four years, more than twice the probable gain in domestic profits". These investments are concentrated primarily in the Middle East and Latin America, neither region being an impressive candidate for the long-run stability, political caution, and lower-class tolerance that American investors typically demand.

Our pugnacious anti-communism and protection of interests has led us to an alliance inappropriately called the "Free World". It included four major parliamentary democracies: ourselves, Canada, Great Britain, and India. It also has included through the years Batista, Franco, Verwoerd, Salazar, De Gaulle, Boun Oum, Ngo Diem, Chiang Kai Shek, Trujillo, the Somozas, Saud, Ydigoras -- all of these non-democrats separating us deeply from the colonial revolutions.

Since the Kennedy administration began, the American government seems to have initiated policy changes in the colonial and underdeveloped areas. It accepted "neutralism" as a tolerable principle; it sided more than once with the Angolans in the United Nations; it invited Souvanna Phouma to return to Laos after having overthrown his neutralist government there; it implemented the Alliance for Progress that President Eisenhower proposed when Latin America appeared on the verge of socialist revolutions; it made derogatory statements about the Trujillos; it cautiously suggested that a democratic socialist government in British Guiana might be necessary to support; in inaugural oratory, it suggested that a moral imperative was involved in sharing the world's resources with those who have been previously dominated. These were hardly sufficient to heal the scars of past activity and present associations, but nevertheless they were motions away from the Fifties. But quite unexpectedly, the President ordered the Cuban invations, and while the American press railed about how we had been "shamed" and defied by that "monster Castro," the colonial peoples of the world wondered whether our foreign policy had really changed from its old imperialist ways (we had never supported Castro, even on the eve of his taking power, and had announced early that "the conduct of the Castro government toward foreign private enterprise in Cuba" would be a main State Department concern). Any heralded changes in our foreign policy are now further suspect in the wake of the Punta Del Este foreign minister's conference where the five countries representing most of Latin America refused to cooperate in our plans to further "isolate" the Castro government.

Ever since the colonial revolution began, American policy makers have reacted to new problems with old "gunboat" remedies, often thinly disguised. The feeble but desirable efforts of the Kennedy administration to be more flexible are coming perhaps too late, and are of too little significance to really change the historical thrust of our policies. The hunger problem is increasing rapidly mostly as a result of the worldwide population explosion that cancels out the meager triumphs gained so far over starvation. The threat of population to economic growth is simply documented: in 1960-70 population in Africa south of the Sahara will increase 14 percent; in South Asia and the Far East by 22 percent; in North Africa 26 percent; in the Middle East by 27 percent; in Latin America 29 percent. Population explosion, no matter how devastating, is neutral. But how long will it take to create a relation of thrust between America and the newly-developing societies? How long to change our policies? And what length of time do we have?

The world is in transformation. But America is not. It can race to industrialize the world, tolerating occasional authoritarianisms, socialisms, neutralisms along the way -- or it can slow the pace of the inevitable and default to the eager and self-interested Soviets and, much more importantly, to mankind itself. Only mystics would guess we have opted thoroughly for the first. Consider what our people think of this, the most urgent issue on the human agenda. Fed by a bellicose press, manipulated by economic and political opponents of change, drifting in their own history, they grumble about "the foreign aid waste", or about "that beatnik down in Cuba", or how "things will get us by" . . . thinking confidently, albeit in the usual bewilderment, that Americans can go right on like always, five percent of mankind producing forty percent of its goods.

Anti-Communism

An unreasoning anti-communism has become a major social problem for those who want to construct a more democratic America. McCarthyism and other forms of exaggerated and conservative anti-communism seriously weaken democratic institutions and spawn movements contrary to the interests of basic freedoms and peace. In such an atmosphere even the most intelligent of Americans fear to join political organizations, sign petitions, speak out on serious issues. Militaristic policies are easily "sold" to a public fearful of a democratic enemy. Political debate is restricted, thought is standardized, action is inhibited by the demands of "unity" and "oneness" in the face of the declared danger. Even many liberals and socialists share static and repititious participation in the anti-communist crusade and often discourage tentative, inquiring discussion about "the Russian question" within their ranks -- often by employing "stalinist", "stalinoid", trotskyite" and other epithets in an oversimplifying way to discredit opposition.

Thus much of the American anti-communism takes on the characteristics of paranoia. Not only does it lead to the perversion of democracy and to the political stagnation of a warfare society, but it also has the unintended consequence of preventing an honest and effective approach to the issues. Such an approach would require public analysis and debate of world politics. But almost nowhere in politics is such a rational analysis possible to make.

It would seem reasonable to expect that in America the basic issues of the Cold War should be rationally and fully debated, between persons of every opinion -- on television, on platforms and through other media. It would seem, too, that there should be a way for the person or an organization to oppose communism without contributing to the common fear of associations and public actions. But these things do not happen; instead, there is finger-pointing and comical debate about the most serious of issues. This trend of events on the domestic scene, towards greater irrationality on major questions, moves us to greater concern than does the "internal threat" of domestic communism. Democracy, we are convinced, requires every effort to set in peaceful opposition the basic viewpoints of the day; only by conscious, determined, though difficult, efforts in this direction will the issue of communism be met appropriately.

Communism and Foreign Policy

As democrats we are in basic opposition to the communist system. The Soviet Union, as a system, rests on the total suppression of organized opposition, as well as on a vision of the future in the name of which much human life has been sacrificed, and numerous small and large denials of human dignity rationalized. The Communist Party has equated falsely the "triumph of true socialism" with centralized bureaucracy. The Soviet state lacks independent labor organizations and other liberties we consider basic. And despite certain reforms, the system remains almost totally divorced from the image officially promulgated by the Party. Communist parties throughout the rest of the world are generally undemocratic in internal structure and mode of action. Moreover, in most cases they subordinate radical programs to requirements of Soviet foreign policy. The communist movement has failed, in every sense, to achieve its stated intentions of leading a worldwide movement for human emancipation.

But present trends in American anti-communism are not sufficient for the creation of appropriate policies with which to relate to and counter communist movements in the world. In no instance is this better illustrated than in our basic national policy-making assumption that the Soviet Union is inherently expansionist and aggressive, prepared to dominate the rest of the world by military means. On this assumption rests the monstrous American structure of military "preparedness"; because of it we sacrifice values and social programs to the alleged needs of military power.

But the assumption itself is certainly open to question and debate. To be sure, the Soviet state has used force and the threat of force to promote or defend its perceived national interests. But the typical American response has been to equate the use of force -- which in many cases might be dispassionately interpreted as a conservative, albeit brutal, action -- with the initiation of a worldwide military onslaught. In addition, the Russian-Chinese conflicts and the emergency !! throughout the communist movement call for a re-evaluation of any monolithic interpretations. And the apparent Soviet disinterest in building a first-strike arsenal of weapons challenges the weight given to protection against surprise attack in formulations of American policy toward the Soviets.

Almost without regard to one's conception of the dynamics of Soviet society and foreign policy, it is evident that the American military response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy than communism. Moreover, our prevailing policies make difficult the encouragement of skepticism, anti-war or pro-democratic attitudes in the communist systems. America has done a great deal to foment the easier, opposite tendency in Russia: suspicion, suppression, and stiff military resistance. We have established a system of military alliances which of even dubious deterrence value. It is reasonable of suggest the "Berlin" and "Laos" have been earth-shaking situations partly because rival systems of deterrence make impossible the withdrawal of threats. The "status quo" is not cemented by mutual threat but by mutual fear of receeding from pugnacity -- since the latter course would undermine the "credibility" of our deterring system. Simultaneously, while billions in military aid were propping up right-wing Laotian, Formosan, Iranian and other regimes, American leadership never developed a purely political policy for offering concrete alternatives to either communism or the status quo for colonial revolutions. The results have been: fulfillment of the communist belief that capitalism is stagnant, its only defense being dangerous military adventurism; destabilizing incidents in numerous developing countries; an image of America allied with corrupt oligarchies counterposed to the Russian-Chinese image of rapid, though brutal, economic development. Again and again, America mistakes the static area of defense, rather than the dynamic area of development, as the master need of two-thirds of mankind.

Our paranoia about the Soviet Union has made us incapable of achieving agreements absolutely necessary for disarmament and the preservation of peace. We are hardly able to see the possibility that the Soviet Union, though not "peace loving", may be seriously interested in disarmament.

Infinite possibilities for both tragedy and progress lie before us. On the one hand, we can continue to be afraid, and out of fear commit suicide. On the other hand, we can develop a fresh and creative approach to world problems which will help to create democracy at home and establish conditions for its growth elsewhere in the world.

Discrimination

Our America is still white.

Consider the plight, statistically, of its greatest nonconformists, the "nonwhites" (a Census Bureau designation).

Literacy: One of every four "nonwhites" is functionally illiterate; half do not complete elementary school; one in five finishes high school or better. But one in twenty whites is functionally illiterate; four of five finish elementary school; half go through high school or better.
Salary: In 1959 a "nonwhite" worker could expect to average $2,844 annually; a "nonwhite" family, including a college-educated father, could expect to make $5,654 collectively. But a white worker could expect to make $4,487 if he worked alone; with a college degree and a family of helpers he could expect $7,373. The approximate Negro-white wage ratio has remained nearly level for generations, with the exception of the World War II employment "boom" which opened many better jobs to exploited groups.
Work: More than half of all "nonwhites" work at laboring or service jobs, including one-fourth of those with college degrees; one in 20 works in a professional or managerial capacity. Fewer than one in five of all whites are laboring or service workers, including one in every 100 of the college-educated; one in four is in professional or managerial work.
Unemployment: Within the 1960 labor force of approximately 72 million, one of every 10 "nonwhites" was unemployed. Only one of every 20 whites suffered that condition.
Housing: The census classifies 57 percent of all "nonwhite" houses substandard, but only 27 percent of white-owned units so exist.
Education: More than fifty percent of America's "nonwhite" high school students never graduate. The vocational and professional spread of curriculum categories offered "nonwhites" is 16 as opposed to the 41 occupations offered to the white student. Furthermore, in spite of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, 80 percent of all "nonwhites" educated actually, or virtually, are educated under segregated conditions. And only one of 20 "nonwhite" students goes to college as opposed to the 1:10 ratio for white students.
Voting: While the white community is registered above two-thirds of its potential, the "nonwhite" population is registered below one-third of its capacity (with even greater distortion in areas of the Deep South).

Even against this background, some will say progress is being made. The facts bely it, however, unless it is assumed that America has another century to deal with its racial inequalities. Others, more pompous, will blame the situation on "those people's inability to pick themselves up", not understanding the automatic way in which such a system can frustrate reform efforts and diminish the aspirations of the oppressed. The one-party system in the South, attached to the Dixiecrat-Republican complex nationally, cuts off the Negro's independent powers as a citizen. Discrimination in employment, along with labor's accomodation to the "lily-white" hiring practises, guarantees the lowest slot in the economic order to the "nonwhite." North or South, these oppressed are conditioned by their inheritance and their surroundings to expect more of the same: in housing, schools, recreation, travel, all their potential is circumscribed, thwarted and often extinguished. Automation grinds up job opportunities, and ineffective or non-existent retraining programs make the already-handicapped "nonwhite" even less equipped to participate in "technological progress."

Horatio Alger Americans typically believe that the "nonwhites" are being "accepted" and "rising" gradually. They see more Negroes on television and so assume that Negroes are "better off". They hear the President talking about Negroes and so assume they are politically represented. They are aware of black peoples in the United Nations and so assume that the world is generally moving toward integration. They don't drive through the South, or through the slum areas of the big cities, so they assume that squalor and naked exploitation are disappearing. They express generalities about "time and gradualism" to hide the fact that they don't know what is happening.

The advancement of the Negro and other "nonwhites" in America has not been altogether by means of the crusades of liberalism, but rather through unavoidable changes in social structure. The economic pressures of World War II opened new jobs, new mobility, new insights to Southern Negroes, who then began great migrations from the South to the bigger urban areas of the North where their absolute wage was greater, though unchanged in relation to the white man of the same stratum. More important than the World War II openings was the colonial revolution. The world-wide upsurge of dark peoples against white colonial domination stirred the separation and created an urgancy among American Negroes, while simultaneously it threatened the power structure of the United States enough to produce concessions to the Negro. Produced by outer pressure from the newly-moving peoples rather than by the internal conscience of the Federal government, the gains were keyed to improving the American "image" more than to reconstructing the society that prospered on top of its minorities. Thus the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954, theoretically desegregating Southern schools, was more a proclamation than a harbinger of social change -- and is reflected as such in the fraction of Southern school districts which have desegregated, with Federal officials doing little to spur the process.

It has been said that the Kennedy administration did more in two years than the Eisenhower administration did in eight. Of this there can be no doubt. But it is analogous to comparing whispers to silence when positively stentorian tones are demanded. President Kennedy lept ahead of the Eisenhower record when he made his second reference to the racial problem; Eisenhower did not utter a meaningful public statement until his last month in office when he mentioned the "blemish" of bigotry.

To avoid conflict with the Dixiecrat-Republican alliance, President Kennedy has developed a civil rights philosophy of "enforcement, not enactment", implying that existing statuatory tools are sufficient to change the lot of the Negro. So far he has employed executive power usefully to appoint Negroes to various offices, and seems interested in seeing the Southern Negro registered to vote. On the other hand, he has appointed at least four segregationist judges in areas where voter registration is a desperate need. Only two civil rights bills, one to abolish the poll tax in five states and another to prevent unfair use of literacy tests in registration, have been proposed -- the President giving active support to neither. But even this legislation, lethargically supported, then defeated, was intended to extend only to Federal elections. More important, the Kennedy interest in voter registration has not been supplemented with interest in giving the Southern Negro the economic protection that only trade unions can provide. It seems evident that the President is attempting to win the Negro permanently to the Democratic Party without basically disturbing the reactionary one-party oligarchy in the South. Moreover, the administration is decidedly "cool" (a phrase of Robert Kennedy's) toward mass nonviolent movements in the South, though by the support of racist Dixiecrats the Administration makes impossible gradual action through conventional channels. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the South is composed of Southerners and their intervention in situations of racial tension is always after the incident, not before. Kennedy has refused to "enforce" the legal prerogative to keep Federal marshals active in Southern areas before, during and after any "situations" (this would invite Negroes to exercise their rights and it would infuriate the Southerners in Congress because of its "insulting" features).

While corrupt politicians, together with business interests happy with the absence of organized labor in Southern states and with the $50 billion in profits that results from paying the Negro half a "white wage", stymie and slow fundamental progress, it remains to be appreciated that the ultimate wages of discrimination are paid by individuals and not by the state. Indeed the other sides of the economic, political and sociological coins of racism represent their more profound implications in the private lives, liberties and pursuits of happiness of the citizen. While hungry nonwhites the world around assume rightful dominance, the majority of Americans fight to keep integrated housing out of the suburbs. While a fully interracial world becomes a biological probability, most Americans persist in opposing marriage between the races. While cultures generally interpenetrate, white America is ignorant still of nonwhite America -- and perhaps glad of it. The white lives almost completely within his immediate, close-up world where things are tolerable, there are no Negroes except on the bus corner going to and from work, and where it is important that daughter marry right. White, like might, makes right in America today. Not knowing the "nonwhite", however, the white knows something less than himself. Not comfortable around "different people", he reclines in whiteness instead of preparing for diversity. Refusing to yield objective social freedoms to the "nonwhite", the white loses his personal subjective freedom by turning away "from all these damn causes."

