Michael Moore, Nate Silver, Bernie MF Sanders, fake radicals, exit stage right.

OK so the silver lining to watching the Hillary – Trump prizefight is that those cheering and jeering are showing their colors. If they’re on either party bandwagon we can dismiss them out of hand, I’m talking about those pretending to be left of middle. Michael Moore is now out, as usual shepherding for the Dems. Buh-bye. Statistician Nate Sliver, expending his infallible credibility to scaremonger for Hillary, sorry no. Bernie Sanders, thanks for activating a leftist base, but you sold it up the river. Begone now and good riddance.

All your friends who swear they’re greener than green, but have to support Hillary lest Trump win the election? Not greens. Those who proclaim they’re otherwise progressive, or true to their causes? Not true, they’re Dems. They’re why Americans never get beyond the lesser of evils. But- but- no buts, you’re the silent consent that enables war.

Let me ask, did you also vote for Obama? Because shut the fuck up. Seriously, you obviously learned nothing from it. Show some humility and shut up. Why on earth would you expect to offer guidance on election matters? You are a fool. You are easily scared. You’re falling for it again.

The Hillary Clinton War Machine banner seen by everyone at 2016 DNC but you.


PHILADELPHIA, PA- The second day of protest of the 2016 DNC was expected to dwarf Sunday’s impressive turnout, so we hit the Monday rally determined to repeat our photo-op coup of the day before. This time our banner read “HILLARY CLINTON IS THE CANDIDATE OF THE WAR MACHINE” which we knew would ruffle more feathers. We wore costumes, me as American Cowboy Capitalist, my teammate as war victim, in a black burqa, Muslims being both targets and scapegoats of the US War on Islam. Shutters clicked wherever we went, whether our banner was unfurled or not. Professional photographers recorded our names and fellow activists gave us thumbs up and maneuvered to record us on their phones. Some posed beside us, asking companions or strangers to take their selfies. We gave interviews to Time Magazine, the New Yorker, several newspapers, and multiple foreign news outlets. We spoke about the undemocratic character of our party conventions and about Hillary being the establishment warmonger. Having drenched our clothes in Philly’s 95 degree weather, we consoled ourselves that we had absolutely nailed the message.

We’d learned the day before that getting a visual out before a march began was the most fruitful in reaching the media audience. Unless you’re storming the Bastille, protest visuals are not for drawing people to the street. Visual messaging is for the benefit of local television viewers first, who can rush to join in, and news readers second, to give substance to the coverage.

At first we found scant footage of our banner in the Sunday march, but our early morning bannering, meant be a beacon toward which people could gather, garnered a headline photo by the AP. That picture ran on AP articles across the globe, and dominatd images of “DNC protests” before the convention had even begun.

We knew that press coverage would be best before the convention got started, when protests wouldn’t compete with the choreographed performances inside. But we were confident that the first day’s march, as the biggest and most anticipated, would float our antiwar message to the top. Our war-machine slogan appealed to Bernie supporters, to the Greens, and to the antiwar groups.

We went out early and wherever we went we drew thumbs up, applause, fingers pointed our way, cellphones and cameras. Organizers of a Bernie-delegates press conference asked us to be their backdrop. So imagine our surprise when the day’s news images did not include our banner!

Instead media photo editors chose images of Bernie Sanders supporters despondent about his betrayal. In reality, most protesters on Monday were not apprised of Bernie’s formal capitulation. Protesters were upbeat and enthousiastic. The thousands of Berners who marched that day were exuberant about the prospects of their delegates prevailing in the convention. Press photogs must have known something about what their editors wanted, or the heat and exhaustion produced the compositions they needed. News stories of Monday’s start of the DNC ran with images of solitary protesters, looking isolated and resigned.

For our part, we’re certain the photos of our banner will resurface from the files when Hillary’s presidency is in the bag and the war machine is no longer an embargoed issue.

Clean Energy march opens DNC 2016

Clean Energy March, July 24, 2016
PHILADELPHIA, PA- Sunday’s successful march kickstarted public demonstrations against the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Thousands called for environmental justice on the eve of the nomination of pro-fracking, pro-pipeline, pro-war-for-oil Hillary Clinton. The banner brought by Denver Occupiers “THINK OUTSIDE THE CONVENTION” dominated the photopress coverage, thanks to a great AP image carried around the world. It was a good thing too, because “Clean Energy” is a bit of a muddy concept, isn’t it?

The event was sponsored in part by the Sierra Club and Food and Water Watch, known to accommodate fracking as part of their Big Greens “let’s be realistic” about what what environmental actions can achieve. I’m not convinced that the average tree hugger has come to favor “clean” over the lesser-descript “green”, but energy industrialists cerainly like clean. They’re confident they’ve squarely branded it with natural gas. The clean coal industry is still making a play for it too.

Though the marchers on July 24 were unanimously against fossil fuels, participants may have been hoodwinked into believing they can reclaim the word “clean” from corporate advertizing and its captive media. I doubt it. This is the same argument for reasserting ownership of the American Flag from the America Fuck Yeah pro-war patriots. No. You retire the Swastika, you don’t rebrand it to mean something transformative. Someone pushing to rehabilitate the swastika is a Nazi.

Also typical of demonstrations coordinated by Big Greens, the march on Sunday didn’t go to the DNC. Instead it went Eastward, from City Hall for Independence Hall, for a rally in sweltering heat –and unshaded sun– that will incapacitate many participants from the next day’s march. The Big Greens know from their membership rolls that the average age is elderly.

Fear and Loathing in Colorado Springs

Those readers following the Occupy! Movement in its many forms around the world and in Colorado Springs will be glad to hear that Tuesday culminated a difficult week for us here with a resolution of many contentious issues, and an overall commitment to unity.
 
The subject matter behind this particular post is closely associated with the Movement in general, but it’s more a humanity thing than an Occupy thing, overall. I hope i can get the associations to make sense, and that readers will restrain themselves from developing the erroneous notion that this is meant to be a pitch for some sort of religion. It’s not.

I went to the Municipal Court in Colorado Springs to enter a plea of “not guilty” to the charge of camping on public property because of actions executed as a part of Occupy! Actually, i was camping on public property, to put it quite plainly, and the idea behind the plea is that the action does not engender guilt even if it violates a silly and badly unAmerican, (read, “oppressive,” if we’ve become a little unrecognizable in this regard), statute. A couple dozen supporters made it to the courtroom with me, and raised enough ruckus to get Municipal Judge Spottswood W. H. Williams to threaten them all with contempt charges. The whole thing was kind of a lot of fun, really. Made me feel a little like Hoffman or Hayden, in a much smaller sense. There comes a first time for everything, and this was my first visit to a courtroom during which i was able to feel utterly unencumbered by the dark nature of my own action that had led me there. My deepest thanks to all the OCS members and especially Dennis Apuan, who put his political credibility on the line to stand with us, and brought a good deal of patriotic weight to the room as State Rep for the fine soldiers of Fort Carson.

The hearing was only that, after all, and after entering the plea, we scheduled a pre-trial conference with the City Attorney, for 22 Nov, at which a government lawyer will make me an offer i’ll most assuredly refuse and we’ll schedule a jury trial. I’ll keep you news hounds posted as things progress.

The point to this post, though, is an underlying root to the no-camping ordinance, as well as to most of the woes of the day: The Fear.

Most of us don’t acknowledge the Fear because, well, it’s scary. Instead we get angry, or attempt to maneuver ourselves into a position to control uncontrollable factors like society or competitive economies. We eschew cooperation because we’re afraid of our fellows. We make assumptions about others’ behavior and how it will effect us. We bewail the corruption of society, and begin looking over our shoulders for the punishment of God, or black-clad mercenaries coming over the horizon to herd us into frigid winter FEMA camps. We worry about hunger, poverty, inglorious death. We develop elaborate political systems and foment revolution in order to establish “security” of dubious credibility. Look around. These tactics have not ever worked after attempting repeated, redundant permutations, and there is no reasonable expectation that they ever will.

The Fear has driven all this cutthroat competition. It’s what motivates folks to be sure they have more, more, more. It’s what causes us to petulantly demand our right to burn as much gas in our Hummers as possible, and to constantly engage in useless commerce. It motivates the lowest guy competing for some crappy job at Taco Bell just as surely as it motivates conspiratorial Rothschild backroom bankers. It motivates us to enact stupid, oppressive no-camping ordinances when someone that scares us becomes visible, oh my! We’re all deathly afraid of some horrible outcome, like someone else getting our stuff, or scaring tourists away, or enjoying some habitual pleasure we find repugnant.

The Fear is irrational! What’s the very worst that can happen to us in this life? We die? We find ourselves incarcerated or tortured? Consider, if you will, that we live our little spans, maybe a hundred years or so at the outside limit, surrounded at both ends by an unfathomable mass of toroidally twisted, multi-dimentional Eternity that not one of us will ever grasp while we live. What possible fear can be valid under this circumstance other than that we fail to live according to our own perceived Truths? I say “perceived” since only those afflicted by the Fear are afraid to examine those truths for the errors all honest thinkers know to exist within our own perceptions. If I knew my own blind spots they wouldn’t exist, right? We don’t even know what we’re afraid of mostly, though we can usually list a few if we set ourselves to the task. No one is to blame for his or her own irrational fears, especially cultural fears such as seem to be more or less universal. Many have been established by the direct influence of media that may well have been designed by nefarious folk for exactly the purpose of invoking unfounded fears in various populations. OMG! Now i’m making myself afraid! Not really–but what to do about the Fear?

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear,” reads a certain religious text, (1 Jn 4:18, for those with a source fetish like me). I won’t be digressing into a religious sermon here. The principle holds without the doctrinal baggage surrounding it in the context in which it nests. No matter how evil the Ideas we oppose as Occupiers, or as human beings in general, they can’t overwhelm a spirit of love. No matter the spiritual foundation or lack thereof, love can dissipate greed, fear, disappointment, embarrassment, and in fact any of the various bases for the secondary anger response we are all prone to manifesting in situations as apparently dire as the one we’re seeing now. As much as i can plainly see the bogus nature of the moves made in, say, the financial industry, (inseparable from other key industries at a certain level), applying some genuine empathy causes a mental process that can not end in hatred or vengefulness. Look guys like Greenspan or Geitner in the eyes next time you see them. They’re deeply miserable, and completely trapped in their own Fears. When it all collapses, i really hope they’re still available so we can feed them a plate of food, even if we can’t resist the temptation to ask, “What the fuck were you thinking!?”

We can’t fight fire with fire here. Battling greed with more greed, as some seeking to restore an “American Dream” involving bigger slices of a rotten pie seem to do. Revolution only spins us in circles: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” We always seem to find ourselves standing in the same spot we started, except standing in pools of blood with fewer resources after every revolution we’ve ever effected. We don’t have these options any longer. The planet is in a condition that will not permit us to continue on the deeply ingrained, competitive course we’ve followed for so long. Learning to love, to let go, to tolerate, to work together for our futures which are common whether we like it or not is the only way out of this. It’s not easy, only necessary.

I can’t tell anyone how to save anyone else, or how to convince the next guy that any of this is true. I can’t even describe the mental processes that led to these conclusions. All i seem able to do is to proceed in the direction the thoughts lead, as they come to me in a fashion that very often seems external. Examine the assertions that continue to spill out of me at 2 in the morning like this. Notice with joy that there seem to be many others reaching similar conclusions: Things are terminally fucked up and only Love can save us. If it turns out that we’re not saved, that the whole human experiment is doomed to fail, i’ll breathe my last breath in the knowledge that i walked the talk spoken by all my heroes in tongues long lost to history, or new today, or unspoken yet understood by common nature. I don’t think i’m alone. I don’t know how to be afraid of that.

Simple American breakfast no longer

pancake syrop corn syrup hfcs maple KaroMy ideal breakfast is served at a diner: coffee, eggs, hash browns and toast. But can you feel healthy about it –as your conscience (n) –> vegan? You could pack in sugar in the raw, sea salt, and organic peppercorns in the requisite grinders; likewise from a cooler you could pull jars of rBGH-free half and half, real butter, and organic ketchup if you’re inclined. But what about what’s served on the plate?

A disclaimer: let’s define eating to mean the consumption of nutrition and avoidance of toxin. That precludes genetically modified organisms, irradiated produce, chemical pesticides, trans-fats, corn-syrup, HFCS, etc. The expression “natural” has been co-opted by Big Agra, but no longer can detractors say that “organic” doesn’t mean anything.

I’m omitting the optional meats: ham, bacon and sausage links for the obvious reasons; free-range, grass-fed, single-animal slaughtered efforts notwithstanding. Enough said.

Empty calories like juice are out as well, unless it’s freshly squeezed for your glass.

And let’s presume too, we’ll be asking the cook to stir some onions and peppers into the hash browns, for at least a little green.

Before we leave the subject of condiments, there a three non-perishable items it might be worth bringing with you to the diner. restaurant jelly single serving corn syrup hfcs For your toast: corn-less fruit preserves, unheated honey, and if you’re planning to add pancakes, grade-B maple syrup. The diner variety syrup, and any portion-size pre-packaged confection are apt to be entirely corn syrup and HFCS.

If the price of your breakfast starts at $3.80, it’s unlikely your local diner can afford the healthy food supplies you are able to ferret from your grocer. It’s become enough of a feat to stock them at home. Let’s see: eggs from vegetarian-fed cage-less chickens, organic potatoes, whole-grain bread. All these hyphens concatenate into a value meal priced more like a dinner entree. And there’s probably no chance a typical diner can spring for fair-trade organic coffee beans.

Economists point to America’s relatively level cost of living. Progressive analysts address the subsidies which keep commodity prices artificially low. Others decry the need for society to address the real costs which cripple our unhealthy system. From the consumer’s point of view, the cost of real nutrition has suffered a hyperinflation to put it beyond our reach, eating out or in.

NOTES:
1. Here’s that recipe for organic catsup:

3 cups canned organic tomato paste
¼ cup whey (liquid from plain yogurt)
1 Tbls sea salt
½ cup maple syrup
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
3 cloves peeled & mashed garlic
½ cup fish sauce fish sauce

Mix together in a wide-mouth glass jar, leave at least an inch below the top and leave it at room temperature for 2-3 days before putting into the refrigerator. Recipe makes a whole quart.

2. An optimum juice concoction:

1. Beetroot
2. Celery
3. Carrot
4. Apple
5. Ginger

3. Three lists:

Foods to buy organic:
Meat, Milk, Coffee, Peaches, Apples, Sweet Bell Peppers, Celery, Nectarines, Strawberries, Cherries, Kale, Leafy Greens, Grapes, Carrots, Potatoes, Tomatoes

Foods that don’t need to be organic:
Onions, Avocado, Sweet Corn, Pineapple, Mango, Asparagus, Sweet Peas, Kiwi Fruit, Cabbage, Eggplant, Papaya, Watermelon, Broccoli, Sweet Potatoes

GMO crops:
Soybeans, Corn starch, Canola oil, Sugar beet, Rice. Watch list:
Wheat, Potatoes.

On Afghanistan, tell Obama NO NO NO

UPDATE – TUES DEC 1 ANTIWAR ACTION- Show up. Bring a get-out-of-Afghanistan slogan, or hold extras from Coloradans For Peace.
afghanistan antiwar banner
Sport a healthy indignation over the new administration wanting to “finish the job” ie. continue war-making. Our action will be joined by peace organizations nationwide. As President rallies the officers of West Point, his words will be met by NY demonstrators, and more in Washington DC, Baltimore, Chicago, Seattle and Saginaw. Followed by Allentown, Boston, Eugene, Greensboro, Hartford, Los Angeles, Madison, Maine, Milwaukee, Newark, Newton, San Francisco, to name only the early listings. We’ll be Acacia Park, 5PM Tuesday, and if Obama doesn’t respond to our message, we’ll be there again Wednesday.

Who owns images of American dead?

vietnam-wounded-marineAP photographer Julie Jacobson was reticent to publish her picture of dying US Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard. Though his father was opposed, the Associated Press overruled. But this was no victory for the public’s right to see a true reflection of war. The D.o.D. is still indignant, but I suspect Jacobson’s report was ultimately vetted in their favor. Military propagandists need to represent America’s growing losses in Afghanistan. Jacobson’s image provides their limited hangout. Like the other photographs of casualties which have escaped through embeds, the image of Lance Corporal Bernard is desaturated of blood, and the surrounding events fit the military endorsed narrative.

Have you noticed that all combat images coming out of today’s wars are drab and lifeless. Obviously this motif is not being applied to the PR shots of jets and military hardware, but scenes of soldiering in Iraq and Afghanistan are dusty and grey, like scenes from a dark virtual world.

The colors in Jacobson’s controversial photo are similarly under saturated. Earlier casualty pics have even been rendered as black and white, and this is no exercise of artistic license. Colorless images telegraph little resemblance to our real world lived in color. An emotional distance is created, most obviously like the detachment we feel looking into the past. Everything before the late sixties happened in monocrome. Early color photographs always shock children with the prospect that lives in generations past might have been been lived in a world of contemporary vibrance.

The photographs from Vietnam were helped by that nation’s lush tropical greens. Images of the wounded were all the more gripping –and demoralizing from the military’s point of view– because unlike in Korea and WWII, the blood was red.