White American ethnocentrism at home and abroad reflect most sharply the self-deprivation suffered by the majority of our country which effectively makes it an isolated minority in the world community of culture and fellowship. The awe inspired by the pervasiveness of racism in American life is only matched by the marvel of its historical span in American traditions. The national heritage of racial discrimination via slavery has been a part of America since Christopher Columbus' advent on the new continent. As such, racism not only antedates the Republic and the thirteen Colonies, but even the use of the English language in this hemisphere. And it is well that we keep this as a background when trying to understand why racism stands as such a steadfast pillar in the culture and custom of the country. Racial-xenophobia is reflected in the admission of various racial stocks to the country. From the nineteenth century Oriental Exclusion Acts to the most recent up-dating of the Walter-McCarren Immigration Acts the nation has shown a continuous contemptuous regard for "nonwhites." More recently, the tragedies of Hiroshima and Korematsu, and our cooperation with Western Europe in the United Nations add treatment to the thoroughness of racist overtones in national life.

But the right to refuse service to anyone is no longer reserved to the Americans. The minority groups, internationally, are changing place.

WHAT IS NEEDED?

How to end the Cold War? How to increase democracy in America? These are the decisive issues confronting liberal and socialist forces today. To us, the issues are intimately related, the struggle for one invariably being a struggle for the other. What policy and structural alternatives are needed to obtain these ends?

Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the national defense goal. The strategy of mutual threat can only temporarily prevent thermonuclear war, and it cannot but erode democratic institutions here while consolidating oppressive institutions in the Soviet Union. Yet American leadership, while giving rhetorical due to the ideal of disarmament, persists in accepting mixed deterrence as its policy formula: under Kennedy we have seen first-strike and second-strike weapons, counter-military and counter-population inventions, tactical atomic weapons and guerilla warriors, etc. The convenient rationalization that our weapons potpourri will confuse the enemy into fear of misbehaving is absurd and threatening. Our own intentions, once clearly retaliatory, are now ambiguous since the President has indicated we might in certain circumstances be the first to use nuclear weapons. We can expect that Russia will become more anxious herself, and perhaps even prepare to "preempt" us, and we (expecting the worst from the Russians) will nervously consider "preemption" ourselves. The symmetry of threat and counter-threat lead not to stability but to the edge of hell.

It is necessary that America make disarmament, not nuclear deterrence, "credible" to the Soviets and to the world. That is, disarmament should be continually avowed as a national goal; concrete plans should be presented at conference tables; real machinery for a disarming and disarmed world -- national and international -- should be created while the disarming process itself goes on. The long-standing idea of unilateral initiative should be implemented as a basic feature of American disarmament strategy: initiatives that are graduated in their ~~~ potential, accompanied by invitations to reciprocate when done regardless of reciprocation, openly ~~~ significant period of future time. Their ~~~ should not be to strip America of weapon, ~~~ produce a climate in which disarmament can be ~~~ with less mutual hostility and threat. They might include: a unilateral nuclear test moratorium, withdrawal of several bases near the Soviet Union, proposals to experiment in disarmament by stabilization of zone of controversy; cessation of all apparent first-strike preparations, such as the development of 41 Polaris by 1963 while naval theorists state that about 45 constitutes a provocative force; inviting a special United Nations agency to observe and inspect the launchings of all American flights into outer space; and numerous others.

There is no simple formula for the content of an actual disarmament treaty. It should be phased: perhaps on a region-by-region basis, the conventional weapons first. It should be conclusive, not open-ended, in its projection. It should be controlled: national inspection systems are adequate at first, but should be soon replaced by international devices and teams. It should be more than denuding: world or at least regional enforcement agencies, an international civil service and inspection service, and other supranational groups must come into reality under the United Nations.

2. Disarmament should be see as a political issue, not a technical problem. Should this year's Geneva negotiations have resulted (by magic) in a disarmament agreement, the United States Senate would have refused to ratify it, a domestic depression would have begun instantly, and every fiber of American life would be wrenched drastically: these are indications not only of our unpreparedness for disarmament, but also that disarmament is not "just another policy shift." Disarmament means a deliberate shift in most of our domestic and foreign policy.

It will involve major changes in economic direction. Government intervention in new areas, government regulation of certain industrial price and investment practices to prevent inflation, full use of national productive capacities, and employment for every person in a dramatically expanding economy all are to be expected as the "price" of peace.
It will involve the simultaneous creation of international rulemaking and enforcement machinery beginning under the United Nations, and the gradual transfer of sovereignties -- such as national armies and national determination of "international" law -- to such machinery.
It will involve the initiation of an explicitly political -- as opposed to military -- foreign policy on the part of the two major superstates. Neither has formulated the political terms in which they would conduct their behavior in a disarming or disarmed world. Neither dares to disarm until such an understanding is reached.
A crucial feature of this political understanding must be the acceptance of status quo possessions. According to the universality principle all present national entities -- including the Vietnams, the Koreans, the Chinas, and the Germanys -- should be members of the United Nations as sovereign, no matter how desirable, states.

Russia cannot be expected to negotiate disarmament treaties for the Chinese. We should not feed Chinese fanaticism with our encirclement but Chinese stomachs with the aim of making war contrary to Chinese policy interests. Every day that we support anti-communist tyrants but refuse to even allow the Chinese Communists representation in the United Nations marks a greater separation of our ideals and our actions, and it makes more likely bitter future relations with the Chinese.

Second, we should recognize that an authoritarian Germany's insistence on reunification, while knowing the impossibility of achieving it with peaceful means, could only generate increasing frustrations among the population and nationalist sentiments which frighten its Eastern neighbors who have historical reasons to suspect Germanic intentions. President Kennedy himself told the editor of Izvestia that he fears an independent Germany with nuclear arms, but American policies have not demonstrated cognisance of the fact that Chancellor Adenauer too, is interested in continued East-West tensions over the Germany and Berlin problems and nuclear arms precisely because this is the rationale for extending his domestic power and his influence upon the NATO-Common Market alliance.

A world war over Berlin would be absurd. Anyone concurring with such a proposition should demand that the West cease its contradictory advocacy of "reunification of Germany through free elections" and "a rearmed Germany in NATO". It is a dangerous illusion to assume that Russia will hand over East Germany to a rearmed re-united Germany which will enter the Western camp, although this Germany might have a Social Democratic majority which could prevent a reassertion of German nationalism. We have to recognize that the cold war and the incorporation of Germany into the two power blocs was a decision of both Moscow and Washington, of both Adenauer and Ulbricht. The immediate responsibility for the Berlin wall is Ulbricht's. But it had to be expected that a regime which was bad enough to make people flee is also bad enough to prevent them from fleeing. The inhumanity of the Berlin wall is an ironic symbol of the irrationality of the cold war, which keeps Adenauer and Ulbricht in power. A reduction of the tension over Berlin, if by internationalization or by recognition of the status quo and reducing provocations, is a necessary but equally temporary measure which could not ultimately reduce the basic cold war tension to which Berlin owes its precarious situation. The Berlin problem cannot be solved without reducing tensions in Europe, possibly by a bilateral military disengagement and creating a neutralized buffer zone. Even if Washington and Moscow were in favor disengagement, both Adenauer and Ulbricht would never agree to it because cold war keeps their parties in power.

Until their regimes' departure from the scene of history, the Berlin status quo will have to be maintained while minimizing the tensions necessarily arising from it. Russia cannot expect the United States to tolerate its capture by the Ulbricht regime, but neither can America expect to be in a position to indefinitely use Berlin as a fortress within the communist world. As a fair and bilateral disengagement in Central Europe seems to be impossible for the time being, a mutual recognition of the Berlin status quo, that is, of West Berlin's and East Germany's security, is needed. And it seems to be possible, although the totalitarian regime of East Germany and the authoritarian leadership of West Germany until now succeeded in frustrating all attempts to minimize the dangerous tensions of cold war.

The strategy of securing the status quo of the two power blocs until it is possible to depolarize the world by creating neutralist regions in all trouble zones seems to be the only way to guarantee peace at this time.

4. Experiments in disengagement and demilitarization must be conducted as part of the total disarming process. These "disarmament experiments" can be of several kinds, so long as they are consistent with the principles of containing the arms race and isolating specific sectors of the world from the Cold War power-play. First, it is imperative that no more nations be supplied with, or locally produce, nuclear weapons. A 1959 report of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences predicted that 19 nations would be so armed in the near future. Should this prediction be fulfilled, the prospects of war would be unimaginably expanded. For this reason the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union should band against France (which wants its own independent deterrent) and seek, through United Nations or other machinery, the effective prevention of the spread of atomic weapons. This would involve not only declarations of "denuclearization" in whole areas of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe, but would attempt to create inspection machinery to guarantee the peaceful use of atomic energy.

Second, the United States should reconsider its increasingly outmoded European defense framework, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Since its creation in 1949, NATO has assumed increased strength in overall determination of Western military policy, but has become less and less relevant to its original purpose, which was the defense of Central Europe. To be sure, after the Czech coup of 1948, it might have appeared that the Soviet Union was on the verge of a full-scale assault on Europe. But that onslaught has not materialized, not so much because of NATO's existence but because of the general unimportance of much of Central Europe to the Soviets. Today, when even American-based ICBMs could smash Russia minutes after an invasion of Europe, when the Soviets have no reason to embark on such an invasion, and when "thaw sectors" are desperately needed to brake the arms race, one of at least threatening but most promising courses for American would be toward the gradual diminishment of the NATO forces, coupled with the negotiated "disengagement" of parts of Central Europe.

It is especially crucial that this be done while America is entering into favorable trade relations with the European Economic Community: such a gesture, combining economic ambition with less dependence on the military, would demonstrate the kind of competitive "co-existence" America intends to conduct with the communist-bloc nations. If the disengaged states were the two Germanies, Poland and Czechoslovakia, several other benefits would accrue. First, the United States would be breaking with the lip-service commitment to "liberation" of Eastern Europe which has contributed so much to Russian fears and intransigence, while doing too little about actual liberation. But the end of "liberation" as a proposed policy would not signal the end of American concern for the oppressed in East Europe. On the contrary, disengagement would be a real, rather than a rhetorical, effort to ease military tensions, thus undermining the Russian argument for tighter controls in East Europe based on the "menace of capitalist encirclement". This policy, geared to the needs of democratic elements in the satellites, would develop a real bridge between East and West across the two most pro-Western Russian satellites. The Russians in the past have indicated some interest in such a plan, including the demilitarization of the Warsaw pact countries. Their interest should be publicly tested. If disengagement could be achieved, a major zone could be removed from the Cold War, the German problem would be materially diminished, and the need for NATO would diminish, and attitudes favorable to disarming would be generated.

Needless to say, those proposals are much different than what is currently being practised and praised. American military strategists are slowly acceeding to the NATO demand for an independent deterrent, based on the fear that America might not defend Europe from military attack. These tendencies strike just the opposite chords in Russia than those which would be struck by disengagement themes: the chords of military alertness, based on the fact that NATO (bulwarked by the German Wehrmacht) is preparing to attack Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. Thus the alarm which underlies the NATO proposal for an independent deterrent is likely itself to bring into existence the very Russian posture that was the original cause of fear. Armaments spiral and belligerence will carry the day, not disengagement and negotiation.

The Industrialization of the World

Many Americans are prone to think of the industrialization of the newlydeveloped countries as a modern form of American noblesse, undertaken sacrificially for the benefit of others. On the contrary, the task of world industrialization, of eliminating the disparity between have and have-not nations, is as important as any issue facing America. The colonial revolution signals the end of an era for the old Western powers and a time of new beginnings for most of the people of the earth. In the course of these upheavals, many problems will emerge: American policies must be revised or accelerated in several ways.

The United States' principal goal should be creating a world where hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, violence, and exploitation are replaced as central features by abundance, reason, love, and international cooperation. To many this will seem the product of juvenile hallucination: but we insist it is a more realistic goal than is a world of nuclear stalemate. Some will say this is a hope beyond all bounds: but is far better to us to have positive vision than a "hard headed" resignation. Some will sympathize, but claim it is impossible: if so, then, we, not Fate, are the responsible ones, for we have the means at our disposal. We should not give up the attempt for fear of failure.
We should undertake here and now a fifty-year effort to prepare for all nations the conditions of industrialization. Even with far more capital and skill than we now import to emerging areas, serious prophets expect that two generations will pass before accelerating industrialism is a worldwide act. The needs are numerous: every nation must build an adequate intrastructure (transportation, communication, land resources, waterways) for future industrial growth; there must be industries suited to the rapid development of differing raw materials and other resources; education must begin on a continuing basis for everyone in the society, especially including engineering and technical training; technical assistance from outside sources must be adequate to meet present and long-term needs; atomic power plants must spring up to make electrical energy available. With America's idle productive capacity, it is possible to begin this process immediately without changing our military allocations. This might catalyze a "peace race" since it would demand a response of such magnitude from the Soviet Union that arms spending and "coexistence" spending would become strenuous, perhaps impossible, for the Soviets to carry on simultaneously.
We should not depend significantly on private enterprise to do the job. Many important projects will not be profitable enough to entice the investment of private capital. The total amount required is far beyond the resources of corporate and philanthropic concerns. The new nations are suspicious, legitimately, of foreign enterprises dominating their national life. World industrialization is too huge an undertaking to be formulated or carried out by private interests. Foreign economic assistance is a national problem, requiring long range planning, integration with other domestic and foreign policies, and considerable public debate and analysis. Therefore the Federal government should have primary responsibility in this area.
We should not lock the development process into the Cold War: we should view it as a way of ending that conflict. When President Kennedy declared that we must aid those who need aid because it is right, he was unimpeachably correct -- now principle must become practice. We should reverse the trend of aiding corrupt anti-communist regimes. To support dictators like Diem while trying to destroy ones like Castro will only enforce international cynicism about American "principle", and is bound to lead to even more authoritarian revolutions, especially in Latin America where we did not even consider foreign aid until Castro had challenged the status quo. We should end the distinction between communist hunger and anti-communist hunger. To feed only anticommunists is to directly fatten men like Boun Oum, to incur the wrath of real democrats, and to distort our own sense of human values. We must cease seeing development in terms of communism and capitalism. To fight communism by capitalism in the newly-developing areas is to fundamentally misunderstand the international hatred of imperialism and colonialism and to confuse and needs of 19th century industrial America with those of contemporary nations.

Quite fortunately, we are edging away from the Dullesian "either-or" foreign policy ultimatum towards an uneasy acceptance of neutralism and nonalignment. If we really desire the end of the Cold War, we should now welcome nonalignment -- that is, the creation of whole blocs of nations concerned with growth and with independently trying to break out of the Cold War apparatus.

Finally, while seeking disarmament as the genuine deterrent, we should shift from financial support of military regimes to support of national development. Real security cannot be gained by propping up military defenses, but only through the hastening of political stability, economic growth, greater social welfare, improved education. Military aid is temporary in nature, a "shoring up" measure that only postpones crisis. In addition, it tends to divert the allocations of the nation being defended to supplementary military spending (Pakistan's budget is 70% oriented to defense measures). Sometimes it actually creates crisis situations, as in Latin America where we have contributed to the growth of national armies which are opposed generally to sweeping democratization. Finally, if we are really generous, it is harder for corrupt governments to exploit unfairly economic aid -- especially if it is to plentiful that rulers cannot blame the absence of real reforms on anything but their own power lusts.

5. America should show its commitment to democratic institutions not by withdrawing support from undemocratic regimes, but by making domestic democracy exemplary. Worldwide amusement, cynicism and hatred toward the United States as a democracy is not simply a communist propaganda trick, but an objectively justifiable phenomenon. If respect for democracy is to be international, then the significance of democracy must emanate from America shores, not from the "soft sell" of the United States Information Agency.