Most images taken in Vietnam came through the military staff photographers. The unapproved subjects, which subverted the official face of the war, emerged from the cameras of independent journalists.

dying US marineJulie Jacobson facilitated the release of this picture, by letting slip two details pertinent to the official US narrative in Afghanistan. Would you believe, just prior to this engagement, friendly Afghans came out of their houses to tell the US soldiers where they could find the Taliban? Probably to ensure Corporal Bernard’s squad pointed their guns away from their homes, but that’s not how the story was spun. Jacobson recounts that these Afghans were eager to inform on the Taliban.

The jocular Jacobson records another telltale crowd-pleaser in the aftermath of the Taliban “ambush,” when she found herself flanked by Afghan National Army troops. When the firing started, Jacobson sought immediately the ranks of US soldiers, because the freakin’ ANA Afghans “aren’t very good.”

Today’s media embeds are basically a privatized signal corps. Their photos should belong to the taxpayers. Insinuations that military families should dictate what images can be used, in the event of death, is a cruel irony. Are the families consulted about what Uncle Sam wants to do with their loved one when he’s still alive? Millions of federal tax dollars are spent on our soldiers, all the more when they die. I have little sympathy for the families who couldn’t stand up for their children and protect them from the capricious whims of our military. There is absolutely no reason to ask their permission about what happens when their little soldier meets his/her calculable fate.

Phony Sedon-y meet Social Ecology

hikers-Boynton-Sedona
I mentioned in my last post that I’d had a visceral negative reaction to Sedona — undeniably one of the most beautiful places on earth — which surprised and dismayed me. I had a vague sense that I was offended by the opulence and pseudo-spiritualism of the place, but that didn’t completely explain my snarky attitude which, I’ve come to understand, usually masks a deeper response to perceived injustice or dashed hopes.

I found an answer in the form of a book I happened to pull from my brother’s bookshelf: An American Child Supreme — the education of a liberation ecologist, by John Nichols. It’s a memoir of sorts, and tries to decipher how any of us — born into a culture that very nearly ensures that we become bigots, greedy consumers, warmongers, and environmental parasites — develops a social conscience.

John Nichols tells of the life-changing — often seemingly innocuous — events, people and books that transformed him from a product of a privileged upbringing and Mayflower pedigree to a liberation ecologist (as opposed to naturalist or environmentalist), a more radical superstratum of social ecology.

I won’t go into any of that, although it was fascinating to me. I’ll just write the words that I scratched frantically into my little notebook so I’d not lose them or allow myself to forget them. I wasn’t sure how they related to Sedona, but somehow they did.

Myself, I do not have the courage or the fanaticism that motivated Diana Oughton (of the Weather Underground) to build bombs, but I cannot envision the changes we need without some sort of apocalyptic reaction against the current levels of violence generated by the daily economic activities of the multinationals that feed and clothe us.

Territorial shooting wars are only a small fraction of the greater (and more horrific) violence of a world market that levels forests, pollutes the oceans, impoverishes people and toxifies topsoil in order to bring us our hamburgers, polyester golf slacks, and Marlboro cigarettes. “The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret,” writes Eduard Galeano. “Every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth. This systemic violence is not apparent but is real and constantly increasing: its holocausts are not made known in the sensational press but in Food and Agricultural Organization statistics.”

Environmental collapse is now universally caused by monopoly capital plundering earth’s biological and human resources for profit. The profit is generated by the labor of those underdogs, whose energy is thus co-opted to destroy the environment. This means that our most destructive environmental problems are tied to their inequality. . . . That inequality is causing a downward social spiral on earth and eco-devastation. Profit requires demolition. The racism that deforms our nation (and the globe) is a tool used by a capitalist society to maintain class divisions for profit-making reasons, so racism is also a main component of biosystem toxicity.

John Nichols sums up the philosophy of a liberation ecologist when he quotes Tom Athanasiou’s book Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor, whose words are directed at environmentalists:

“The time for such political innocence is over. . . .it is past time for environmentalists to face their own history, in which they have too often stood not for justice and freedom, or even for realism, but merely for the comforts and aesthetics of affluent nature lovers. They have no choice. History will judge greens by whether they stand with the world’s poor.”

That must be it. I distrusted Sedona because it quite obviously doesn’t stand with the world’s poor, nor even the nation’s middle class. It is an enclave for affluent nature lovers whose social consciences are buried in crystals and energy forces, $4 iced teas and expensive gauzy skirts.

Sedona seems to care not a whit about social or economic justice nor — I’d wager a guess — about wreaking environmental havoc in Utah and New Mexico to keep its own little slice of Eden energized and enflowered. There is no need for Sedona to worry about the larger world, neither liberation for its people nor the sustainability of its global environment. Sedona exists unto itself and its wealthy denizens — to be owned, developed and distributed and enjoyed at their directive.

Sedona-Boynton-Canyon

Kenneth Lewis’s Bank of America!

kenneth lewis panhandlingYou know until this week, I don’t think I had ever known about the US government’s ‘stress test’. You probably have never heard of such a thing either, and might have a picture in your head of Alan Greenspan, shirt off, walking rapidly on a treadmill at Dr. Sam’s office? Put the guy on Lopid for God’s Sake! Or is that Lowbid? These medicines have such cutesy names, don’t they!

However, it is Kenneth Lewis’s Bank of America that needs some medicine (and not Alan), and about $34 BILLION of it! That’s a lot of money and I just know the economy is doing great now! Bank of America to need $34 billion in capital: source

Gosh! That’s a lot of money and I wonder where they will get it? Kenneth for some reason is no longer with the firm, so he can’t help out. And Lord knows that I have helped out BOA enough already, though when I went over my account by 2 cents to the red they left me with a $120 bill and a bad credit report, so I guess my money is no longer welcome with these nice people?

So where will they at Bank of America get the money from for their medical bills after failing their stress test? We have a strange Medical System in America it seems… Wonder how my heart is doing? Got no insurance for one of those government stress tests. Maybe BOA’s rich uncle can help the company out?

Wal-mart drives its chariot of predatory commerce over bones of Civil War dead

Union Soldiers fight on Brock Road 1864
WAL-MART wants to build a Virginia super-center on the edge of the memorial site of one of the most consequential battles of the Civil War. The Wilderness marked the first engagement between Generals Lee and Grant, ignited a forest fire which the soldiers fought through, and left 24,000 dead and wounded. Now 253 historians have joined in asking Wal-mart to reconsider.

Mr. Lee Scott, President and CEO
Walmart Stores, Inc.
702 SW 8th Street
Bentonville, Arkansas 72716-8611

Dear Mr. Scott:

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to pursue alternate building locations for the Walmart Supercenter proposed in Orange County, Virginia. The site currently under consideration lies within the historic boundary of the Wilderness Battlefield and only one quarter mile from the current boundary of the Wilderness Battlefield unit of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.

The Battle of the Wilderness was among the most significant engagements of the Civil War. It marked the first time legendary generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant faced off against one another on the field of battle. During two days of desperate conflict in a harsh, unforgiving landscape tangled with underbrush, 4,000 Americans lost their lives and nearly 20,000 were wounded.

The proposed location will greatly increase traffic through the area and encourage further development to encroach upon and spoil the battlefield. This, in turn, will seriously degrade the experience for the many tens of thousands of heritage tourists who visit this National Park every year. The Wilderness Battlefield is easily the biggest tourist attraction in Orange County, with visitors coming from around the world to experience its serenity and contemplate its history and significance.

As a historian, I feel strongly that the Wilderness Battlefield is a unique historic and cultural treasure deserving careful stewardship. Currently only approximately 20 percent of the battlefield is protected by the National Park Service. If built, this Walmart would seriously undermine ongoing efforts to see more of this historic land preserved and deny future generations the opportunity to wander a landscape that has, until now, remained largely unchanged since 1864.

The Wilderness is an indelible part of our history, its very ground hallowed by the American blood spilled there, and it cannot be moved. Surely Walmart can identify a site that would meet its needs without changing the very character of the battlefield.

There are many places in central Virginia to build a commercial development, but there is only one Wilderness Battlefield. Please respect our great nation’s history and move your store farther away from this historic site and National Park.

Signed,

* Terrie Aamodt, Walla Walla University
* Edward D. Abrahams, Silver Spring, Md.
* Sean P. Adams, University of Florida
* Garry Adelman, History Associates, Inc.
* Nicholas Aieta, the Marlborough School, West Springfield, Mass.
* A.J. Aiseirithe, Washington, D.C.
* James Anderson, Ashburn, Va.
* Adam Arenson, University of Texas
* Jonathan M. Atkins, Berry College
* Arthur H. Auten, University of Hartford
* David Bard, Concord College
* Alwyn Barr, Texas Tech University
* Craig A. Bauer, Metairie, La.
* Erik Bauer, West Hollywood, Calif.
* Dale Baum, Texas A&M University
* Edwin C. Bearss, Historian emeritus, National Park Service
* Caryn Cosse Bell, University of Massachusetts at Lowell
* Jeffrey R. Bennett, Waterford, N.Y.
* Shannon Bennett, Ellettsville, Ind.
* Melvyn S. Berger, Newton, Mass.
* Arthur W. Bergeron, Shippensburg, Pa.
* Edward H. Bergerstrom, Port Richey, Fla.
* Eugene H. Berwanger, Colorado State University
* Fred W. Beuttler, Deputy Historian, U.S. House of Representatives
* Darrel Bigham, University of Southern Indiana
* John Bloom, Las Cruces, N.M.
* Frederick J. Blue, Youngstown State University
* Christopher Bobal, Lees Summit, Mo.
* Thomas Bockhorn, Huntsville, Ala.
* Keith Bohannon, University of West Georgia
* Phillip S. Bolger, San Diego, Calif.
* Patrick Boyd, the Pomfret School, Pomfret, Conn.
* Vernon S. Braswell, Corpus Christi, Tex.
* Roger D. Bridges, Bloomington, Ill.
* Ronald S. Brockway, Regis University
* Col. George M. Brooke, III, USMC (Ret.), Lexington, Va.
* Bruce A. Brown, Cypress, Calif.
* Norman D. Brown, University of Texas, Austen, Tex.
* David Brush, the Pomfret School, Pomfret, Conn.
* Jim Burgess, Manassas National Battlefield, Va.
* Ken Burns, Walpole, N.H.
* Brian Burton, Ferndale, Wash.
* Victoria Bynum, Texas State University-San Marcos
* Peter S. Carmichael, West Virginia University
* Marius M. Carriere, Christian Brothers University
* Katherine Cassioppi, National-Louis University
* Gary Casteel, Lexington, Va.
* Jane Turner Censer, George Mason University
* William Cheek, San Diego State University
* John Cimprich, Thomas More College
* Thomas G. Clemens, Hagerstown Community College
* Leon F. Cohn, Plantation, Fla.
* Thomas B. Colbert, Marshalltown Community College
* James R. Connor, Chancellor emeritus University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
* William J. Cooper, Jr., Louisiana State University
* Janet L. Coryell, Western Michigan University
* Charles E. Coulter, Yankton, S.D.
* Robert E. Curran, Richmond, Ky.
* Thomas F. Curran, Saint Louis, Mo.
* Gordon E. Dammann, National Museum of Civil War Medicine
* Guy Stephen Davis, Atlanta, Ga.
* William C. “Jack” Davis
* Joseph G. Dawson, III, Texas A&M University
* Mary DeCredico, United States Naval Academy
* James Lyle DeMarce, Arlington, Va.
* Charles B. Dew, Williams College
* Steven Deyle, University of Houston
* Richard DiNardo, Marine Corps Command and Staff College
* Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego, Warwick, N.Y.
* Richard R. Duncan, Alexandria, Va.
* Kenneth Durr, History Associates, Inc.
* David Dykstra, Poolesville, Md.
* Mark Elliott, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
* Robert F. Engs, University of Pennsylvania
* C. Wyatt Evans, Drew University
* Daniel Feller, University of Tennessee
* Rex H. Felton, Tiffin, Ohio
* Paul Finkelman, Albany Law School
* Jeff Fioravanti, Lynn, Mass.
* Joseph C. Fitzharris, University of Saint Thomas
* J.K. Folmarm California, Minn.
* George B. Forgie, University of Texas Austin
* Lee W. Formwalt, Organization of American Historians
* Janet B. Frazer, Narberth, Pa.
* Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.
* Jonathan Gantt, Columbia College
* Jason Gart, History Associates, Inc.
* Louis S. Gerteis, University of Missouri, St. Louis
* Kate C. Gillin, the Pomfret School, Pomfret, Conn.
* Mary Giunta, Edinburg, Va.
* Martin K. Gordon, Columbia, Md.
* Cathy Gorn, University of Maryland
* Thomas M. Grace, Amherst, N.Y.
* Susan W. Gray, Severna Park, Md.
* A. Wilson Greene, Pamplin Historical Park and National Museum of the Civil War Soldier
* Debra F. Greene, Jefferson City, Mo.
* Jim Griffin, Frisco, Tex.
* Linda J. Guy, Clearville, Pa.
* Edward J. Hagerty, American Military University
* Alfred W. Hahn, Midlothian, Va.
* Judith Lee Hallock, South Setauket, N.Y.
* Jerry Harlow, President, Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation
* D. Scott Hartwig, Gettysburg National Military Park, Pa.
* David S. Heidler, Colorado State University
* Jeannie Heidler, United States Air Force Academy
* John S. Heiser, Gettysburg National Military Park, Pa.
* Earl J. Hess, Lincoln Memorial University
* Libra Hilde, San Jose State University
* T. John Hillmer, Jr., Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield, Mo.
* David Hochfelder, State University of New York – Albany
* Sylvia Hoffert, Texas A&M University
* Patrick Hotard, Philadelphia, Pa.
* Richard Houston, Harwich, Mass.
* Randal L. Hoyer, Madonna University
* Richard L. Hutchison, Fort Worth, Tex.
* Brian M. Ingrassia, Georgia State University
* Perry D. Jamieson, Crofton, Md.
* Jim Jobe, Fort Donelson National Battlefield, Tenn.
* Willie Ray Johnson, Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, Ga.
* Vivian Lee Joyner, New Hill, N.C.
* Whitmel M. Joyner, New Hill, N.C.
* Walter D. Kamphoefner, Texas A&M University
* Amalie M. Kass, Harvard Medical School
* Philip M. Katz, Washington, D.C.
* Brad Keefer, Kent State University
* Brian J. Kenny, Denver, Co.
* Victoria A. Kin, San Antonio, Tex.
* George W. Knepper, University of Akron
* Christopher Kolakowski, National Museum of the U.S. Army Reserve
* Carl E. Kramer, Indiana University Southeast
* Arnold Krammer, Texas A&M University
* Robert K. Krick, Fredericksburg, Va.
* Michael E. Krivdo, Texas A&M University
* Benjamin Labaree, Saint Alban’s School, Washington, D.C.
* Dan Laney, Austin, Tex.
* Connie Langum, Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield, Mo.
* William P. Leeman, Coventry, R.I.
* Kevin Levin, Charlottesville, Va.
* Richard G. Lowe, University of North Texas
* Robert W. Lowery, Jr., Newport News, Va.
* M. Philip Lucas, Cornell College
* R. Wayne Mahood, Geneseo, N.Y.
* Daniel Martin, Lancaster, Pa.
* William Marvel, South Conway, N.H.
* Matthew Mason, Brigham Young University
* Dinah M. Mayo-Bobee, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
* George T. Mazuzan, Springfield, Va.
* Nathan McAlister, Hoyt, Kan.
* David McCullough
* Dennis K. McDaniel, Washington, D.C.
* James M. McPherson, Princeton University
* Kathleen G. McKesson, Eighty Four, Pa.
* James G. Mendez, Chicago, Ill.
* Brian Craig Miller, Emporia State University
* Roger E. Miller, Eagle River, Alaska.
* Wilbur R. Miller, State University of New York – Stony Brook
* Eric J. Mink, Fredericksburg, Va.
* Robert E. Mitchell, Brookline, Mass.
* John Moody, Orange Park, Fla.
* Richard Moore, Woodbridge, Va.
* Richard Morey, Kent Place School, Summit, N.J.
* Geoffrey Morrison, Saint Louis, Mo.
* Brenda Murray, North Pole, Alaska.
* Richard J. Myers, Doylestown, Pa.
* Eric Nedergaard, Mesa, Ariz.
* Robert D. Neuleib, Normal, Ill.
* Kenneth Noe, Auburn University
* Justin Oakley, Martinsville, Ind.
* Kristen Oertel, Millsaps College
* Marvin Olson, La Crescenta, Ca.
* Beverly Palmer, Claremont, Ca.
* John T. Payne, Lone Star College
* Graham Peck, Saint Xavier University
* William D. Pederson, Louisiana State University, Shreveport
* William E. Pellerin, Santa Barbara, Ca.
* Don Pfanz, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, Va.
* Michael Pierson, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
* Kermit J. Pike, Western Reserve Historical Society, Mentor, Ohio
* Ann Poe, Alexandria, Va.
* Kieth Ploakoff, Rossmoor, Ca.
* Lawrence N. Powell, Tulane University
* Adam J. Pratt. Baton Rouge, La.
* Gerald Prokopowicz, East Carolina University
* John Quist, Shippensburg University
* Steven J. Rauch, Evans, Ga.
* S. Waite Rawls, III, Museum of the Confederacy
* Carol Reardon, Pennsylvania State University
* Douglas Reasner, Durant, Iowa
* Michael Reis, History Associates, Inc.
* Robert V. Remini, Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives
* James Renberg, Southern Pines, N.C.
* Gordon Rhea, Mount Pleasant, S.C.
* Jean Richardson, Buffalo State College
* Jeffrey Richman, Brooklyn, N.Y.
* Harris D. Riley, Jr., M.D., Nashville, Tenn.
* James I. Robertson, Jr., Virginia Tech
* Stephen I. Rockenbach, Virginia State University
* Sylvia Rodrigue, Baton Rouge, La.
* Rodney A. Ross, Center for Legislative Archives, Washington, D.C.
* Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, Johnson Space Center
* Jeffrey J. Safford, Montana State University
* Frank Scaturro, New Hyde Park, N.Y.
* Mark S. Schantz, Hendrix College
* Laurence D. Schiller, Deerfield, Ill.
* Christopher A. Schnell, Springfield, Ill.
* Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein, Springfield, Ill.
* Frederick Schult, Jr., New York University
* Donald L. Schupp, Warrenton, Va.
* Richard D. Schwartz, Morristown, N.J.
* Cynthia Seacord, Schenectady, N.Y.
* Tomas Seaver, Woonsocket, R.I.
* Diane Shalda, Chicago Military Academy
* Peter D. Sheridan, Torrance, Ca.
* Mark Snyder, Akron, Ohio
* John Sotak, O.S.A., New Lenox, Ill.
* Clay W. Stuckey, DDS, Bedford, Ind.
* Carlyn Swaim, History Associates, Inc.
* Andrew Talkov, Virginia Historical Society
* Robert A. Taylor, Florida Institute of Technology
* Paul H. Tedesco, Northeastern University
* James Thayer, Milford, Mass.
* Emory M. Thomas, University of Georgia
* JoAnne Thomas, Peoria, Ill.
* Joseph Trent, Worcester, Mass.
* Tony R. Trimble, Plainfield, Ind.
* I. Bruce Turner, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
* Edwin C. Ulmer, Jr., Feasterville, Pa.
* Charles W. Van Adder, Forked River, N.J.
* Charles Vincent, Baker, La.
* Joseph F. von Deck, Ashburnham, Ma.
* Brent Vosburg, Elizabethtown, N.J.
* Robert Voss, Lincoln, Neb.
* George N. Vourlojianis, Lorain County Community College
* Christopher R. Waldrep, San Francisco State University
* John Weaver, Tipp City, Ohio
* Robert Welch, Ames, Iowa
* Lowell E. Wenger, Cincinnati, Ohio
* Jeffrey Wert, Centre Hall, Pa.
* Bruce E. Wilburn, Glen Allen, Va.
* Diana I. Williams, Wellesley College
* Mary Williams, Fort Davis National Historic Site, Tex.
* Terry Winschel, Vicksburg National Military Park, Miss.
* Roger Winthrop, Lansing, Mich.
* Eric J. Wittenberg, Columbus, Ohio
* Ralph A. Wooster, Lamar University
* Donald Yacovone, Harvard University
* Shirley J. Yee, University of Washington
* Mitchell Yockelson, National Archives and Records Administration
* William D. Young, Maple Woods Community College
* Mary E. Younger, Dayton, Ohio
* Jack Zevin, Queens College, City University of New York