6. America should agree that public utilities, railroads, mines, and plantations, and other basic economic institutions should be in the control of national, not foreign, agencies. The destiny of any country should be determined by its nationals, not by outsiders with economic interests within. We should encourage our investors to turn over their foreign holdings (or at least 50% of the stock) to the national governments of the countries involved.

7. Foreign aid should be given through international agencies, primarily the United Nations. The need is to eliminate political overtones, to the extent possible, from economic development. The use of international agencies, with interests transcending those of American or Russian self-interest, is the feasible means of working on sound development. Second, internationalization will allow more long-range planning, integrate development plans adjacent countries and regions may have, and eliminate the duplication built into national systems of foreign aid. Third, it would justify more strictness of supervision than is now the case with American foreign aid efforts, but with far less chance of suspicion on the part of the developing countries. Fourth, the humiliating "hand-out" effect would be replaced by the joint participation of all nations in the general development of the earth's resources and industrial capacities. Fifth, it would eliminate national tensions, e.g. between Japan and some Southeast Asian areas, which now impair aid programs by "disguising" nationalities in the common pooling of funds. Sixth, it would make easier the task of stabilizing the world market prices of basic commodities, alleviating the enormous threat that decline in prices of commodity exports might cancel out the gains from foreign aid in the new nations. Seventh, it would improve the possibilities of non-exploitative development, especially in creating "soft-credit" rotating-fund agencies which would not require immediate progress or financial return. Finally, it would enhance the importance of the United Nations itself, as the disarming process would enhance the UN as a rule-enforcement agency.

8. Democratic theory must confront the problems inherent in social revolutions. For Americans concerned with the development of democratic societies, the anti-colonial movements and revolutions in the emerging nations pose serious problems. We need to face these problems with humility: after 180 years of constitutional government we are still striving for democracy in our own society. We must acknowledge that democracy and freedom do not magically occur, but have roots in historical experience; they cannot always be demanded for any society at any time, but must be nurtured and facilitated. We must avoid the arbitrary projection of Anglo-Saxon democratic forms onto different cultures. Instead of democratic capitalism we should anticipate more or less authoritarian variants of socialism and collectivism in many emergent societies.

But we do not abandon our critical faculties. Insofar as these regimes represent a genuine realization of national independence, and are engaged in constructing social systems which allow for personal meaning and purpose where exploitation once was, economic systems which work for the people where once they oppressed them, and political systems which allow for the organization and expression of minority opinion and dissent, we recognize their revolutionary and positive character. Americans can contribute to the growth of democracy in such societies not by moralizing, nor by indiscriminate prejudgment, but by retaining a critical identification with these nations, and by helping them to avoid external threats to their independence. Together with students and radicals in these nations we need to develop a reasonable theory of democracy which is concretely applicable to the cultures and conditions of hungry people.

TOWARDS AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

Every effort to end the Cold War and expand the process of world industrialization is an effort hostile to people and institutions whose interests lie in perpetuation of the East-West military threat and the postponement of change in the "have not" nations of the world. Every such effort, too, is bound to establish greater democracy in America. The major goals of a domestic effort would be:

America must abolish its political party stalemate. Two genuine parties, centered around issues and essential values, demanding allegiance to party principles shall supplant the current system of organized stalemate which is seriously inadequate to a world in flux. It has long been argued that the very overlapping of American parties guarantees that issues will be considered responsibly, that progress will be gradual instead of intemperate, and that therefore America will remain stable instead of torn by class strife. On the contrary: the enormous party overlap itself confuses issues and makes responsible presentation of choice to the electorate impossible, that guarantees Congressional listlessness and the drift of power to military and economic bureaucracies, that directs attention away from the more fundamental causes of social stability, such as a huge middle class, Keynesian economic techniques and Madison Avenue advertising. The ideals of political democracy, then, the imperative need for flexible decision-making apparatus makes a real two-party system an immediate social necessity. What is desirable is sufficient party disagreement to dramatize major issues, yet sufficient party overlap to guarantee stable transitions from administration to administration.

Every time the President criticizes a recalcitrant Congress, we must ask that he no longer tolerate the Southern conservatives in the Democratic Party. Every time in liberal representative complains that "we can't expect everything at once" we must ask if we received much of anything from Congress in the last generation. Every time he refers to "circumstances beyond control" we must ask why he fraternizes with racist scoundrels. Every time he speaks of the "unpleasantness of personal and party fighting" we should insist that pleasantry with Dixiecrats is inexcusable when the dark peoples of the world call for American support.

2. Mechanisms of voluntary association must be created through which political information can be imparted and political participation encouraged. Political parties, even if realigned, would not provide adequate outlets for popular involvement. Institutions should be created that engage people with issues and express political preference, not as now with huge business lobbies which exercise undemocratic power, but which carry political influence (appropriate to private, rather than public, groupings) in national decision-making enterprise. Private in nature, these should be organized around single issues (medical care, transportation systems reform, etc.), concrete interest (labor and minority group organizations), multiple issues or general issues. These do not exist in America in quantity today. If they did exist, they would be a significant politicizing and educative force bringing people into touch with public life and affording them means of expression and action. Today, giant lobby representatives of business interests are dominant, but not educative. The Federal government itself should counter the latter forces whose intent is often public deceit for private gain, by subsidizing the preparation and decentralized distribution of objective materials on all public issues facing government.

3. Institutions and practices which stifle dissent should be abolished, and the promotion of peaceful dissent should be actively promoted. The first Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, thought, religion and press should be seen as guarantees, not threats, to national security. While society has the right to prevent active subversion of its laws and institutions, it has the duty as well to promote open discussion of all issues -- otherwise it will be in fact promoting real subversion as the only means to implementing ideas. To eliminate the fears and apathy from national life it is necessary that the institutions bred by fear and apathy be rooted out: the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Senate Internal Security Committee, the loyalty oaths on Federal loans, the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, the Smith and McCarren Acts. The process of eliminating these blighting institutions is the process of restoring democratic participation. Their existence is a sign of the decomposition and atrophy of the participation.

4. Corporations must be made publicly responsible. It is not possible to believe that true democracy can exist where a minority utterly controls enormous wealth and power. The influence of corporate elites on foreign policy is neither reliable nor democratic; a way must be found to be subordinate private American foreign investment to a democratically-constructed foreign policy. The influence of the same giants on domestic life is intolerable as well; a way must be found to direct our economic resources to genuine human needs, not the private needs of corporations nor the rigged needs of maneuvered citizenry.

We can no longer rely on competition of the many to insure that business enterprise is responsive to social needs. The many have become the few. Nor can we trust the corporate bureaucracy to be socially responsible or to develop a "corporate conscience" that is democratic. The community of interest of corporations, the anarchic actions of industrial leaders, should become structurally responsible to the people -- and truly to the people rather than to an ill-defined and questionable "national interest". Labor and government as presently constituted are not sufficient to "regulate" corporations. A new re-ordering, a new calling of responsibility is necessary: more than changing "work rules" we must consider changes in the rules of society by challenging the unchallenged politics of American corporations. Before the government can really begin to control business in a "public interest", the public must gain more substantial control of government: this demands a movement for political as well as economic realignments. We are aware that simple government "regulation", if achieved, would be inadequate without increased worker participation in management decision-making, strengthened and independent regulatory power, balances of partial and/or complete public ownership, various means of humanizing the conditions and types of work itself, sweeping welfare programs and regional public government authorities. These are examples of measures to re-balance the economy toward public -- and individual -- control.

5. The allocation of resources must be based on social needs. A truly "public sector" must be established, and its nature debated and planned. At present the majority of America's "public sector", the largest part of our public spending, is for the military. When great social needs are so pressing, our concept of "government spending" is wrapped up in the "permanent war economy".

In fact, if war is to be avoided, the "permanent war economy" must be seen as an "interim war economy". At some point, America must return to other mechanisms of economic growth besides public military spending. We must plan economically in peace. The most likely, and least desirable, return would be in the form of private enterprise. The undesirability lies in the fact of inherent capitalist instability, noticeable even with bolstering effects of government intervention. In the most recent post-war recessions, for example, private expenditures for plant and equipment dropped from $16 billion to $11.5 billion, while unemployment surged to nearly six million. By good fortune, investments in construction industries remained level, else an economic depression would have occurred. This will recur, and our growth in national per capita living standards will remain unsensational while the economy stagnates. The main private forces of economic expansion cannot guarantee a steady rate of growth, nor acceptable recovery from recession -- especially in a demilitarizing world. Government participation in the economy is essential. Such participation will inevitably expand enormously, because the stable growth of the economy demands increasing "public" investments yearly. Our present outpour of more than $500 billion might double in a generation, irreversibly involving government solutions. And in future recessions, the compensatory fiscal action by the government will be the only means of avoiding the twin disasters of greater unemployment and a slackening rate of growth. Furthermore, a close relationship with the European Common Market will involve competition with numerous planned economies and may aggravate American unemployment unless the economy here is expanding swiftly enough to create new jobs.

All these tendencies suggest that not only solutions to our present social needs but our future expansion rests upon our willingness to enlarge the "public sector" greatly. Unless we choose war as an economic solvent, future public spending will be of a non-military nature -- a major intervention into civilian production by the government. The issues posed by this development are enormous:

How should public vs. private domain be determined? We suggest these criteria: 1) when a resource has been discovered or developed with public tax revenues, such as a space communications system, it should remain a public source, not be given away to private enterprise;
when monopolization seems inevitable, the public should maintain control of an industry; 3) when national objectives contradict seriously with business objectives as to the use of the resource, the public need should prevail.
How should technological advances be introduced into a society? By a public process, based on publicly-determined needs. Technological innovations should not be postponed from social use by private corporations in order to protect investment in older equipment.
How shall the "public sector" be made public, and not the arena of a ruling bureaucracy of "public servants"? By steadfast opposition to bureaucratic coagulation, and to definitions of human needs according to problems easiest for computers to solve. Second, the bureaucratic pileups must be at least minimized by local, regional, and national economic planning -- responding to the interconnection of public problems by comprehensive programs of solution. Third, and most important, by experiments in decentralization, based on the vision of man as master of his machines and his society. The personal capacity to cope with life has been reduced everywhere by the introduction of technology that only minorities of men (barely) understand. How the process can be reversed
- and we believe it can be -- is one of the greatest sociological and economic tasks before human people today. Polytechnical schooling, with the individual adjusting to several work and life experiences, is one method. The transfer of certain mechanized tasks back into manual forms, allowing men to make whole, not partial, products, is not unimaginable. Our monster cities, based historically on the need for mass labor, might now be humanized, broken into smaller communities, powered by nuclear energy, arranged according to community decision. These are but a fraction of the opportunities of the new era: serious study and deliberate experimentation, rooted in a desire for human fraternity, may now result in blueprints of civic paradise.
America should concentrate on its genuine social priorities: abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish an environment for people to live in with dignity and creativeness.
A program against poverty must be just as sweeping as the nature of poverty itself. It must not be just palliative, but directed to the abolition of the structural circumstances of poverty. At a bare minimum it should include a housing act far larger than the one supported by the Kennedy Administration, but one that is geared more to low-and middleincome needs than to the windfall aspirations of small and large private entrepreneurs, one that is more sympathetic to the quality of communal life than to the efficiency of city-split highways. Second, medical care must become recognized as a lifetime human right just as vital as food, shelter and clothing -- the Federal government should guarantee health insurance as a basic social service turning medical treatment into a social habit, not just an occasion of crisis, fighting sickness among the aged, not just by making medical care financially feasible but by reducing sickness among children and younger people. Third, existing institutions should be expanded so the Welfare State cares for everyone's welfare according to read. Social security payments should be extended to everyone and should be proportionately greater for the poorest. A minimum wage of at least $1.50 should be extended to all workers (including the 16 million currently not covered at all). Equal educational opportunity is an important part of the battle against poverty.
A full-scale public initiative for civil rights should be undertaken despite the clamor among conservatives (and liberals) about gradualism, property rights, and law and order. The executive and legislative branches of the Federal government should work by enforcement and enactment against any form of exploitation of minority groups. No Federal cooperation with racism is tolerable -- from financing of schools, to the development of Federally-supported industry, to the social gatherings of the President. Laws bastcuing school desegregation, voting rights, and economic protection for Negroes are needed right now. The moral force of the Executive Office should be exerted against the Dixiecrats specifically, and the national complacency about the race question generally. Especially in the North, where one-half of the country's Negro people now live, civil rights is not a problem to be solved in isolation from other problems. The fight against poverty, against slums, against the stalemated Congress, against McCarthyism, are all fights against the discrimination that is nearly endemic to all areas of American life.
The promise and problems of long-range Federal economic development should be studied more constructively. It is an embarrassing paradox that the Tennessee Valley Authority is a wonder to foreign visitors but a "radical" and barely influential project to most Americans. The Kennedy decision to permit private facilities to transmit power from the $1 billion Colorado River Storage Project is a disastrous one, interposing privately-owned transmitters between public-owned power generators and their publicly (and cooperatively) owned distributors. The contracy trend, to public ownership of power, should be generated in an experimental way.

The Area Redevelopment Act of 1961 is a first step in recognizing the underdeveloped areas of the United States, but is only a drop in the bucket financially and is not keyed to public planning and public works on a broad scale, but only to a few loan programs to lure industries and some grants to improve public facilities to "lure industries." The current public works bill in Congress is needed and a more sweeping, higher priced program of regional development with a proliferation of "TVAs" in such areas as the Appalachian region are needed desperately. It has been rejected by Mississippi already however, because of the improvement it bodes for the unskilled Negro worker. This program should be enlarged, given teeth, and pursued rigorously by Federal authorities.

d. We must meet the growing complex of "city" problems; over 90% of Americans will live in urban areas in the next two decades. Juvenile delinquency, untended mental illness, crime increase, slums, urban tenantry and uncontrolled housing, the isolation of the individual in the city -- all are problems of the city and are major symptoms of the present system of economic priorities and lack of public planning. Private property control (the real estate lobby and a few selfish landowners and businesses) is as devastating in the cities as corporations are on the national level. But there is no comprehensive way to deal with these problems now midst competing units of government, dwindling tax resources, suburban escapism (saprophitic to the sick central cities), high infrastructure costs and on one to pay them. The only solutions are national and regional. "Federalism" has thus far failed here because states are rural-dominated; the Federal government has had to operate by bootlegging and trickle-down measures dominated by private interests, and the cities themselves have not been able to catch up with their appendages through annexation or federation. A new external challenge is needed, not just a Department of Urban Affairs but a thorough national program to help the cities. The model city must be projected -- more community decision-making and participation, true integration of classes, races, vocations -- provision for beauty, access to nature and the benefits of the central city as well, privacy without privatism, decentralized "units" spread horizontally with central, regional, democratic control -- provision for the basic facility-needs, for everyone, with units of planned regions and thus public, democratic control over the growth of the civic community and the allocation of resources.

e. Mental health institutions are in dire need; there were fewer mental hospital beds in relation to the numbers of mentally-ill in 1959 than there were in 1948. Public hospitals, too, are seriously wanting; existing structures alone need an estimated $1 billion for rehabilitation. Tremendous staff and faculty needs exist as well, and there are not enough medical students enrolled today to meet the anticipated needs of the future.

f. Our prisons are too often the enforcers of misery. They must be either re-oriented to rehabilitative work through public supervision or be abolished for their dehumanizing social effects. Funds are needed, too, to make possible a decent prison environment.

g. Education is too vital a public problem to be completely entrusted to the province of the various states and local units. In fact, there is no good reason why America should not progress now toward internationalizing rather than localizing, its educational system -- children and young adults studying everywhere in the world, through a United Nations program, would go far to create mutual understanding. In the meantime, the need for teachers and classrooms in America is fantastic. This is an area where "minimal" requirements hardly should be considered as a goal -- there always are improvements to be made in the educational system, e.g., smaller classes and many more teachers for them, programs to subsidize the education of the poor but bright, etc.

h. America should eliminate agricultural policies based on scarcity and pent-up surplus. In America and foreign countries there exist tremendous needs for more food and balanced diets. The Federal government should finance small farmers' cooperatives, strengthen programs of rural electrification, and expand policies for the distribution of agricultural surpluses throughout the world (by Foodfor -Peace and related UN programming). Marginal farmers must be helped to either become productive enough to survive "industrialized agriculture" or given help in making the transition out of agriculture -

the current Rural Area Development program must be better coordinated with a massive national "area redevelopment" program. i. Science should be employed to constructively transform the conditions of life throughout the United States and the world. Yet at the present time the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the National Science Foundation together spend only $300 million annually for scientific purposes in contrast to the $6 billion spent by the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission. One-half of all research and development in America is directly devoted to military purposes. Two imbalances must be corrected -- that of military over non-military investigation, and that of biological-natural-physical science over the sciences of human behavior. Our political system must then include planning for the human use of science: by anticipating the political consequences of scientific innovation, by directing the discovery and exploration of space, by adapting science to improved production of food, to international communications systems, to technical problems of disarmament, and so on. For the newly-developing nations, American science should focus on the study of cheap sources of power, housing and building materials, mass educational techniques, etc. Further, science and scholarship should be seen less as an apparatus of conflicting power blocs, but as a bridge toward supranational community: the International Geophysical Year is a model for continuous further cooperation between the science communities of all nations.

Alternatives to Helplessness

The goals we have set are not realizable next month, or even next election -- but that fact justifies neither giving up altogether nor a determination to work only on immediate, direct, tangible problems. Both responses are a sign of helplessness, fearfulness of visions, refusal to hope, and tend to bring on the very conditions to be avoided. Fearing vision, we justify rhetoric or myopia. Fearing hope, we reinforce despair.

The first effort, then, should be to state a vision: what is the perimeter of human possibility in this epoch? This we have tried to do. The second effort, if we are to be politically responsible, is to evaluate the prospects for obtaining at least a substantial part of that vision in our epoch: what are the social forces that exist, or that must exist, if we are to be at all successful? And what role have we ourselves to play as a social force?

In exploring the existing social forces, note must be taken of the Southern civil rights movement as the most heartening because of the justice it insists upon, exemplary because it indicates that there can be a passage out of apathy.

This movement, pushed into a brilliant new phase by the Montgomery bus boycott and the subsequent nonviolent action of the sit-ins and Freedom Rides has had three major results: first, a sense of self-determination has been instilled in millions of oppressed Negroes; second, the movement has challenged a few thousand liberals to new social idealism; third, a series of important concessions have been obtained, such as token school desegregation, increased Administration help, new laws, desegregation of some public facilities.

But fundamental social change -- that would break the props from under Jim Crown -- has not come. Negro employment opportunity, wage levels, housing conditions, educational privileges -- these remain deplorable and relatively constant, each deprivation reinforcing the impact of the others. The Southern states, in the meantime, are strengthening the fortresses of the status quo, and are beginning to camouflage the fortresses by guile where open bigotry announced its defiance before. The white-controlled one-party system remains intact; and even where the Republicans are beginning under the pressures of industrialization in the towns and suburbs, to show initiative in fostering a two-party system, all Southern state Republican Committees (save Georgia) have adopted militant segregationist platforms to attract Dixiecrats.

Rural dominance remains a fact in nearly all the Southern states, although the reapportionment decision of the Supreme Court portends future power shifts to the cities. Southern politicians maintain a continuing aversion to the welfare legislation that would aid their people. The reins of the Southern economy are held by conservative businessmen who view human rights as secondary to property rights. A violent anti-communism is rooting itself in the South, and threatening even moderate voices. Add the militaristic tradition of the South, and its irrational regional mystique and one must conclude that authoritarian and reactionary tendencies are a rising obstacle to the small, voiceless, poor, and isolated democratic movements.

The civil rights struggle thus has come to an impasse. To this impasse, the movement responded this year by entering the sphere of politics, insisting on citizenship rights, specifically the right to vote. The new voter registration stage of protest represents perhaps the first major attempt to exercise the conventional instruments of political democracy in the struggle for racial justice. The vote, if used strategically by the great mass of now-unregistered Negroes theoretically eligible to vote, will be decisive factor in changing the quality of Southern leadership from low demagoguery to decent statesmanship.

More important, the new emphasis on the vote heralds the use of political means to solve the problems of equality in America, and it signals the decline of the short-sighted view that "discrimination" can be isolated from related social problems. Since the moral clarity of the civil rights movement has not always been accompanied by precise political vision, and sometimes not every by a real political consciousness, the new phase is revolutionary in its implication. The intermediate goal of the program is to secure and insure a healthy respect and realization of Constitutional liberties. This is important not only to terminate the civil and private abuses which currently characterize the region, but also to prevent the pendulum of oppression from simply swinging to an alternate extreme with a new unsophisticated electorate, after the unhappy example of the last Reconstruction. It is the ultimate objectives of the strategy which promise profound change in the politics of the nation. An increased Negro voting race in and of itself is not going to dislodge racist controls of the Southern power structure; but an accelerating movement through the courts, the ballot boxes, and especially the jails is the most likely means of shattering the crust of political intransigency and creating a semblence of democratic order, on local and state levels.

Linked with pressure from Northern liberals to expunge the Dixiecrats from the ranks of the Democratic Party, massive Negro voting in the South could destroy the vice-like grip reactionary Southerners have on the Congressional legislative process.

2. The broadest movement for peace in several years emerged in 1961-62. In its political orientation and goals it is much less identifiable than the movement for civil rights: it includes socialists, pacifists, liberals, scholars, militant activists, middle-class women, some professionals, many students, a few unionists. Some have been emotionally single-issue: Ban the Bomb. Some have been academically obscurantist. Some have rejected the System (sometimes both systems). Some have attempted, too, to "work within" the System. Amidst these conflicting streams of emphasis, however, certain basic qualities appear. The most important is that the "peace movement" has operated almost exclusively through peripheral institutions -- almost never through mainstream institutions. Similarly, individuals interested in peace have nonpolitical social roles that cannot be turned to the support of peace activity. Concretely, liberal religious societies, anti-war groups, voluntary associations, ad hoc committees have been the political unit of the peace movement, and its human movers have been students, teacher, housewives, secretaries, lawyers, doctors, clergy. The units have not been located in spots of major social influence, the people have not been able to turn their resources fully to the issues that concern them. The results are political ineffectiveness and personal alienation.

The organizing ability of the peace movement thus is limited to the ability to state and polarize issues. It does not have an institution or the forum in which the conflicting interests can be debated. The debate goes on in corners; it has little connection with the continuing process of determining allocations of resources. This process is not necessarily centralized, however much the peace movement is estranged from it. National policy, though dominated to a large degree by the "power elites" of the corporations and military, is still partially founded in consensus. It can be altered when there actually begins a shift in the allocation of resources and the listing of priorities by the people in the institutions which have social influence, e.g., the labor unions and the schools. As long as the debates of the peace movement form only a protest, rather than an opposition viewpoint within the centers of serious decision- making, then it is neither a movement of democratic relevance, nor is it likely to have any effectiveness except in educating more outsiders to the issue. It is vital, to be sure, that this educating go on (a heartening sign is the recent proliferation of books and journals dealing with peace and war from newly-developing countries); the possibilities for making politicians responsible to "peace constituencies" becomes greater.

But in the long interim before the national political climate is more open to deliberate, goal-directed debate about peace issues, the dedicated peace "movement" might well prepare a local base, especially by establishing civic committees on the techniques of converting from military to peacetime production. To make war and peace relevant to the problems of everyday life, by relating it to the backyard (shelters), the baby (fall-out), the job (military contracts) -- and making a turn toward peace seem desirable on these same terms -- is a task the peace movement is just beginning, and can profitably continue.

3. Central to any analysis of the potential for change must be an appraisal of organized labor. It would be a-historical to disregard the immense influence of labor in making modern America a decent place in which to live. It would be confused to fail to note labor's presence today as the most liberal of mainstream institutions. But it would be irresponsible not to criticize labor for losing much of the idealism that once made it a driving movement. Those who expected a labor upsurge after the 1955 AFL-CIO merger can only be dismayed that one year later, in the Stevenson-Eisenhower campaign, the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education was able to obtain solicited $1.00 contributions from only one of every 24 unionists, and prompt only 40% of the rankand -file to vote.

As a political force, labor generally has been unsuccessful in the postwar period of prosperity. It has seen the passage of the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin laws, and while beginning to receiving slightly favorable National Labor Relations Board rulings, it has made little progress against right-to-work laws. Furthermore, it has seen less than adequate action on domestic problems, especially unemployment.

This labor "recession" has been only partly due to anti-labor politicians and corporations. Blame should be laid, too, to labor itself for not mounting an adequate movement. Labor has too often seen itself as elitist, rather than mass-oriented, and as a pressure group rather than as an 18-million member body making political demands for all America. In the first instance, the labor bureaucracy tends to be cynical toward, or afraid of, rank-and-file involvement in the work of the Union. Resolutions passed at conventions are implemented only by high-level machinations, not by mass mobilization of the unionists. Without a significant base, labor's pressure function is materially reduced since it becomes difficult to hold political figures accountable to a movement that cannot muster a vote from a majority of its members.

There are some indications, however, that labor might regain its missing idealism. First, there are signs within the movement: of worker discontent with the economic progress, of collective bargaining, of occasional splits among union leaders on questions such as nuclear testing or other Cold War issues. Second, and more important, are the social forces which prompt these feelings of unrest. Foremost is the permanence of unemployment, and the threat of automation, but important, too, is the growth of unorganized ranks in white-collar fields with steady depletion in the already-organized fields. Third, there is the tremendous challenge of the Negro movement for support from organized labor: the alienation from and disgust with labor hypocrisy among Negroes ranging from the NAACP to the Black Muslims (crystallized in the formation of the Negro American Labor Council) indicates that labor must move more seriously in its attempts to organize on an interracial basis in the South and in large urban centers. When this task was broached several years ago, "jurisdictional" disputes prevented action. Today, many of these disputes have been settled -- and the question of a massive organizing campaign is on the labor agenda again.

These threats and opportunities point to a profound crisis: either labor continues to decline as a social force, or it must constitute itself as a mass political force demanding not only that society recognize its rights to organize but also a program going beyond desired labor legislation and welfare improvements. Necessarily this latter role will require rank-and-file involvement. It might include greater autonomy and power for political coalitions of the various trade unions in local areas, rather than the more stultifying dominance of the international unions now. It might include reductions in leaders' salaries, or rotation from executive office to shop obligations, as a means of breaking down the hierarchical tendencies which have detached elite from base and made the highest echelons of labor more like businessmen than workers. It would certainly mean an announced independence of the center and Dixiecrat wings of the Democratic Party, and a massive organizing drive, especially in the South to complement the growing Negro political drive there.

A new politics must include a revitalized labor movement; a movement which sees itself, and is regarded by others, as a major leader of the breakthrough to a politics of hope and vision. Labor's role is no less unique or important in the needs of the future than it was in the past, its numbers and potential political strength, its natural interest in the abolition of exploitation, its reach to the grass roots of American society, combine to make it the best candidate for the synthesis of the civil rights, peace, and economic reform movements.

The creation of bridges is made more difficult by the problems left over from the generation of "silence". Middle class students, still the main actors in the embryonic upsurge, have yet to overcome their ignorance, and even vague hostility, for what they see as "middle class labor" bureaucrats. Students must open the campus to labor through publications, action programs, curricula, while labor opens its house to students through internships, requests for aid (on the picket-line, with handbills, in the public dialogue), and politics. And the organization of the campus can be a beginning -- teachers' unions can be argued as both socially progressive, and educationally beneficial university employees can be organized -- and thereby an important element in the education of the student radical.

But the new politics is still contained; it struggles below the surface of apathy, awaiting liberation. Few anticipate the breakthrough and fewer still exhort labor to begin. Labor continues to be the most liberal -- and most frustrated -- institution in mainstream America.

4. Since the Democratic Party sweep in 1958, there have been exaggerated but real efforts to establish a liberal force in Congress, not to balance but to at least voice criticism of the conservative mood. The most notable of these efforts was the Liberal Project begun early in 1959 by Representative Kastenmeier of Wisconsin. The Project was neither disciplined nor very influential but it was concerned at least with confronting basic domestic and foreign problems, in concert with sever liberal intellectuals.

In 1960 five members of the Project were defeated at the polls (for reasons other than their membership in the Project). Then followed a "post mortem" publication of the Liberal Papers, materials discussed by the Project when it was in existence. Republican leaders called the book "further our than Communism". The New Frontier Administration repudiated any connection with the statements. Some former members of the Project even disclaimed their past roles.

A hopeful beginning came to a shameful end. But during the demise of the Project, a new spirit of Democratic Party reform was occurring: in New York City, Ithaca, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Texas, California, and even in Mississippi and Alabama where Negro candidates for Congress challenged racist political power. Some were for peace, some for the liberal side of the New Frontier, some for realignment of the parties -- and in most cases they were supported by students.

Here and there were stirrings of organized discontent with the political stalemate. Americans for Democratic Action and the New Republic, pillars of the liberal community, took stands against the President on nuclear testing. A split, extremely slight thus far, developed in organized labor on the same issue. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached against the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition across the nation.

5. From 1960 to 1962, the campuses experienced a revival of idealism among an active few. Triggered by the impact of the sit-ins, students began to struggle for integration, civil liberties, student rights, peace, and against the fast-rising right wing "revolt" as well. The liberal students, too, have felt their urgency thwarted by conventional channels: from student governments to Congressional committees. Out of this alienation from existing channels has come the creation of new ones; the most characteristic forms of liberal-radical student organizations are the dozens of campus political parties, political journals, and peace marches and demonstrations. In only a few cases have students built bridges to power: an occasional election campaign, the sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and voter registration activities; in some relatively large Northern demonstrations for peace and civil rights, and infrequently, through the United States National Student Association whose notable work has not been focused on political change.

These contemporary social movements -- for peace, civil rights, civil liberties labor -- have in common certain values and goals. The fight for peace is one for a stable and racially integrated world; for an end to the inherently volatile exploitation of most of mankind by irresponsible elites; and for freedom of economic, political and cultural organization. The fight for civil rights is also one for social welfare for all Americans; for free speech and the right to protest; for the shield of economic independence and bargaining power; for a reduction of the arms race which takes national attention and resources away from the problems of domestic injustice. Labor's fight for jobs and wages is also one labor; for the right to petition and strike; for world industrialization; for the stability of a peacetime economy instead of the insecurity of the war economy; for expansion of the Welfare State. The fight for a liberal Congress is a fight for a platform from which these concerns can issue. And the fight for students, for internal democracy in the university, is a fight to gain a forum for the issues.

But these scattered movements have more in common: a need for their concerns to be expressed by a political party responsible to their interests. That they have no political expression, no political channels, can be traced in large measure to the existence of a Democratic Party which tolerates the perverse unity of liberalism and racism, prevents the social change wanted by Negroes, peace protesters, labor unions, students, reform Democrats, and other liberals. Worse, the party stalemate prevents even the raising of controversy -- a full Congressional assault on racial discrimination, disengagement in Central Europe, sweeping urban reform, disarmament and inspection, public regulation of major industries; these and other issues are never heard in the body that is supposed to represent the best thoughts and interests of all Americans.