Alan is shocked!!!!!

alan-greenspan
Alan Greenspan represents more than any individual anywhere, the bipartisan fact that there is no real difference between the 2 chosen parties of our corporate dictatorship here in America. Let’s fact, it… Greenspan has been the darling of both the Democratic and Republican Parties for a very long time now. He’s The Man!

He has been running the economic show that has now put the world capitalist economies in tail spin, you and I on board. Poor Alan is shocked!!!!!! Poor Old Alan… He’s shocked!!!!!! He says he just doesn’t know any more. He’s shocked!!!!!!

This guy really takes the cake, now doesn’t he. He was held up to the level of Jesus Christ in the eyes of the American monied class who held him high above our heads as some great genius know-it-all, and now his temple is shaking in its foundations. Remember these slime balls celebrating when their Cold War spending crashed the ex Soviet Union? Remember them not giving a damn about what they did to the Russian people? Remember smug old Alan?

In spite of all these croc tears and croc shock by the like ilk of Alan Greenspan, they will give about as much a damn about you as they did about the Russians. They don’t give a damn about you and the rest of Working Class America anymore than they cared about the Gooks and Ragheads (their words for them, not mine) they screwed over to make their super profits. I take that back, they are actually worried more about you and how you might soon grow to hate them passionately. Got it? Alan is shocked!!!!!

But he’s 82, damn him, and now there’s not much justice we can do for him… He wants forgiveness does he? Who knows? He simply has no god beyond money…. just our money that is now just so much trashed out planet. Alan is shocked!!!!!!! And so is the planet.

No blank-check bailout for Wall Street

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO – Organizations in Southern Colorado will participate in a National Day of Action in opposition to the no-strings attached, $700 billion corporate bailout plan advanced by President Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson. A press conference will take place 2PM on Thursday, Sept. 25 in front of the Department of Human Services Sand Creek Office at 1635 South Murray Blvd., Colorado Springs.

From the LOCAL PRESS RELEASE:

“We believe the bailout is wrong headed – it’s low-wage working families struggling to make ends meet, who will most suffer the consequences of this kind of bad economic policy,” said Dennis Apuan, community leader and Democratic candidate for Statehouse, District 17. “We must press on our elected officials to ensure that families do not have to make impossible choices between feeding their children, heating their homes and filling their prescriptions. We need leaders who know how to respond to the growing need in our communities – lost jobs, threatened homes, and surging food and energy prices,” Apuan added.

The National Day of Action will feature more than 75 press conferences, demonstrations and other public events throughout the United States. Some of the events are being held by local and national organizations; others will be citizen-organized, involving taxpayers angered by the proposed corporate bailout, as introduced in Congress. The local event will include a voter registration drive and sign-up opportunities to volunteer in community civic engagement.

“With so many of the citizens and residents of House District 17 suffering from the downturn in the economy, it is important that they have a voice in these ill-advised corporate bailouts,” said Rosemary Harris, President of the Colorado Springs Branch NAACP. “This is a diverse community, with people from all racial, social and economic backgrounds. Our lives matter. Our voices matter. And our vote is our true voice. Registering voters who will determine the future policies and future leaders of this House District, this state, and this country is perhaps the best way to respond to the actions of those in Washington,” Harris added.

Among the leaders of the national organizing effort are TrueMajority.org, US Action Education Fund, ACORN, Campaign For America’s Future, Coalition on Human Needs, Military Spouses For Change, National Priorities Project and many others.

From the INDYPENDENT’s Arun Gupta, the ORIGINAL EMAIL CALL-OUT:

NO BAILOUT FOR WALL STREET
Protest on Wall Street this Thursday at 4pm!

Call to Self-Organize

This week the White House is going to try to push through the biggest robbery in world history with nary a stitch of debate to bail out the Wall Street bastards who created this economic apocalypse in the first place.

This is the financial equivalent of September 11. They think, just like with the Patriot Act, they can use the shock to force through the “therapy,” and we’ll just roll over!

Think about it: They said providing healthcare for 9 million children, perhaps costing $6 billion a year, was too expensive, but there’s evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street pigs. If this passes, forget about any money for environmental protection, to counter global warming, for education, for national healthcare, to rebuild our decaying infrastructure, for alternative energy.

This is a historic moment. We need to act now while we can influence the debate. Let’s demonstrate this Thursday at 4pm in Wall Street (see below).

We know the congressional Democrats will peep meekly before caving in like they have on everything else, from FISA to the Iraq War.

With Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, the money markets and now this omnibus bailout, well in excess of $1 trillion will be distributed from the poor, workers and middle class to the scum floating on top.

This whole mess gives lie to the free market. The Feds are propping up stock prices, directing buyouts, subsidizing crooks and swindlers who already made a killing off the mortgage bubble.

Worst of all, even before any details have been hashed out, The New York Times admits that “Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it,” and its chief financial correspondent writes that the Bush administration wants “Congress to give them a blank check to do whatever they want, whatever the cost, with no one able to watch them closely.”

It’s socialism for the rich and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us.

Let’s take it to the heart of the financial district! Gather at 4pm, this Thursday, Sept. 25 in the plaza at the southern end of Bowling Green Park, which is the small triangular park that has the Wall Street bull at the northern tip.

By having it later in the day we can show these thieves, as they leave work, we’re not their suckers. Plus, anyone who can’t get off work can still join us downtown as soon as they are able.

There is no agenda, no leaders, no organizing group, nothing to endorse other than we’re not going to pay! Let the bondholders pay, let the banks pay, let those who brought the “toxic” mortgage-backed securities pay!

On this list are many key organizers and activists. We have a huge amount of connections – we all know many other organizations, activists and community groups. We know P.R. folk who can quickly write up and distribute press releases, those who can contact legal observers, media activists who can spread the word, the videographers who can film the event, etc.

Do whatever you can – make and distribute your own flyers, contact all your groups and friends. This crime is without precedence and we can’t be silent! What’s the point of waiting for someone else to organize a protest two months from now, long after the crime has been perpetrated?