An imperative task for these publicly disinherited groups, then, is to demand a Democratic Party responsible to their interests. They must support Southern voter registration and Negro political candidates and demand that Democratic Party liberals do the same (in the last Congress, Dixiecrats split with Northern Democrats on 119 of 300 roll-calls, mostly on civil rights, area redevelopment and foreign aid bills; and breach was much larger than in the previous several sessions). Labor should begin a major drive in the South. In the North, reform clubs (either independent or Democratic) should be formed to run against big city regimes on such issues as peace, civil rights, and urban needs. Demonstrations should be held at every Congressional or convention seating of Dixiecrats. A massive research and publicity campaign should be initiated, showing to every housewife, doctor, professor, and worker the damage done to their interests every day a racist occupies a place in the Democratic Party. Where possible, the peace movement should challenge the "peace credentials" of the otherwise-liberals by threatening or actually running candidates against them.

The University and Social Change. There is perhaps little reason to be optimistic about the above analysis. True, the Dixiecrat-GOP coalition is the weakest point in the dominating complex of corporate, military and political power. But the civil rights and peace and student movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too quiescent, to be counted with enthusiasm. From where else can power and vision be summoned? We believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence.

First, the university is located in a permanent position of social influence. Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes. Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the central institution for organizing, evaluating, and transmitting knowledge. Third, the extent to which academic resources presently is used to buttress immoral social practice is revealed first, by the extent to which defense contracts make the universities engineers of the arms race. Too, the use of modern social science as a manipulative tool reveals itself in the "human relations" consultants to the modern corporation, who introduce trivial sops to give laborers feelings of "participation" or "belonging", while actually deluding them in order to further exploit their labor. And, of course, the use of motivational research is already infamous as a manipulative aspect of American politics. But these social uses of the universities' resources also demonstrate the unchangeable reliance by men of power on the men and storehouses of knowledge: this makes the university functionally tied to society in new ways, revealing new potentialities, new levers for change. Fourth, the university is the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.

These, at least, are facts, no matter how dull the teaching, how paternalistic the rules, how irrelevant the research that goes on. Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness

these together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.

1. Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.

2. A new left must be distributed in significant social roles throughout the country. The universities are distributed in such a manner.

3. A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the postwar world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger people. The university is an obvious beginning point.

4. A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system. The university is a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.

5. A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.

6. A new left must transform modern complexity into issues that can be understood and felt close-up by every human being. It must give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social and economic sources of their private troubles and organize to change society. In a time of supposed prosperity, moral complacency and political manipulation, a new left cannot rely on only aching stomachs to be the engine force of social reform. The case for change, for alternatives that will involve uncomfortable personal efforts, must be argued as never before. The university is a relevant place for all of these activities.

But we need not indulge in allusions: the university system cannot complete a movement of ordinary people making demands for a better life. From its schools and colleges across the nation, a militant left might awaken its allies, and by beginning the process towards peace, civil rights, and labor struggles, reinsert theory and idealism where too often reign confusion and political barter. The power of students and faculty united is not only potential; it has shown its actuality in the South, and in the reform movements of the North.

The bridge to political power, though, will be built through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people, and an awakening community of allies. In each community we must look within the university and act with confidence that we can be powerful, but we must look outwards to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice.

To turn these possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. They must make fraternal and functional contact with allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the campus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum -- research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life. They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.

As students, for a democratic society, we are committed to stimulating this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program is campus and community across the country. If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.

How Political Dissent Can Give Way to Hope

2011-09-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

AlterNet.org

WORLD

AlterNet / By Bruce E. Levine

How Anti-Authoritarians Can Transcend their Sense of Hopelessness and Fight Back

How can anti-authoritarian critical thinkers rise above their pessimism and really fight for change?

September 28, 2011 |

Critical thinking anti-authoritarians see the enormity of the military-industrial complex, the energy-industrial complex and the financial-industrial complex. They see the overwhelming power of the U.S. ruling class. They see many Americans unaware of the true sources of their oppression or with little knowledge of the strategies and tactics necessary to overcome it. They see American society lacking the psychological and cultural building blocks necessary for democratic movements—the self-respect required to reject the role as a mere subject of power, the collective self-confidence that success is possible, courage, determination, anti-authoritarianism, and solidarity. They see how the corporatocracy pays back those few Americans who do question, challenge, and resist illegitimate authority with economic and political marginalization.

Critical Thinking, Depression, and Political Passivity

Research shows that a more accurate notion of one’s powerlessness can result in a greater feeling of helplessness and is associated with depression. Several classic studies show that moderately depressed people are more critically thinking than those who are not depressed. Researchers Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, studying nondepressed and depressed subjects who played a rigged game in which they had no actual control, found that nondepressed subjects overestimated their contribution to winning, while depressed subjects more accurately evaluated their lack of control.

If you are critical thinking enough to see the reality of just how much influence the corporatocracy has and how little power you have, then you are going to experience more pain than those who do not see these truths. To dull this pain, in addition to drugs and other diversions, human beings use depression and apathy. But these “shutdown strategies” weaken us and create passivity, immobilization and what Bob Marley called “mental slavery,” which in itself can be humiliatingly painful. And in this vicious cycle, human beings use even more diversions and shutdown strategies to dull this ever-increasing pain.

When one is in such a debilitating vicious cycle, painful truths about the cause of one’s malaise—the truths of how we are getting screwed—are not positively energizing. Instead, one may take such truths as confirmation that pessimism and hopelessness are warranted. The vicious cycle continues.

When one is already in pain and immobilized, there is a reflexive negative reaction to any proposed solution. Solutions demand effort, and a demand for effort is painful for those with little energy. So, it’s much easier to reflexively dismiss any solution. Of course, many solutions do deserve to be dismissed, as they may well be naïve.

The feeling of hopelessness is a legitimate one. And hopeless people are turned off by attempts to invalidate their feelings. Is it possible to validate that feeling of hopelessness while at the same time challenging the wisdom of inactions based on hopelessness? And is it possible to challenge it in a way that doesn’t insult the intelligence of critical thinkers?

Critical Thinking about Critical Thinking

The battle against the corporatocracy demands critical thinking, which results in seeing many ugly truths about reality. This critical thinking is absolutely necessary. Without it, one is more likely to engage in tactics that can make matters worse. Critical thinking also means the ability to think critically about one’s pessimism—realizing that pessimism can cripple the will. Critical thinkers who reflect on their own critical thinking recognize how negativism can cause inaction, which results in maintaining the status quo.

Critical thinking anti-authoritarians who move into hopelessness can forget that while they may in fact be better at seeing ugly truths than are many other people, they cannot see everything. Simply put, critical thinkers sometimes lose their humility.

Abraham Lincoln, considered by many historians to be our most critical thinking president, was also a major depressive. When he was a young man, he became so depressed that twice his friends had to form suicide watches for him. In the 1850s in the United States, the major battle was less over abolishing slavery than merely stopping the spread of it. Lincoln, who fought politically to stop the spread of slavery, wrote in 1856 a pessimistic analysis of the North’s chances of winning this fight:

This immense, palpable pecuniary interest, on the question of extending slavery, unites the Southern people, as one man. But it can not be demonstrated that the North will gain a dollar by restricting it. Moral principle is all, or nearly all, that unites us of the North. Pity ’tis, it is so, but this is a looser bond, than pecuniary interest. Right here is the plain cause of their perfect union and our want of it.

That slavery would be abolished in the United States less than a decade after Lincoln’s pessimistic analysis of the difficulty of merely stopping its spread was one of those seeming impossibilities that became possible because of unforeseen historical events. In the North, there was certainly not enough concern for African Americans to result in the end of slavery. But less than a decade after Lincoln’s pessimistic analysis about merely stopping the spread of slavery, one unforeseen event after another resulted in the abolition of slavery.

There are many examples from history of seeming impossibilities actually happening, examples that compel critical thinkers to rethink whether they are actually seeing all the possibilities. One recent example is, of course, the Arab spring. Many critical thinkers from that part of the world remain amazed at the huge revolts in Egypt that toppled the Mubarak tyranny.

The collapse of the Soviet empire seemed impossible to most Americans up until shortly before it occurred. Most Americans saw only mass resignation within the Soviet Union and its sphere of control. But the shipyard workers in Gdansk, Poland, did not see their Soviet and Communist Party rulers as the all-powerful forces that Americans did. And so Polish workers’ Solidarity, by simply refusing to go away, provided a strong dose of morale across Eastern Europe at the same time other historical events—such as the Soviet Union’s Afghanistan war—weakened their empire.

Why Not Just Wait for the Collapse?

History tells us that not just the Soviet empire but all empires ultimately collapse, and so why not just wait for their fall? It is pretty safe to say that the U.S. military-industrial complex and other oppressive U.S. industrial complexes will ultimately fall. These may be transformed by our own efforts or, more likely—given Americans’ current state of political passivity—they will fall owing mostly under the weight of their own stupidity. So, if it is more likely that these will fall under the weight of their own stupidity, why bother with activism?

One reason for democratic movements is that history tells us that not all empires and oppressive institutions fall under the weight of their own stupidity, as some are transformed by a combination of democratic movements and empire stupidity.

There is another reason to work each day on the democracy battlefields at our workplace, schools, the media, the marketplace, etc. Whether an empire and its oppressive institutions fall under the weight of their own stupidity or with help from a democratic movement, there must be people around in the aftermath who have what it takes to create and maintain a democratic society. There must be people who have retained their individual self-respect, collective self-confidence, courage, determination, anti-authoritarianism, and solidarity.

The lesson from history is that tyrannical and dehumanizing institutions are often more fragile than they appear. We never really know until it happens whether or not we are living in that time when historical variables are creating opportunities for seemingly impossible change. Maybe in our lifetime, or our kids’ lifetime, or their kids’ lifetime, the current corporatocracy will fall. It may fall because of the efforts of democratic movements or because of its own stupidity or some combination.

But when it does fall, the likelihood that it will be replaced by an enduring democratic society rests on whether there are enough of us with practice in democracy, enough of us who took seriously the psychological and cultural building blocks of self-respect, collective self-confidence, courage, determination, anti-authoritarianism, and solidarity. And democratic movements are the best place to practice creating those psychological and cultural building blocks required for an enduring democracy.

That's why "Occupy Wall Street" makes sense, and that's why I will be at "October 2011" at Freedom Plaza, Washington D.C. beginning next Thursday, October 6.

>Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net.

Why Establishment Media & the Power Elite Loathe Occupy Wall Street

2011-09-28T09:42:00.000-07:00

The Dissenter

Why Establishment Media & the Power Elite Loathe Occupy Wall Street

By: Kevin Gosztola Tuesday September 27, 2011 12:22 pm

(photo: Collin David Anderson )

Over the past ten days, hundreds of people have occupied Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan in New York as part of Occupy Wall Street. Citizens have faced down a city that has fortified Wall Street with blockades so corporate criminals responsible for the economic collapse in 2008 can avoid confrontations with angry, passionate Americans.

Citizens have camped out and held daily marches in the face of a massive police presence, which has sometimes been very intimidating as individuals have been arbitrarily picked off and arrested. And last weekend, the police corralled them into an area near Union Square and proceeded to make a number of violent arrests; eighty to one hundred were arrested on Saturday.

The organizers, who pride themselves in being “leaderless,” have sought to bring together a diverse crowd of various political persuasions. They have rallied behind the slogan, “We are the 99%,” to show they will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the top 1% in America. They have rallied against banks that engage in tax dodging while at the same time foreclosing on Americans’ homes and charging exorbitant interest rates on student loans putting young citizens in deep debt. They are rising up against increased unemployment and war against the poor in America. And they have used what is known as the General Assembly process to make decisions, which democratically gives all people present an opportunity to influence the continued organization of Occupy Wall Street.

Traditional media have characterized the plurality of voices and the number of issues the occupation is seeking to challenge as a weakness. Establishment media has been openly condescending. Ginia Bellafante’s report in the New York Times has generated significant attention for her focus on the fact that some “half-naked woman” who looks like Joni Mitchell to her is the leader of this movement of “rightly frustrated young people.” Bellafante accuses the protesters of lacking “cohesion” and “pantomiming progressivism rather than practice it knowledgeably.” NPR reiterated NYT’s focus on the “scattered nature of the movement” in its coverage of the occupation (and tellingly used a photo of a man holding a sign that reads “Satan Controls Wall St”). Local press have treated the occupiers as if they are a tribe or a group of nomads focusing on occupiers’ behavior instead of trying to understand the real reason why people are in the park.

Liberals have shown scorn, too, suggesting the occupation is not a “Main Street production” or that the protesters aren’t dressed properly and should wear suits cause the civil rights movement would not have won if they hadn’t worn decent clothing.

(photo: David Shankbone )

The latest show of contempt from a liberal comes from Mother Jones magazine. Lauren Ellis claims that the action, which “says it stands for the 99 percent of us,” lacks traction. She outlines why she thinks Zuccotti Park isn’t America’s Tahrir Square. She chastises them for failing to have one demand. She claims without a unified message police brutality has stolen the spotlight. She suggests the presence of members of Anonymous is holding the organizers back writing, “It’s hard to be taken seriously as accountability-seeking populists when you’re donning Guy Fawkes masks.” And, she concludes as a result of failing to get a cross-section of America to come out in the streets, this movement has been for “dreamers,” not “middle class American trying to make ends meet.”

First off, nobody in the last week can claim to be reporting on Occupy Wall Street and genuinely claim it isn’t gaining traction. Ellis conveniently leaves out the fact that Occupy Wall Street is inspiring other cities to get organized and hold similar assemblies/occupations. Second, if the protesters did have one demand, does Ellis really think that would improve media coverage? Wouldn’t pundits then be casting doubt on whether the one demand was the appropriate singular demand to be making? Third, so-called members of Anonymous are citizens like Ellis and have a right to participate in the protest. It is elitist for Ellis to suggest Occupy Wall Street should not be all-inclusive. And, finally, there is no evidence that just “dreamers” are getting involved. A union at the City University of New York, the Industrial Workers of the World, construction workers, 9/11 responders and now a postal workers and teachers union have shown interest in the occupation.

The Middle Needs to Rise Up

Nothing captures the disapproval the establishment has for the people in Zuccotti Park like the conversation on “Real Time with Bill Maher” last Friday. Center-right establishment pundit John Avlon had nothing but a smug grin and atrocious centrist political talking points for musician Tom Morello and filmmaker Michael Moore. He and former Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman provided an example for why Americans are so frustrated with American politics:

Maher: You have to wonder what will make people rise up?

Avlon: I’ve been there. It’s a couple hundred [minimizing what is going on with a smirk]

Harman: The people in the political middle rise up and demand that people in Congress get some work done. Where are they?

Moore: How would you have them rise up? Write a letter to the editor?

Harman: No. They have a vote…

Moore: Uh-huh. And who do they vote for? Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dummer…

Harman: No, I think there are a lot of good people in Congress but it is a broken place.

Maher: If you mean like centrist Democrats, I think they’re the problem. Like the Democrats have 53 senators… Like forty of them are good but it’s people like Mary Landrieu—Jim Webb came out against Obama’s taxing the millionaires plan. It’s those centrist Democrats who are really corporatist Democrats, who work with the Republicans—That’s what cockblocks everything in this country.

Avlon shakes his head – couldn’t be more wrong he says

Harman: Working together is what Congress used to always be. We can disagree with each other but to get something done you have to work together…

Maher: Who works together? It’s those Max Baucus Democrats with the Republicans. That’s who works together.

Morello attempted to set people like Avlon and Harman straight:

Morello: …A lot of people who put [Obama] in office put [Obama] in office to fight for them—to fight against the Tea Party, to fight against this bullshit in Congress, to fight against the sonsofbitches who are attacking the working class and the poor in this country. And he hasn’t done any of that [Avlon wags finger at Morello, shakes head “no.”]

At the same time, I’m not waiting for him. I’m with the people in Madison. I’m with the people occupying Wall Street. That’s what my music is about. And I know Michael knows this too – when progressive, radical or even revolutionary changes happen, it’s always come from below. When women got the right to vote, when lunch counters were desegregated, it was people you do not read about in history books who stood up in their time for what they believed in.

Avlon: But, Tom, all these changes happen when good ideas are adopted by reformers. Politics is really not divided between left and right. It’s radicals and reactionaries and reformers and that’s why the center matters. We got a divided government. The only way you can get anything passed is if you try to reason together. That’s the core idea of our government. It’s broken down. The hyper-partisanship, the polarization of the two parties, that’s hurting our country because it’s stopping us from solving…

Avlon is an example of why many Americans do not support Occupy Wall Street. They understand that Occupy Wall Street wants to have an impact on the system and force the system to respond to the occupation’s demands, but they see protesters do not want to work within the system and lobby members of Congress and sign petitions and find out what piecemeal reforms representatives and senators think they can manage to deliver without jeopardizing their re-election campaigns. They are afraid of people power or “too much democracy.”

Managers of Democracy First, Citizens After

(photo: Screen shot of “Real Time with Bill Maher” )

People like Avlon and Harman fear people power or acts of rebellion because they choose to be managers of democracy rather than citizens. And, actually, media and the elites aren’t the only ones who think like this. Numerous politically engaged Americans operate like managers of democracy in America because they believe “purism” on issues will create gridlock and prevent anything from being done. They despise making urgent demands of power because they believe Washington is only and has only ever been capable of incremental reform. To them, making demands and refusing to budge places an unacceptable burden on President Obama and legislators.

Demonstrations are demeaned because everything is supposed to come back to the political process. The truth is, corporate executives and business managers are and have been constantly protesting. They just do it in the halls of power instead of in public squares.

Corporate executives, business managers and free market ideologues have worked to avert any changes to the status quo. They have aggressively turned opportunities for change into chances to leverage power over government so they can reap huge financial or monetary advantages in the long run; for example, the watered-down financial and health reform bills.

The Myth of the American Dream

Compounding the contempt for grassroots struggle in America is the unwavering confidence in the myth known as the American Dream. The American Dream rests upon the idea that all Americans can prosper if they try hard enough. In its most perverted form, it cons Americans into believing they could not only prosper but be rich one day. This was discussed on “Real Time w/ Bill Maher” Friday night too.

MAHER: Do [Americans] really think everyone can be rich? How can that really work? Who would do the things for rich people that allow them to be rich people if we are all rich?

MOORE: 400 Americans have more wealth than 150 million combined

HARMAN: I don’t think we can all be rich. I agree with that. But look at who is rich and how young people who are colossally inventive can become the billionaires?

MAHER: So anecdotal.

HARMAN: Have polices that promote innovation and enterprise in this country.

AVLON: This is part of the American character. Right, this is the idea. It’s not just anecdotal. It’s Google. It’s the guys behind Google. There’s dozens and dozens and hundreds — This is the story of America. There are two things going on here. One, eighty percent of Americans always think they are middle class and that’s a good thing. The problem is we have seen the middle class get squeezed for around four decades now. And the average CEO’s salary is around $9.6 million while the average family of four still makes 50 [thousand?] …

Avlon concludes, “You can’t dismiss the idea of the American Dream because people live it every day and that’s what animates our country.” But, as Moore responded, “That dream is a nightmare for most people” these days.

Progressive leader Van Jones has kickstarted a movement called Rebuilding the American Dream. The movement aims to stand up to right wing attacks on unions and the middle class in America. It is a feel good movement and also politically safe. It gives upset Americans the opportunity to get involved in a well-organized advocacy venture that is likely to work with power. The more people who get involved in advocating for changes, the more people who elect representatives in city, state and federal government, the more likely America is to see the American Dream “restored.”

No person participating in Occupy Wall Street will talk about some mythical American Dream that has been held over Americans to pacify them. They understand this country has owners and like comedian George Carlin said there is a club and they “ain’t in it.” They are out planting the seeds of rebellion and for many it is either annoying because they think it will divert and suck off too much energy and fail or, worse, lead to a confrontation that sparks riots.

They Fear Encouraging Occupy Wall Street Will Lead to Riots

Here is how CNBC covered the history of “civil unrest” or protest in America earlier this year:

On January 25, 2011, the people of Egypt took to the streets in unprecedented numbers to protest the government of President Hosni Mubarak, who has kept the nation under a state of emergency for three decades. The riots have continued unabated into the month of February, and it’s anybody’s guess when the disorder will end.

The United States has endured its share of civil unrest as well. Some riots have been carefully planned in advance to protest government policies, and some have begun spontaneously in communities plagued by poverty and unemployment. But while riots start for many different reasons, they usually end the same way, with mass arrests, loss of life and damage to public and private property.

(photo: David Shankbone )

To establishment media and the power elite, Occupy Wall Street can only be ineffective or destructive. CNBC has nothing but scorn for the Arab Spring. CNBC and other media organizations care little about the “moral imperative to fight,” as writer and journalist Chris Hedges puts it. They do not see the consciousness of America awakening as a positive development because it will put additional pressure on government. They see Occupy Wall Street as a movement exacerbating political polarization in America, which is why they advocate for mobilizing people in “the middle.” They want to see disgruntled Americans demobilize and channel their energy into more controlled arenas like electoral politics.

“Power Elite Will Define Whatever You Do as Failure”

Hedges has cautioned occupiers, “The power elite will define whatever you do as failure.” The future of Occupy Wall Street and any future act of rebellion or resistance to economic, political and social injustice depend on understanding this truth.

The growing threat to power Occupy Wall Street poses does not rest upon its critique of the financial system or its ability to show the world how the security state of America squelches dissent. It lies in its ability to convince Americans that people have the power, that if they abandon fear and cynicism and step out into the streets they will find community and hope.

The power of Occupy Wall Street is, as Hedges also said, the movement’s ability to “break the kind of atomization or isolation that enables fear.” It is the ability “to endure frightening situations and know someone is standing next to you” and be around people, who have “empathy toward you,” that will create the kind of rebellion in America necessary to challenge the power of Wall Street and other corporate and special interests putting not just this country but the entire planet at risk.

Criticism of Occupy Wall Street is just a way for establishment media, the power elite and those who believe in their views to defend their ideology on how politics is supposed to work. It is their way of affirming their conviction that at some point the children need to leave the streets and the grown-ups must be allowed to work in peace. It is also part of the culture; expressing support for “hippies” or a “plurality of voices” preaching against capitalism will not win friends and influence people in the Beltway. And so, they will make criticisms whether there is evidence to support what is said or written.

(photo: David Shankbone )

So, move forward and let the elites and establishment media come to the realization that the people outnumber them and they are on the wrong side of history. Instead, remember the words of the late people’s historian Howard Zinn:

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future.

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

The Meaning and Importance of Dissent

2011-09-27T16:52:00.000-07:00

AlterNet.org

ACTIVISM & VISION

AlterNet / By Michael Ratner and Margaret Ratner Kunstler

The Meaning and Importance of Dissent

In their new book, Ratner and Ratner Kunstler discuss Americans' right to protest -- and how those rights are often trampled on by the U.S. government.

September 26, 2011 |

The following is an excerpt from Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in Twenty-First Century America by Michael Ratner and Margaret Ratner Kunstler, published this spring by the New Press.

Many of us think of the constitutionally protected right to dissent as the right to speak our minds and write and publish what we think. But free speech is only one of three related rights protected by the First Amendment. Not only is Congress prohibited from passing a law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” the amendment also protects “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” and their right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Taken together, the right to free speech, the right of assembly, and the explicit right to express grievances to the government add up to an expansive right to “dissent” enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Beyond written or spoken words, the right to dissent is the right of citizens to organize themselves, to associate, to make themselves heard in order to achieve political and social change and oppose government policies without fear of impediment or reprisal.

Despite these clear protections, the government has not always lived up to its constitutionally required mandate to protect our right to dissent. Indeed, it is this right that the government, whether federal, state, or local, has typically targeted for repression, especially in times of claimed “emergencies.” That has been true historically and it is true today. Often, federal agencies and state and city governments, at times of both war and relative quiescence, try through surveillance, infiltration, and limits on protest to suppress dissent. Most of these repressive efforts have ultimately been beaten back, but not before people were jailed, and often not until the effects of the claimed “emergency” that purportedly justified the restrictions had dissipated.

Since the founding of this nation, the government has made many efforts to restrict free speech and dissent. The list on page 8 is a cursory overview of major turning points in the history of attacks on dissent. The rest of this chapter provides a more in-depth look at the continued assault on our right to dissent over the past fifty years, with a special focus on the new post–9/11 legal framework.

It is important to note that government measures limiting organized dissent have become increasingly common in our society since the terrorist attacks of 2001. These assaults upon and criminalization of dissent—from the surveillance of activists to the federalization of local law enforcement to the labeling of activists as “terrorists”—dismantle piece by piece a core right considered essential to meaningful democracy. Understanding the evisceration of this right is a first step to regaining our lost liberties.

Bringing About Political and Social Change

Free speech is a bedrock principle of our nation. The Framers believed that open and unfettered discussion would promote better thinking and decisions, particularly important when it came to government policies. The Supreme Court stated in 1964 in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, a seminal case on modern-day dissent:

The general proposition that freedom of expression upon public questions is secured by the First Amendment has long been settled by our decisions. The constitutional safeguard, we have said, “was fashioned to assure unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people.”

This “unfettered interchange of ideas” on public issues, according to Sullivan, must be “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open . . . [and] it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

Clearly, the lone speaker standing on a soapbox in Times Square or the odd local newspaper article opposing a war will generally not lead to change in government policy. It has always been understood that the right to speak freely is not sufficient without the ability to make that speech effectively reach a meaningful audience. That is why other related rights are included in the First Amendment. Congress was prohibited from abridging the right to demonstrate (“people peaceably to assemble”) and from interfering with the right to petition and lobby government officials (“petition the Government for a redress of grievances”). Implicit in the rights to assemble and petition is the right to freedom of association—the right to join together with others to advocate for change. The Supreme Court has recognized this right of association as a critical part of First Amendment protections.

While not literally protected by the First Amendment, civil disobedience and passive resistance fall within its broad ambit. They are often found to be effective expressions of political dissent because such tactics are a source of organizational solidarity and attract wider media attention. For people without the means to purchase airtime or newspaper space, organized protest offers a chance to “speak with their bodies” and collectively to make themselves heard.

Protesters typically break the law in insubstantial, generally nonviolent ways while making clear that their technically illegal actions seek to bring about change in policies or practices that are much more harmful than these actions. Such minor violations of law have a long and honorable history in this country. Thousands of activists engaged in civil disobedience in the South to break the Jim Crow laws. Hundreds today engage in civil disobedience protesting the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, torture, draconian immigration laws, and Appalachian mountaintop removal.

Sometimes, however, these minor violations are dealt with severely so as to discourage effective protest. We saw this in the South with mass arrests and jailings meted out to Dr. King and others. We are seeing it today with special laws that treat acts of civil disobedience as terrorism and single out environmentalists for especially harsh sentences. Such repression is never about the nature of the legal violations; it is always about discouraging vigorous dissent and protecting governmental and corporate interests.

Other amendments in our Constitution also ensure that these speech protections can be used effectively. The Fourth Amendment ensures that our persons, homes, and places of work are not searched without good reason (searching homes and offices for evidence of dissent is one way governments have historically tried to impede free speech) and that our various forms of communications are protected from unwarranted surveillance. The Fifth Amendment guarantees us due process of law before we can be imprisoned or held liable and is designed in part to stop government from using imprisonment as a means of suppressing potential dissent.

Even a cursory look at struggles for progressive social change in America reveals the wisdom of viewing the First Amendment in the context of protecting direct advocacy of social and political change. Often change has occurred only when free speech is taken to the streets, when thousands and eventually millions of people force their demands upon the government and compel the government to act and to change. That is how women gained the right to vote, labor won the 40-hour workweek and the right to unionize, the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s overcame the segregation policies of Jim Crow, protesters helped bring an end to the Vietnam War, and millions in the United States and around the world tried to prevent the 2003 Iraq war. That is why today immigrants and their supporters are marching in demand of immigration reform.

There are some who believed that the access to information provided by the Internet would provide a new force for change—that the democratization of information sharing would provide a new means of association and organization by which to foster political and social change. While access to the Internet has allowed countless voices to speak, the very proliferation of voices means that few are heard by large numbers of people. Neither does the Internet alone provide the real social connectedness needed for political organization. A YouTube video or a blog post can certainly spark action, but as we saw throughout North Africa, change comes about when people take to the streets.

Protests, while often having an element of spontaneity, need organization to be effective. This organizing often begins with small activist groups who believe that protest against unjust policies and practices is a necessity, and that activism in support of just and moral policies is an obligation. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and other activist organizations led civil rights protests in the South; the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (a coalition of many groups) led protests against that war; ACT UP organized to draw attention to our government’s failure to respond to the AIDS crisis; dozens of groups concerned by the draconian 2010 anti-immigration law in Arizona protested in almost 50 cities against that law. These groups formed and were able to function because the First Amendment forbids the government from interfering with their right of association. Too often, however, the history books omit that, at the time these protests occurred, they met strong, even violent resistance from the government and parts of the public.

Disabling Democracy: The Attack on Dissent in America

The U.S. government has regularly sought to suppress movements for social change that challenge the status quo, the hierarchy of power, and the impunity of corporations. This suppression has waxed and waned based on various factors, including the strength and popularity of such movements. Despite the widespread heralding of First Amendment rights, U.S. history includes numerous examples of government authorities using surveillance, spying, wiretapping, infiltration, entrapment, criminal prosecutions, and even extrajudicial homicide to try to suppress dissent and its public expression. The targeting of movements, organizations, and individuals seeking social and political change has taken many forms, including denying demonstrators permits, restricting demonstration sites, controlling the media, and harassing participants, often involving tax audits and character assassination. Historically the government has used both legal means such as search warrants, grand jury subpoenas, indictments, and trials as well as illegal means such as infiltration and entrapment to hinder, if not destroy, its opponents.

--The Sedition Act (1798) (allowed to expire in 1801, but considered unconstitutional by later courts) made it a crime to criticize the government.

--The Espionage Act (1917) made it a crime to incite disloyalty or advocate against military recruitment. Courts have since cast doubt on the constitutionality of its speech provisions.

--The anticommunist Palmer Raids (1919) combined executive action with legislation to crack down on and deport radical leftists and immigrants, actions subsequently revoked by the secretary of labor.

--The Special Committee on Un‑American Activities (1934), which later became the House Un‑American Activities Committee (HUAC), was a congressional committee devoted to investigating political thought that subsequently imprisoned people who refused to answer questions about their political affiliations.

--The preventive internment of more than 120,000 Japanese citizens and residents during World War II exemplified wartime excesses in racial profiling, preventive detention, and violation of civil liberties. It was later ruled by the Supreme Court to be unjustified.

--COINTELPRO (1950s–1970s), the FBI’s secret intelligence program, illegally targeted various individuals and groups including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, Daniel Ellsberg, and many others in the name of monitoring potential “threats.”

--The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (1996) created a new category of prohibited activity: “material support” to groups designated by the State Department to be Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), including a range of groups sharing a common opposition to U.S. foreign policy. Enacted in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, this act contained little to no content relevant to the circumstances that produced it.

--The USA PATRIOT Act (2001), containing laws of questionable constitutionality, expands government surveillance powers, erodes the right to habeas corpus, formalizes the use of military tribunals rather than courts in the judicial branch, and allows the use of coerced testimony and torture as part of military prosecution techniques. Under this act, much of what has been traditionally considered standard civil disobedience is now viewed as terrorism.