We have everything we need to create a large, peaceful, loud demonstration. Millions of others must feel the same way; they just don’t know what to do. Let’s take the lead and make this the start!

AGAIN:
When: 4pm – ? Thursday, September 25.
Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area
What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc.
Why: To say we won’t pay for the Wall Street bailout
Who: Everyone!

PETITION LETTER from 200 ECONOMISTS:

To the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate:

As economists, we want to express to Congress our great concern for the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the financial crisis. We are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function. We see three fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plan:

1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses. Not every business failure carries systemic risk. The government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.

2) Its ambiguity. Neither the mission of the new agency nor its oversight are clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards.

3) Its long-term effects. If the plan is enacted, its effects will be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, America’s dynamic and innovative private capital markets have brought the nation unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order to calm short-run disruptions is desperately short-sighted.

For these reasons we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S. economy for years to come.

Signed (updated at 9/25/2008 8:30AM CT)

Acemoglu Daron (Massachussets Institute of Technology)
Adler Michael (Columbia University)
Admati Anat R. (Stanford University)
Alexis Marcus (Northwestern University)
Alvarez Fernando (University of Chicago)
Andersen Torben (Northwestern University)
Baliga Sandeep (Northwestern University)
Banerjee Abhijit V. (Massachussets Institute of Technology)
Barankay Iwan (University of Pennsylvania)
Barry Brian (University of Chicago)
Bartkus James R. (Xavier University of Louisiana)
Becker Charles M. (Duke University)
Becker Robert A. (Indiana University)
Beim David (Columbia University)
Berk Jonathan (Stanford University)
Bisin Alberto (New York University)
Bittlingmayer George (University of Kansas)
Boldrin Michele (Washington University)
Brooks Taggert J. (University of Wisconsin)
Brynjolfsson Erik (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Buera Francisco J. (UCLA)
Camp Mary Elizabeth (Indiana University)
Carmel Jonathan (University of Michigan)
Carroll Christopher (Johns Hopkins University)
Cassar Gavin (University of Pennsylvania)
Chaney Thomas (University of Chicago)
Chari Varadarajan V. (University of Minnesota)
Chauvin Keith W. (University of Kansas)
Chintagunta Pradeep K. (University of Chicago)
Christiano Lawrence J. (Northwestern University)
Cochrane John (University of Chicago)
Coleman John (Duke University)
Constantinides George M. (University of Chicago)
Crain Robert (UC Berkeley)
Culp Christopher (University of Chicago)
Da Zhi (University of Notre Dame)
Davis Morris (University of Wisconsin)
De Marzo Peter (Stanford University)
Dubé Jean-Pierre H. (University of Chicago)
Edlin Aaron (UC Berkeley)
Eichenbaum Martin (Northwestern University)
Ely Jeffrey (Northwestern University)
Eraslan Hülya K. K.(Johns Hopkins University)
Faulhaber Gerald (University of Pennsylvania)
Feldmann Sven (University of Melbourne)
Fernandez-Villaverde Jesus (University of Pennsylvania)
Fohlin Caroline (Johns Hopkins University)
Fox Jeremy T. (University of Chicago)
Frank Murray Z.(University of Minnesota)
Frenzen Jonathan (University of Chicago)
Fuchs William (University of Chicago)
Fudenberg Drew (Harvard University)
Gabaix Xavier (New York University)
Gao Paul (Notre Dame University)
Garicano Luis (University of Chicago)
Gerakos Joseph J. (University of Chicago)
Gibbs Michael (University of Chicago)
Glomm Gerhard (Indiana University)
Goettler Ron (University of Chicago)
Goldin Claudia (Harvard University)
Gordon Robert J. (Northwestern University)
Greenstone Michael (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Guadalupe Maria (Columbia University)
Guerrieri Veronica (University of Chicago)
Hagerty Kathleen (Northwestern University)
Hamada Robert S. (University of Chicago)
Hansen Lars (University of Chicago)
Harris Milton (University of Chicago)
Hart Oliver (Harvard University)
Hazlett Thomas W. (George Mason University)
Heaton John (University of Chicago)
Heckman James (University of Chicago – Nobel Laureate)
Henderson David R. (Hoover Institution)
Henisz, Witold (University of Pennsylvania)
Hertzberg Andrew (Columbia University)
Hite Gailen (Columbia University)
Hitsch Günter J. (University of Chicago)
Hodrick Robert J. (Columbia University)
Hopenhayn Hugo (UCLA)
Hurst Erik (University of Chicago)
Imrohoroglu Ayse (University of Southern California)
Isakson Hans (University of Northern Iowa)
Israel Ronen (London Business School)
Jaffee Dwight M. (UC Berkeley)
Jagannathan Ravi (Northwestern University)
Jenter Dirk (Stanford University)
Jones Charles M. (Columbia Business School)
Kaboski Joseph P. (Ohio State University)
Kahn Matthew (UCLA)
Kaplan Ethan (Stockholm University)
Karolyi, Andrew (Ohio State University)
Kashyap Anil (University of Chicago)
Keim Donald B (University of Pennsylvania)
Ketkar Suhas L (Vanderbilt University)
Kiesling Lynne (Northwestern University)
Klenow Pete (Stanford University)
Koch Paul (University of Kansas)
Kocherlakota Narayana (University of Minnesota)
Koijen Ralph S.J. (University of Chicago)
Kondo Jiro (Northwestern University)
Korteweg Arthur (Stanford University)
Kortum Samuel (University of Chicago)
Krueger Dirk (University of Pennsylvania)
Ledesma Patricia (Northwestern University)
Lee Lung-fei (Ohio State University)
Leeper Eric M. (Indiana University)
Leuz Christian (University of Chicago)
Levine David I.(UC Berkeley)
Levine David K.(Washington University)
Levy David M. (George Mason University)
Linnainmaa Juhani (University of Chicago)
Lott John R. Jr. (University of Maryland)
Lucas Robert (University of Chicago – Nobel Laureate)
Luttmer Erzo G.J. (University of Minnesota)
Manski Charles F. (Northwestern University)
Martin Ian (Stanford University)
Mayer Christopher (Columbia University)
Mazzeo Michael (Northwestern University)
McDonald Robert (Northwestern University)
Meadow Scott F. (University of Chicago)
Mehra Rajnish (UC Santa Barbara)
Mian Atif (University of Chicago)
Middlebrook Art (University of Chicago)
Miguel Edward (UC Berkeley)
Miravete Eugenio J. (University of Texas at Austin)
Miron Jeffrey (Harvard University)
Moretti Enrico (UC Berkeley)
Moriguchi Chiaki (Northwestern University)
Moro Andrea (Vanderbilt University)
Morse Adair (University of Chicago)
Mortensen Dale T. (Northwestern University)
Mortimer Julie Holland (Harvard University)
Muralidharan Karthik (UC San Diego)
Nanda Dhananjay (University of Miami)
Nevo Aviv (Northwestern University)
Ohanian Lee (UCLA)
Pagliari Joseph (University of Chicago)
Papanikolaou Dimitris (Northwestern University)
Parker Jonathan (Northwestern University)
Paul Evans (Ohio State University)
Pejovich Svetozar (Steve) (Texas A&M University)
Peltzman Sam (University of Chicago)
Perri Fabrizio (University of Minnesota)
Phelan Christopher (University of Minnesota)
Piazzesi Monika (Stanford University)
Piskorski Tomasz (Columbia University)
Rampini Adriano (Duke University)
Reagan Patricia (Ohio State University)
Reich Michael (UC Berkeley)
Reuben Ernesto (Northwestern University)
Roberts Michael (University of Pennsylvania)
Robinson David (Duke University)
Rogers Michele (Northwestern University)
Rotella Elyce (Indiana University)
Ruud Paul (Vassar College)
Safford Sean (University of Chicago)
Sandbu Martin E. (University of Pennsylvania)
Sapienza Paola (Northwestern University)
Savor Pavel (University of Pennsylvania)
Scharfstein David (Harvard University)
Seim Katja (University of Pennsylvania)
Seru Amit (University of Chicago)
Shang-Jin Wei (Columbia University)
Shimer Robert (University of Chicago)
Shore Stephen H. (Johns Hopkins University)
Siegel Ron (Northwestern University)
Smith David C. (University of Virginia)
Smith Vernon L.(Chapman University- Nobel Laureate)
Sorensen Morten (Columbia University)
Spiegel Matthew (Yale University)
Stevenson Betsey (University of Pennsylvania)
Stokey Nancy (University of Chicago)
Strahan Philip (Boston College)
Strebulaev Ilya (Stanford University)
Sufi Amir (University of Chicago)
Tabarrok Alex (George Mason University)
Taylor Alan M. (UC Davis)
Thompson Tim (Northwestern University)
Tschoegl Adrian E. (University of Pennsylvania)
Uhlig Harald (University of Chicago)
Ulrich, Maxim (Columbia University)
Van Buskirk Andrew (University of Chicago)
Veronesi Pietro (University of Chicago)
Vissing-Jorgensen Annette (Northwestern University)
Wacziarg Romain (UCLA)
Weill Pierre-Olivier (UCLA)
Williamson Samuel H. (Miami University)
Witte Mark (Northwestern University)
Wolfers Justin (University of Pennsylvania)
Woutersen Tiemen (Johns Hopkins University)
Zingales Luigi (University of Chicago)
Zitzewitz Eric (Dartmouth College)

Liberals cry out for ‘Regulation!’