--The TALON databases (2003), part of the increased federalization of local law enforcement, were purportedly set up by the Defense Department to monitor potential threats to the department’s quarters within the United States. However, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, lawsuits, and media coverage have shown that the Defense Department went well beyond its stated mission, executing sweeping surveillance of a wide variety of peaceful political activities and meetings rather than adhering to the mandate to collect information on an alleged “threat” and judge it to be either “credible” or “not credible.”

--The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (2006) amends the Animal Enterprise Protection Act by increasing the penalties for activities that disrupt the business of companies that exploit and abuse animals, and broadens the scope of businesses that the law protects. The law deters protests, leafleting, boycotts, and joining animal rights organizations by using broad language that induces fear of being labeled a “terrorist,” and federalizes penalties for civil disobedience–type actions that were previously classified as minor crimes and prosecuted under state law.

Michael Ratner is president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Margaret Ratner Kunstler originated the Movement Support Network as the education director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Currently an attorney in private practice in New York City, Kunstler is the president of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice.

Dissent in Theory & Practice: Mass Democracy Works Against Dissent, Individuals

2011-09-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

Dissent in Theory & Practice: Mass Democracy Works Against Dissent, Individuals

Tocqueville Described Mass Tyranny By Social Conformity Against Dissenters

By Austin Cline, About.com Guide

See More About:

Alexis de Tocqueville's writings about early American social and political life are popular in America, but his criticisms are ignored. One problem which Tocqueville saw and which which atheists should be able to relate to is how dissenters are silenced through a culture of fear. Tocqueville focused on political dissent, but what he wrote is true about religious dissent, too. Popular religion in America even today demands deference and submission, making dissent and criticism difficult.

In Fear: The History of a Political Idea, Corey Robin writes:

Tocqueville identified anxiety as a political problem that could be resolved by political means: anxiety was the political weapon of a tyrannical majority, which drew its power from law, ideology, and institutions, and subjected minority dissenters to the threat of ostracism. How to fend off this tyrannical majority? By dividing and decentralizing political power, and by encouraging participatory and local organizations, which would put less power at the majority’s disposal, and more at the dissenters’. This wasn’t an altogether happy picture, but it did hold out the possibility that if political power were fragmented, freedom might thrive and anxiety diminish. [emphasis added]

Fragmented power creates room for individual liberty. In government, the separation of powers is supposed to prevent any one branch or department from acquiring enough power to infringe on popular liberty. The same holds for religious liberty: the more religious power is distributed through society, the easier it is to dissent from any one religion or even from all religions.

We see this in how religious pluralism undermines traditional Christian privileges. America is being de-Christianized because other religions insist on equality; in the process, the power of Christian institutions, beliefs, and leaders drops. Unfortunately, making room for liberty doesn't mean everyone takes advantage of it:

But even in the first volume, Tocqueville’s analysis contained a corrosive subtext: the individual conformed not because of any distribution of power, not because of laws, ideology, and institutions, but because he was too weak, psychologically, to insist upon his freedom. In the second volume, published in 1840, this weak psyche metastasized into an entire culture, beyond politics and power, almost beyond hope. With his desperate emotional need to belong, the modem, democratic self did not have to be actively frightened into submission: he was already anxious by virtue of his inability to stand on his own, already prepared, with no encouragement, to hand over his freedom.

While in the first volume laws, ideology, and institutions helped create a culture of quiescence, the second was dominated by a darker vision, where political solutions were almost helpless against a preexisting culture of loneliness. The second volume represented more than a simple change of focus. It was a wholesale rejection of the first, which Tocqueville had come to believe was “distorted, common, and false,” offering in its place “the true and original Picture” of modem life.

Few are aware of Tocqueville strong criticisms of democracy and rejection of many of his optimistic views. Even fewer would likely agree with Tocqueville’s complaints, but he makes valid points and many are similar to 20th century Marxist critiques of liberal democracy.

The tyrannical mass, Tocqueville believed, represented a new kind of political animal, brandishing new instruments. It did not wield the “clumsy weapons of chains and hangmen.” Instead, it roamed about the land, arranging a dull sameness through sentiments. The new agent of fear was a majority wielding power not through traditional offices or weapons of state, but through the social mechanisms of popular opinion and common belief. [...]

Just as the foundation of the majority’s power was political, so were the weapons it wielded against dissenters. The majority threatened dissenters not with physical violence or prison but with isolation, telling those who challenged it, “You are a stranger among us.” It did not deprive dissenters of their rights; through ostracism, it made those rights ineffective. In democracies like the United States, Tocqueville believed, exercising power depended upon the cooperation of like-minded men and women.

Without the ability to talk to fellow citizens, the dissenter was politically crippled, incapable of advancing his goals. “You can keep your privileges in the township,” the majority would declare to the dissenter, “but they will be useless to you, for if you solicit your fellow citizens’ votes, they will not give them to you, and if you only ask for their esteem, they will make excuses for refusing that.” The dissenter’s potential allies were well aware that if they joined him, they too would face isolation and be equally crippled, and so they kept their distance from him.

Once again, this is about political dissenters but the words also apply to religious dissenters — and especially atheists, though for us sometimes the threats of physical violence do exist. This is an argument for why atheists should organize: individual dissenters may be denied access to popular government, but not if enough of them get together and support each other.

The desire to conform is probably less a function of mass democracy than a natural function of the human species. We are social animals, after all, and social cohesion made survival easier as we evolved. Lone dissenters are more likely to die out in the bush; strongly connected social groups that work together and sacrifice for each other are more likely to survive and thrive.

It might be fair to say liberal democracy takes advantage of what's already inherent in the human species: achieving greater conformity not through outside force, but through an internal desire to be liked, to belong, and not to stand out. That we have these desires seems indisputable, so the question is how liberal democracies can overcome them. Perhaps we need institutions or procedures to ensure that dissent and liberty are not just theoretically possible, but positively supported.

Austin Cline
Agnosticism / Atheism Guide

Sign up for My Newsletter

Who's Your Psychopath? (I mean "Husband", or "Daddy".)

2011-09-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

A Radical Profeminist

This blog exists to challenge white heterosexual male supremacy as an institutionalized ideology and a systematized set of practices which are misogynistic, heterosexist, racist, genocidal, and ecocidal.

Who's Your Psychopath? (I mean "Husband", or "Daddy".)

I'm not sure about using a term like "psychopath aggressors" (see below) when being aggressive is normally encouraged among men, and when being dangerous isn't all that unusual. "Psychopath" generally means someone who significantly deviates from the norm. Given that the norm for men is to be oppressive, controlling, and abusive to women, how can being an abusive husband or father be called "psychopathic"? The terms of mental illness are used in courts and classrooms, in media and by the military, to not name what's really going on. This is to say, the problem, socially, isn't that some men are mentally ill. It's that they've been socialized to be men and feel entitled to exercise power they have structurally, positionally, in many social hierarchies that aren't at all "psychological". And, some men are, clinically speaking, psychopaths. But who gets clinically diagnosed? Very few people. Among the population of people who have access to mental health care, or whatever it's erroneously called, more women than men are likely to seek out support with mental health issues, not getting to speak with anyone who will validate that the personal-social roots of being aggressed against by men, of being terrorized by men, or of having post-traumatic stress due to invasions and violations by men, are normal while atrocious. Which means more women than men will be diagnosed with mental illness. With all that said, please read on. I don't have an online link to it as it is an offline document.

THE TACTICS AND PLOYS OF PSYCHOPATH AGGRESSORS IN THE FAMILY LAW SYSTEM

In the twenty years I have been advising parents, children, and their legal advisers in several hundred cases in Family Law matters, I have often been asked, “Why is it that children are so often ordered to have contact with, and even into the custody of, parents who have abused them and have perpetrated violence against their partners.”

The answer to this question is not simple and involves an examination of the requirements of Family Laws which stress the importance of children having both parents in their lives after parental separation, the dynamics of legal processes, and the often very clear gender biases of the principals involved in judicial processes.

But one of the most outstanding and consistent features of proceedings involving the care of children post-separation are the conduct and behaviours which can be identified as clearly fitting the definitions of psychopathy/sociopathy.

The major personality traits of the psychopath are supremacy and narcissism. The afflicted individual must be in complete control of their environment and all persons who are a part of that environment or can serve the psychopaths purposes in maintaining control.

The psychopath is capable of using both physical aggression and passive aggression with cunning and guile, to achieve their goals of exerting control. Examples of such contrary behaviours are the aggressive violence against an intimate partner, with the frequent inherent abuse of children, and to groom friends, relatives, and professionals into believing they are harmless and indeed a very stable and friendly person. If thwarted in attaining these goals however, the passive can quickly turn into the aggressive.

In furtherance of these traits, the major tactics and ploys of the psychopath are:
1. Denial of wrongdoings in the face of clear evidence;
2. Refusal to take responsibility for behaviours and actions;
3. Minimise the incident and consequences;
4. Blame others;
5. Misrepresent, fabricate, embellish, and distort information and evidence;
6. Minimise all information and evidence regarding wrongdoing;
7. Claim victim status alleging the victim was the aggressor;
8. Project their own actions and behaviour onto the victim; e.g. she abuses/neglects the children/ she is an alcoholic or drug abuser. This is based on the belief by the psychopath that attack is the best form of defence.

The `Grooming’ of friends, relatives, and professionals is very clear in many cases and in particular how some psychiatrists, psychologists, Family Evaluators/Reporters have been hoodwinked by such tactics and ploys by the psychopathic individual. Their reports of course favouring the psychopath have very considerable influence on the Courts and their determinations. Very often clear evidence of intimate partner violence such as convictions, Domestic Violence Orders, Apprehended Violence Orders and Restraining orders against the psychopathic aggressor and medical evidence of injuries suffered by the adult and child victims are ignored or dismissed as irrelevant by such professionals.

Such professionals now refer to such cases as `High Conflict’ cases when it is clear that they are situations of a violent Aggressor/Tormentor/Persecutor and their victims. It is easy to see how the cases in Austria and America where young girls were imprisoned for many years by controlling individuals and regularly abused in several ways were undetected, when the aggressors /persecutors / tormentors were able to convince their family members, relatives, and associates that they were reasonable, normal people. The same often occurs in other cases of violence and murder where neighbours report that the accused murderer is a `nice and friendly neighbour’. They do not recognise the Jekyll and Hyde aspects of the psychopath’s ploys and tactics and those they have effectively groomed in their beliefs.

The `High Conflict’ which usually occurs in such cases is most commonly engendered by the respective lawyers, conditioned by operating in an adversarial process and arena, and whose own major goal is to `win’, whatever may be the justness and fairness of the result.

It is not difficult to see therefore how the psychopath is able to readily gain the sympathy and support of some of the professionals engaged in the Family Law system and for them to abandon and forfeit their professional objectivity and impartiality in such circumstances. In `Blaming others’ the psychopath will allege the former partner is mentally ill and in some cases the former partner may be suffering a Complex Post Traumatic Disorder after suffering years of physical, mental, and sexual abuse and violence. This is often misinterpreted and misdiagnoses a Borderline Personality Disorder or similar psychiatric term. In effect it is a classic `Blame the victim’ scenario.

The groomed professionals then enable the psychopath to achieve their primary objective which is to maintain power and control over their victims, their former partner and children. It is an act of vengeance and spite but mostly it is to maintain the power and control and feelings of supremacism and narcissism. “I am faultless and flawless and in control of my whole environment” are the unvoiced cravings of the psychopath, and “I can continue to inflict my tortures on my victims with impunity” are the psychopaths continuing behaviours.

The Family Law and their Shared Parenting provisions and its administration by the Family Courts have become ready enablers for the psychopath.

Charles Pragnell
Independent Advocate for Children and Families
18/02/2010.

The Perfect Storm of Whistleblowing -- Our Duty, Our Dilemma

2011-09-22T18:05:00.000-07:00

September 21, 2011 at 22:02:54

The Perfect Storm of Whistleblowing -- Our Duty, Our Dilemma

2011 Washington Whistleblower Assembly

- A Conference for Accountability -

19 September 2011

Thomas Drake - Keynote

"No tyranny is more cruel than that which is practiced in the shadow of the law and with the trappings of justice: that is, one would drown the unfortunate by the very plank by which he would hope to be saved." - Montesquieu

Today we assemble together at the center of a perfect storm for whistleblowing - defined by our conscience of duty to speak out while challenged by the real dilemma of making our world and our welfare a better place -- by placing at great risk our own personal and professional well-being.

I also stand here in front of you and speak before you to sound the alarm and ring the warning bell regarding what power and politics will attempt to do in this country against a whistleblower and a government simply willing to grant itself a license to violate the central liberties and civil rights I took an oath to defend as a public servant four times in my government career -- twice in the military, at the CIA and then the NSA.

We face both enormous challenges to prevail as individual whistleblowers, as well as real opportunities as a whistleblowing community through enhanced law, ethics, public outreach, advocacy and reform because whistleblowers are now needed more than ever.

The paradox is that we truly inhabit a whistleblowing rich environment while facing truly great and persistent perils when exposing and disclosing malfeasance, corruption, and wrongdoing in the workplace.

Our perfect storm is created by the nexus of power and politics in the halls and shadows of government, within our private and public institutions, the corporate executive suites, and the company boardrooms -- where secrecy and withholding are often the order of the day in doing business, while openness and transparency are considered anathema and increasingly a threat to the status quo.

And yet by the very inherent nature of whistleblowing our protection and our security are most often violated by the very institutions we serve. Our daily dilemma is quite palpable. The conflict we face and its consequences are all too real. What takes priority? Blowing the whistle on corruption, cronyism, and the ills and wrongs of the status quo, or just remaining silent - letting loyalty and obeisance to the company and institution preserve one's job, one's career and one's security?
Let me just say it - whistleblower protection is all too shallow and mostly a house of cards.

There is no alternative to silence.

Yet let there also be no misunderstanding. The current challenges we face as a whistleblower community are unprecedented in a climate increasingly characterized by fear, intimidation, retribution, reprisal and retaliation.
Back in 2002, whistleblowers in the persons of Worldcom's Cynthia Copper, Enron's Sherron Watkins and FBI's Coleen Rowley were lauded and made the People of the Year for Time magazine. Almost a decade later whistleblowers are now pasted on the wanted posters by the federal government.
Our circumstances raise a most troubling question - Are we as whistleblowers individually and collectively becoming an increasingly endangered species?

We hear of the egregious public cases, but there are many more cases that never make the press or see the light of day. How many other whistleblowers suffer in silence, have no voice, and pay their own very tragic personal and professional price -- sacrificing career over conscience with little or no support?

We need to ask of ourselves the hard question - Is past the prologue - in the present campaign of pursuing, punishing, persecuting and prosecuting whistleblowers - becoming the most troubling future norm?

One most disturbing trend is the federal government's truly unprecedented war on whistleblowers.

For example, whistleblowers in the government increasingly face prosecution (or worse), with little or no protection -- even under existing laws - laws that clearly come up way short - hollow means that often expose whistleblowers to the very things they disclose!

Increasingly whistleblowers experience persecution and isolation.

The alternative of silence and the reality of whistleblowing in the face of very stiff headwinds, powered by raw intimidation and suppression, are completely unacceptable.

And yet we must also understand as a whistleblower community the clear political and personal ramifications and consequences of having information and knowledge that rises to the level of whistleblowing and doing what is right individually while protecting and defending the rights of whistleblowers as a focused community - and also ensuring that new whistleblower laws have real teeth and are not only passed but enforced.

Alignment is critical. We must categorically stand together united - dedicated to fully protecting, preserving and defending our very own future well-being as whistleblowers in the face of those who would silence and suppress us.