Government regulationsDemocratic party-tied websites are spouting much the same analysis of the current economic crisis, which is simply that in their point of view, capitalism is great, it just needs ‘regulation.’ Give us a break, People!

The US Capitalist System is greatly regulated and you guys backed a political party that helped regulate it, in league with the other party. Liberal Democratic Party voters seemingly want us to forget that their party has regulated The System for a century PLUS now! And once again, their regulation has produced chaos and uncertainly.

It takes a lot of gall to demand something that your politics have been doing all along, which is that we ‘regulate’ the economy! What is really being demanded now by your Party leadership is more tinkering through the same old regulations, instead of proposing something different. It is your regulation that is every bit as much the cause of where the US economic system is today, as under the regulation of the Republicans. Alan Greenspan was your dog as well as theirs!

The regulatory system was basically to have the companies police themselves, and this was a policy of the Democrats every much as much as it was of the Republicans. A capitalist supporting government will simply turn over all regulation to its own corporate leaders. To propose that a capitalist government do something else is utterly meaningless.

So shout out ‘Regulation’ all you want, and it will not lead to anything than what was already being done, and is being done at this moment. The thieves will regulate themselves unless that power is taken away from them, something that the Democratic Party utterly opposes.

ARD, Tent State surrogate for DNC cops

IVAW ARD march
DENVER- Accounts of the Wednesday march from the Colosseum to the DNC are only getting half the story. Can I recount my small part? We were at the Pepsi Center entrance, laying the groundwork for the arrival of the IVAW parade and became concerned when workers positioned large dump trucks to block the way, to corral the marchers into the fenced gauntlet traversing the Auraria campus.

When I caught up with the already diverted march, I found out the coordinators had been on the lookout for me. Legal observers informed me that marchers were being forewarned of a man with a green banner who would be trying to instigate trouble. The message was being spread as if coordinators had intercepted this information from police scanners. In reality this was deliberate disinformation being given them by their police liaisons. The common goal being to keep out of trouble.

Well it wasn’t disinformation, because I most definitely wanted to disrupt this surprising and disastrous turn. I sought to prevent the march from being led like sheep into a dead end. But the ARD collective had clearly promised an uneventful march, and they were bent on delivering it. At every turn, at every temptation, they policed the march so the police didn’t have to. Stay on the sidewalk, stay off the grass, go this way unless you want to be arrested, etc. Like overly cautious boy scouts.

Navigating the Auraria enclosures, the coordinator monkeys would circulate alongside their restless marchers admonishing them “Hey guys, let’s keep the focus: on the vets and off the fence.”
Bullhorn
So let me be less harsh in my criticism of the IVAW. A number of them are bright, well-motivated guys, but they are governed by committee decisions made by the predominant lessers, some about as daft as soldiers can get. On the Wednesday march too often the bullhorn was in the wrong hands. I have no sense yet of what their dressed-to-the-nines Marine official spokesman was thinking. But the other corrosive element in the event was mentioned in a comment to my previous post on this subject. Tent State/ARD.

Tent State idealists helped coordinate the Rage concert and the march. The parade monkeys who kept everyone in line were Tent State/ARD workers bent on civil disobedience minus any trace of disaffected incivility. Who do they think they are, telling angry constituents that they must accept their lot in the police state?

If Tent State has any role in the planned RNC protests, we must forewarn the activists in Minneapolis. They’re collaborator scum, every bit as fraudulent as the Democratic Party of good cop to the GOP bad cop. If we can salvage anything from our Debacle in Denver, it’s to ferret out these Quislings. Tent State, ARD, UFPJ, Code Pink and the Greens. Derelict saboteurs.

I love the spirit and wit of Code Pink, they show determination and stamina, but ultimately no savvy. Their I MISS AMERICA gag is dead on, but it’s a lament, isn’t it? She’s gone, their America. Where the occasion calls for drums, Code Pink would march us into battle to the beat of Kum ba yah.

Green Party-pooper insubordination more embarrassing than imaginable

And I thought I hade a vivid imagination. Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney has issued a press release detailing her explicit intention to participate in the Sunday DNC rally. The letter is very diplomatic but it spells out the ultimatum she was given by the Colorado Greens to desist. Cynthia McKinney for President Compelling reading. On a related note. Cindy Sheehan will also be joining the lineup. This represents a significant divergence from her close allies Medea Benjamin and UFPJ’s Leslie Cagan. It shouldn’t be that way.

If you’re not inclined to read McKinney’s letter, and I’ll add it’s as direct as her speeches, I can summarize the threats made and actions taken. Spoiler alert. For agreeing to speak at a rally organized by R-68: Resignation threatened. Fundraiser, place to stay, withdrawn. All scheduled engagements canceled. Assistance to get on Wyoming ballot, withdrawn. Every effort to remove her from Colorado ballot, threatened. McKinney was also informed she had been last choice candidate of Colorado delegation. So there.

Are we witnessing someone’s hissy-fit nervous self-immolation? Could be, but it packs the wallop of a suicide bomber. Local party gutted; bystanders, fellow Greens, burned; vital preparations annulled just months from the election. Third parties probably attract people who have difficulty with authority. In this case with irreparable consequence.

Cynthia McKinney & Rosa Clemente Announce Their Participation in Anti-war, Anti-human rights Abuse Events Before the DNC
August 14, 2008

As the United States activated Navy ships and the Air Force to begin an airlift of non-specified goods into the former Soviet state of Georgia, and military exercises began in the Persian Gulf near Iran, I received communications from certain individuals among the Colorado Greens who were organizing campaign support events there, suggesting that I not participate in an anti-war program being organized by other individuals in Colorado.

Perplexed, I began to do my research to understand the nature of the fissure that I seemed to be placing myself in the middle of. The communications to me about not participating in one of the scheduled events became more and more shrill. The events ran through August 26th. When the lineup of speakers, including Rosa and me, was announced for the events in question, I received multiple communications stating in various ways that the sender from the Green Party of Colorado, was on the verge of desperation over the matter. Within a few hours, I was reading messages stating that the Green Party of Colorado would be ruined if I participated in the End the Occupations/End the War march and rally slated to take place on the morning of August 24th on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol, or if Rosa participated in a Freedom March and Rally for Human Rights and Political Prisoners at Civic Center Park the following day.

An article appeared in a local Colorado newspaper stating that Rosa and I would not appear at the events for which we had been scheduled. Rosa responded to our Colorado Green Party contact that yes, indeed, we were appearing at the two events. Both Rosa and I then received messages demanding to know by a time certain what our plans were, and asserting that the Green Party of Colorado would be totally ruined if we associated with the group sponsoring the events. In addition, we were told that at least one resignation and sustaining membership would be tendered to the Party, and that Rosa and I could expect no support on the ground in Denver from the Green Party of Colorado, including a planned fundraiser and a place to stay.

Without receiving any additional response or information from either Rosa or I, the correspondent sent a message informing us that all Green Party of Colorado events previously scheduled for us had been canceled. Further, the message stated that ballot access petitioning by Green Party of Colorado would cease in neighboring Wyoming and that all efforts would be made to remove Rosa’s and my names from the ballot in Colorado. The message also noted that the Colorado delegation overwhelmingly supported Elaine Brown at the Green Party Convention.

With the e-mail messages flying “fast and furious,” I hope I have mentioned the highlights of this episode in somewhat chronological order. What Rosa and I would like to address now, is the ideological and rational order that produced this outcome. At the very first Green Party debate held in San Francisco earlier this year, I pleaded for unity of action and purpose as we face the challenges that confront us as a country. Rosa and I are proud to join with others who are sick and tired of war, occupation, human rights abuses, and the continued incarceration of our political prisoners. We are proud to join with others who are willing to do something about it. In the context of activities in Denver, that means cooperating with some organizations new to us and others with which Rosa and I have had a long-standing relationship. Let me explain some of those relationships.

I am proud to have received a Backbone Award from the Backbone Campaign, one of the co-participants of the anti-war, anti-occupation events in question, according to the organizers.

Rosa and I are pleased to have received the endorsement of M-1 of Dead Prez, who put out a video of endorsement and is rallying other conscious Hip Hop, Generation X voters to the Green Party with Rosa and I as its nominees. Rebel Diaz was on the stage with Rosa as she accepted her Green Party nomination for Vice President. Both Dead Prez and Rebel Diaz are participating in the events in question, according to the organizers.