My own recent and successfully concluded case in prevailing against a multi-year, multi-million Department of Justice criminal investigation, prosecution and Espionage Act indictment against me, is direct evidence of an out of control and 'off the books' government that is increasingly alien to the Constitution. The rise in this form of a contrary government assuming the shape of a national security state under surveillance evidences the all too distinct and historically familiar characteristics of an alarming "soft tyranny' and is anathema to democracy and our Constitutional Republic - or what's left of it.

Whistleblowers in this toxic and culturally caustic environment are truly at great risk.

One could make the case that the government choosing to make myself (and others) targets -- as part of a much broader campaign against whistleblowers out of malicious reprisal and retribution for standing up against government malfeasance, the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-surveillance complex, and just plain wrongdoing -- sends the strongest possible message about what the government can and will do when one speaks truth to power - a direct form of political repression and censorship.

The government wanted to take my whistleblower voice away simply because of what I knew and reasonably believed was evidence of violations of law, statute and regulation; gross mismanagement; gross waste of funds; abuse of management control authority; and actions on the part of government that I believed were fundamentally endangering our national security, while putting our country at additional, but unnecessary risk.

I had followed all the rules until it fundamentally conflicted with the primacy of my oath to defend the Constitution and became civilly disobedient administratively. However, as a result of the government's April 2010 indictment against me after a multi-year, multi-million dollar Department of Justice "leak' investigation, I became an enemy of the state and a high value target charged under the Espionage Act by my very own government wanting to put me away for decades in prison.
However, the real purpose of the raids by the FBI and the prosecutorial actions of the DoJ against myself and others serves to punish whistleblowers who would attempt to disclose shocking and embarrassing truths, regarding corruption, malfeasance, contract fraud and illegalities committed by the U.S. Government. The other purpose is to warn and otherwise intimidate current and future employees who would seek to expose wrongdoing in our governmental institutions.
In the absence of meaningful whistleblower legislation, and in the wake of some of the most ineffective congressional oversight in the history of our Nation, the American public may never know what their government is doing or has wrought, were it not for whistleblowers.

And if Americans truly knew the extent to which the federal government and the national security state have turned this country inside out with respect to electronic surveillance for the purposes of increasingly targeting and tracking anybody at anytime, it is not a stretch to imagine the power the government holds over us in secret.

At its core the government has criminalized whistleblowing through the abject misuse and abuse of power.

If sharing issues of significant and grave public concern - that do not in any way compromise our national security - are now considered a criminal act under the 1st Amendment, we have seen not only the continuing destruction of the Constitution by our own government, but also the attempt to suppress freedom of thought, free speech, and association.

It is pure sophistry to argue that the government can and should willfully operate with secret impunity and immunity - even when unlawful - from those it is Constitutionally bound to serve and protect, when duty bound to provide for the common defense and the general welfare of the Nation, and then prosecutes those who reveal their misdeeds and wrongdoing that violate that very duty.

The American Revolution was largely sparked by colonial outrage over the Alien and Sedition Acts and the restrictions on press and assembly with others, as well as arbitrary writs that granted access to people's homes and property by fiat and not through cause.

Do we really want the government suppressing frees speech protected under the 1 st Amendment while violating our 4 th Amendment rights that protect our homes, papers and other personal effects and information from unlawful search and seizure -- even electronically - without probable cause of disloyalty or illegality?

Is this how our democracy begins to die? Is this the country we now wish to keep?

Reminds me of the 1975 spy thriller movie - "Three Days of the Condor" starring Faye Dunaway, Robert Redford and recently deceased Cliff Robertson. Like Joe Turner (the analyst in the movie played by Redford), I found myself in grave danger because I blew the whistle on contract fraud, government officials selling out national security for institutional self-interest, and collusion involving the NSA and the White House at the highest levels to bypass the Constitution and turn the US into a surveillance nation.

Speaking of Hollywood -- Did you know that Cliff Robertson was exiled from acting for some four years because he blew the whistle and exposed a studio head forging checks?

And that Senator Smith in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" also clearly became a whistleblower against the collusion and corruption of special interests and the senior Senator from his own state that wanted to ram through Congress a "deficiency bill" that included a sweetheart deal for a special land swindle project involving payoffs and a dam that would flood Willet Creek, the very place where Mr. Smith wanted to create a national boys' camp?

Let's now take ourselves to the very beginning of the history US -- back to the future.

Important to note that this country has been there before when it comes to whistleblowing. And yet this tension between protecting true national security secrets and ensuring the public's "right to know" about abuses of authority is not new. Indeed, the nation's founders faced this very issue.

During the Revolutionary War, a few whistleblowers took a huge risk and petitioned the Continental Congress with direct evidence that the commander of the Continental Navy, a Commodore Hopkins, had participated in the torture of captured British sailors. Hopkins was quite powerful and very well connected - his brother was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

No surprise, but Hopkins retaliated with extreme prejudice -- filing a criminal libel suit against the whistleblowers -- all military - and they were arrested and put in jail for what they later said was "doing what they then believed and still believe was nothing but their duty."

The Continental Congress voted to remove Hopkins from his post and in the summer of 1778 passed into law this country's first whistleblower protection and I quote: "That it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge."

This law also provided the whistleblowers with legal counsel to fight criminal charges and even authorized payment for all the legal fees they incurred dealing with Hopkins!

Remember - the country was at war. And yet remarkably, Congress did not hide behind claims of government secrecy or invoking any executive "state secrets" privilege. In actual fact, Congress also authorized the release of all records dealing with the removal of Hopkins. Furthermore, the whistleblowers didn't have to use a Freedom of Information Act to release all of the exculpatory documents that vindicated their whistleblowing, or even keep away from the public the fact that Hopkins had tortured and abused and severely mistreated British prisoners of war. And in the end, the whistleblowers won their case in a court of law!

Consider this the template for the future we need to see as whistleblowers.

And what more proof can one have than this telling episode that took place at the very embryonic stages of this country's founding -- fully demonstrating that the dominant purpose for what later became the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information?

A 1989 law -- the WPA - was supposed to protect federal employees who expose fraud and misconduct from retaliation. But over the years, these protections have been completely undermined. One loophole gives the government the absolute right to strip employees of their security clearances and fire them, without judicial review. Another bars employees of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency from any coverage under the law. And Congress has barred national security whistleblowers who are fired for exposing wrongdoing from obtaining protection in federal court.
Therefore, it is no surprise that honest citizens who witness waste, fraud and abuse in national security programs, but lack legal protections, are silenced or forced to turn to unauthorized methods to expose malfeasance, incompetence or negligence.
Instead of ignoring and intimidating whistleblowers, Congress and the executive branch would do well to follow the example of the Continental Congress, by supporting and shielding them.
In a world filled with inequity, politics, institutional loyalty and abuse - resisting organizational power is often an act of career suicide by a whistleblower.

In a world inhabited by powerful institutions, whistleblowers are not simply disadvantaged by those in charge -- they are often fully retaliated against, leading to devastating consequences.

Whistleblowers typically act alone resisting against the will and might of the institution -- large or small. Our whistleblower well-being is very much dependent on those who have institutional power over us -- an automatic social inequality. A whistleblower perceives that a wrong has been committed and responds by attempting to address that wrong. Yet in practice, when the wrong is the result of those with direct power over the whistleblower, a real inequity is created.

Typically, there is no need to blow the whistle if one's own subordinates perpetrate the wrong since the whistleblower more than likely has the power to address the wrong.

However, exposing the wrongdoing as a subordinate often results in retaliation against the whistleblower, while the underlying cause goes unaddressed.

We must also appreciate that organizations are absolutely ruthless when it comes to whistleblowing and especially when the organization is well entrenched, and has lots of resources at their disposal to go after the whistleblower. More often than not they turn the whistleblower into an outsider, banishing them from any influence, while also ensuring that they can do no further damage.

In this rigid social institutional climate, individual integrity and rights do not matter, law does not matter, and maintaining the status quo of the organization takes priority -- including sacrificing those individuals who would dare question the authority of the organization or expose the organization's dirty linen.

And yet I stood up - eyes wide open - against such an institution at NSA engaged in corrupt conduct involving American taxpayer monies and illegalities that were not necessary except to get away with them in the name of national security through the secret abuse and aggrandizement of unaccountable executive power.

However, I could not have stood up (or now stand before you as a free American), against the full weight of the overwhelming arsenal that the government used to target me as a whistleblower, without the exemplar example of a brave and courageous whistleblower who did not have the benefit that I did and who has pioneered the way for whistleblowers, after great personal and professional sacrifice, in the post 9/11 world characterized by secrecy and fear-driven decision making that pushed so much of the ideals of this country right past and over the edge of law, ethics, and historical precedent.
Jesselyn Radack resisted organizational power at its core, after the very institution she worked for violated its own rules and our Constitution for the sake of expediency and publicity in the newly declared global war on terrorism. Her intrepid resistance to the unacceptable and the dawning realization that much of what this country had gained at great expense over the past 200 years was eroding, speaks volumes to her integrity and holding fast to the truth of her experiences in the face of ethical violations committed within the Department of Justice simply because they had the power to do so and figured they could get away with it -- no matter what the law or the ethics required.

In resisting organizational power, Jesselyn became a whistleblower by virtue of standing up for what mattered in the face of the reality that people within the Department of Justice lived with secret power and authority and wanted to maintain it, while also desirous institutionally in getting away with the changed legal and littered ethical landscape justified by 9/11, with any number of intended and unintended consequences.
Jesselyn herself became the subject of extreme retaliatory actions by the government as an object lesson in punishment for having resisted the organizational power in the first place that also had the ability to cover up and conceal the truth she revealed internally. The government also clearly did not want the disclosure of its ethical wrongdoing made public for all to see given the "dark side' legal paths that the Bush Administration had chosen to go down for expediency in the furtherance of strategic foreign policy post 9/11.

Jesselyn and I both stumbled on and got in the way of two of the most controversial policies of the Bush Administration in their early embryonic stages: torture and secret surveillance. The government attempted to justify both through a theory of expansive presidential power, enabled by a state-secrets doctrine that was used to evade judicial review.

We both complained through internal channels--our supervisors and respective Inspectors General--and, when that failed, made the difficult choice to go to the press with unclassified information of significant public concern and interest. Then we became targets of federal criminal investigations into our disclosures. In effect, for exercising our fundamental First Amendment right to speak to the press about issues of public concern--revealing only unclassified information--we were designated as bad people--criminals-- who had become turncoats, traitors and enemies of the state.

In reality, our "crimes" amounted to embarrassing the government by exposing high-level government wrongdoing and illegality. Like most of the current crop of whistleblowers in the same boat, neither of us was alleged to have actually harmed national security.

When the Obama administration took office, each of us hoped that reason would prevail and that the persecutions would stop. This wasn't reading too much into Obama's statements. He had campaigned on abuses brought forward by whistleblowers and came into office hailing whistleblowers as courageous and patriotic.

Obama's actions have not matched his words. His Administration's reaction to national security and intelligence whistleblowers has been even harsher than the previous Administration. The Bush Administration harassed whistleblowers unmercifully, but it took the Obama Administration to actually prosecute them.

For a president whose mantra is to "look forward and not backward" when it came to investigating torture and warrantless wiretapping, it is rank hypocrisy to resuscitate such stale Bush-era cases for disclosures that served the public interest and did no harm to national security.

Using the Espionage Act to silence public servants who reveal government malfeasance is chilling at best and tyrannical at worst. This administration's attack on national security and intelligence whistleblowers expands the origins of Bush's secrecy regime and cripples the free press by silencing its most important sources. It's a recipe for the slow poisoning of a democracy.

Just after the signing of the Constitution, in answer to a woman's inquiry regarding what kind of government the Founding Fathers had created, Benjamin Franklin reportedly answered, "A republic, if you can keep it." This is not the kind of republic I want to keep.

I share this history with you because it strikes at the historical heart of the matter regarding whistleblowing and the excruciatingly hard and difficult choice faced by whistleblowers - fundamentally centered on the moral dilemma of remaining silent in the face of massive fraud, waste, abuse, mismanagement and illegalities committed by the government, or literally risking one's career and freedom in speaking up and out about it.

What do we do? We can't just treat the symptoms, but whistleblowers are both the canaries in the coalmines of our society as well as the blinking red alarms that something must be done immediately and everything in between.
We also can't have avenues of redress for whistleblowers completely compromised due to institutional conflicts of interest. We must pass meaningful legislation that protects whistleblowers -- like the WPEA -- although not perfect -- it does serve to help restore due process and whistleblowers defending themselves against criminal referrals by virtue of their blowing the whistle -- including the national security arena.

We must also have an affirmative defense for protecting whistleblowers against criminal prosecution, while also preventing unilateral retaliation by the government against whistleblowers.

Although many of the great strides and reforms in society have been the result of whistleblowing, it is precisely the lack of protection for whistleblowers today (in both private industry and government), where problems of wrongdoing and malfeasance and abuse become more often concealed than revealed.

So many of the gains made for whistleblowers in the wake of the civil rights movements from the 60s and 70s have become severely eroded, even though a host of federal and state laws were enacted during this time period and designed to protect employees even in private industry, including laws that did not permit retaliation or reprisal by employers when reporting violations in public.

And yet the very fear of reprisals, despite all this legislation passed, including the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, the False Claims Act, the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 and even the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 that I followed in protected communications with Congress and the Department of Defense Inspector General - and that were supposed to protect the disclosure of information by whistleblowers - has more often than not served to suppress and intimidate whistleblowers or even used as the pretext for criminal investigations and prosecutions against Americans who were simply upholding their oaths.
We have seen that even a legislatively created right to protection does not mean that the protection exists in practice when a person blows the whistle on illegalities or wrongdoing -- and especially where there is little or no enforcement.
So let me challenge you. Whistleblowing has become a hazardous occupation and not subject to hazardous duty pay! If internal whistleblowing is fraught with peril, then protection for external whistleblowing becomes even more critical within our community going forward.

I look forward to the rest of our time together here at the Assembly -- while continuing to seek the protections we must have as whistleblowers.

With each and every one of you I challenge us -- that we take up and rise to the task, for the sake of whistleblowing now and into the future, resolving at this Assembly to urgently press for the best and most effective whistleblower protection we can advocate and achieve together in this current climate, and then build upon those efforts to secure those critical protections through enforcement and oversight going forward.

"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it." -- Judge Learned Hand

From 2001 through 2008, Mr. Drake was a senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA) and served in various technical management and leadership capacities. While there he became a material witness and whistleblower for two 9/11 congressional investigations and a Department of Defense Inspector General audit of a failed multi-billion dollar flagship program called TRAILBLAZER as well as an operationally ready, highly innovative, revolutionary and breakthrough multi-million dollar intelligence data collection, processing and analysis system called THINTHREAD -- that was specifically designed to handle the massive data volumes and information flows of the Digital Age, with built-in 4th Amendment and privacy protection safeguards for U.S. Persons, but rejected by NSA. His recently concluded legal ordeal involving a targeted, multi-year, many millions of dollars federal government investigation and prosecution of him, ended when the Department of Justice dropped all of the felony charges in the indictment against him (including the Espionage Act) in a plea agreement to a minor misdemeanor. His case lies at the nexus of overreaching national security, the 1st and 4th Amendments, wrongdoing and illegalties cloaked in secrecy, overclassification, a unitary executive branch state secrets privilege hiding 'off the books' domestic warrantless wiretapping, electronic surveillance, eavesdropping and data mining, freedom of thought and association, as well as the alarming erosion of our civil liberties and the enshrined rights in the Constitution. Mr. Drake was the recipient of the 2011 Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize and currently works as an Expert at an Apple Retail Store in the greater D.C. area.

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.