Fred Hampton, Jr.’s mother, a victim of COINTELPRO, came to Georgia in the mid-1990s to help me gain reelection after a malicious redistricting case that went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Ward Churchill has traveled to my Congressional district to educate my former constituents on the COINTELPRO of yesterday and the COINTELPRO of today. Natsu Saito introduced me to other victims of COINTELPRO. I asked Kathleen Cleaver to co-author a report that was submitted to Mary Robinson, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights at the time of the World Conference Against Racism, on the unsolved murders of Black Panther Party members who were victims of COINTELPRO. Fred Hampton, Jr., Ward Churchill, Natsu Saito, and Kathleen Cleaver are all participating in the events in question, according to the organizers.

As a Member of Congress, I supported the release of all political prisoners and welcomed information from the American Indian Movement about Leonard Peltier. I have at many times in my political career been allied with the ACLU, and have always supported Pam and Ramona Africa and the MOVE Organization. The American Indian Movement of Colorado, King Downing of the ACLU, and Pam and Ramona Africa of MOVE are all participating in the events in question, according to the organizers.

Mumia Abu Jamal has endorsed the Power to the People Campaign and my Green Party candidacy. According to the organizers, Mumia will transmit a message to all of us participating in the events in question.

Finally, I have appeared on various stages with many Palestinians; I have proudly spoken at rallies organized by Larry Holmes. Debra Sweet with World Can’t Wait was among the very first to my knowledge to organize around impeachment as an imperative and I support hers and all other impeachment groups in their efforts. And finally, I have known Ben Manski for a long time as a socially conscious activist who is also a member of the Green Party. According to the organizers, a Palestinian refugee is slated to speak at the events in question, as well as Larry Holmes, Debra Sweet, and Ben Manski.

Rosa and I have not been given any rational, ideological, or strategically-acceptable reason by the Green Party of Colorado to dissociate ourselves from the movement that this country so desperately needs and that these individuals and organizations participating represent, as we all attempt to hold the Democratic Party accountable for its complicity in all of the crimes of the Bush Administration. Therefore Rosa and I will keep our appointments in Denver and we hope that the members of the Green Party of Colorado will attend our sessions and listen to what we have to say. I have faith that by taking principled stands against war and occupation, human rights abuse, the prison-industrial complex, and in support of freedom for political prisoners, the Green party will emerge stronger.

Cynthia McKinney
Green Party Nominee for President of the United States

Rosa Clemente
Green Party Nominee for Vice President of the United States

Denver Greens turn backs on candidate

Vote Green
Vote Green of course! Try to ignore the louses who presume to speak for them locally. First the Denver Greens fired off press releases insisting that Recreate 68 retract the announcement that Cynthia McKinney would be speaking at the Sunday antiwar rally. Now they’ve revised their initial statement, omitting the correction, saying only: “Nevertheless, the Green Party of Colorado is not in any way associated with Recreate ’68.”

So… are you going to tell your fellow greens, God Bless them, where they can come hear their presidential and vice-presidential candidates?

It’s encouraging that you are no longer sticking to your original invective:

“Both candidates, and the Green Party of Colorado, are refuting this announcement and are stating that neither candidate, nor the Green Party of Colorado, are in any way associated with Recreate ’68, nor will any of their candidates be speaking at or attending any event, nor are they in any way associated with the group Recreate ’68.”

But shouldn’t you retract your refutation?

No, the Green’s Claire Ryder won’t clarify the McKinney/Clemente appearance. She won’t correct the confusion she created, and she won’t temper disparagement of DNC protest organizers. No, but she will reiterate anew:

Let’s be real clear about this. The Green Party of Colorado, the Adams-Jeffco, Arapahoe and Denver Greens have absolutely no connection or affiliation with the group touting itself as ‘Recreate ’68’.

The problem is reversed with the Democrats. Those at the grassroots are activated by the best intentions. They are betrayed by the corporate top. In the case of the Greens, the candidates are about as bright and impressive as it gets, but the party dregs have their yard-sale mentality. They’ve got to deal with their neighbors who accuse them of spoiling the vote. I imagine it’s hard not to reassure your friends you will of course support Obama.

Oh, I’m sorry if I’ve confused what the Greens are about. Is it about supporting all green issues? Is it about backing greenish Dems? No doubt it has to be. But that’s not a political party.

If they won’t say it, I will! VOTE GREEN!

Global economic rapists are at it again

G8 protest
Why protest the G8 Summit July 7-9? Those hoodlums always look so determined. Here’s the rationale by the Emergency Exit Collective:

The 2008 G8 on Hokkaido, a Strategic Assessment
Emergency Exit Collective
Bristol, Mayday, 2008

The authors of this document are a collection of activists, scholars, and writers currently based in the United States and Western Europe who have gotten to know and work with each other in the movement against capitalist globalization. We’re writing this at the request of some members of No! G8 Action Japan, who asked us for a broad strategic analysis of the state of struggle as we see it, and particularly, of the role of the G8, what it represents, the dangers and opportunities that may lie hidden in the moment. It is in no sense programmatic. Mainly, it is an attempt to develop tools that we hope will be helpful for organizers, or for anyone engaged in the struggle against global capital.

I
It is our condition as human beings that we produce our lives in common.

II
Let us then try to see the world from the perspective of the planet’s commoners, taking the word in that sense: those whose most essential tradition is cooperation in the making and maintenance of human social life, yet who have had to do so under conditions of suffering and separation; deprived, ignored, devalued, divided into hierarchies, pitted against each other for our very physical survival. In one sense we are all commoners. But it’s equally true that just about everyone, at least in some ways, at some points, plays the role of the rulers—of those who expropriate, devalue and divide—or at the very least benefits from such divisions.

Obviously some do more than others. It is at the peak of this pyramid that we encounter groups like the G8.

III
The G8’s perspective is that of the aristocrats, the rulers: those who command and maintain that global machinery of violence that defends existing borders and lines of separation: whether national borders with their detention camps for migrants, or property regimes, with their prisons for the poor. They live by constantly claiming title to the products of others collective creativity and labour, and in thus doing they create the poor; they create scarcity in the midst of plenty, and divide us on a daily basis; they create financial districts that loot resources from across the world, and in thus doing they turn the spirit of human creativity into a spiritual desert; close or privatize parks, public water taps and libraries, hospitals, youth centers, universities, schools, public swimming pools, and instead endlessly build shopping malls that channels convivial life into a means of commodity circulation; work toward turning global ecological catastrophe into business opportunities.

These are the people who presume to speak in the name of the “international community” even as they hide in their gated communities or meet protected by phalanxes of riot cops. It is critical to bear in mind that the ultimate aim of their policies is never to create community but to introduce and maintain divisions that set common people at each other’s throats. The neoliberal project, which has been their main instrument for doing so for the last three decades, is premised on a constant effort either to uproot or destroy any communal or democratic system whereby ordinary people govern their own affairs or maintain common resources for the common good, or, to reorganize each tiny remaining commons as an isolated node in a market system in which livelihood is never guaranteed, where the gain of one community must necessarily be at the expense of others. Insofar as they are willing to appeal to high-minded principles of common humanity, and encourage global cooperation, only and exactly to the extent that is required to maintain this system of universal competition.

IV
At the present time, the G8—the annual summit of the leaders of “industrial democracies”—is the key coordinative institution charged with the task of maintaining this neoliberal project, or of reforming it, revising it, adapting it to the changing condition of planetary class relations. The role of the G8 has always been to define the broad strategic horizons through which the next wave of planetary capital accumulation can occur. This means that its main task is to answer the question of how 3?4 in the present conditions of multiple crises and struggles 3?4 to subordinate social relations among the producing commoners of the planet to capital’s supreme value: profit.

V
Originally founded as the G7 in 1975 as a means of coordinating financial strategies for dealing with the ‘70s energy crisis, then expanded after the end of the Cold War to include Russia, its currently face a moment of profound impasse in the governance of planetary class relations: the greatest since the ‘70s energy crisis itself.

VI
The ‘70s energy crisis represented the final death-pangs of what might be termed the Cold War settlement, shattered by a quarter century of popular struggle. It’s worth returning briefly to this history.

The geopolitical arrangements put in place after World War II were above all designed to forestall the threat of revolution. In the immediate wake of the war, not only did much of the world lie in ruins, most of world’s population had abandoned any assumption about the inevitability of existing social arrangements. The advent of the Cold War had the effect of boxing movements for social change into a bipolar straightjacket. On the one hand, the former Allied and Axis powers that were later to unite in the G7 (the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Japan)—the “industrialized democracies”, as they like to call themselves—engaged in a massive project of co-optation. Their governments continued the process, begun in the ‘30s, of taking over social welfare institutions that had originally been created by popular movements (from insurance schemes to public libraries), even to expand them, on condition that they now be managed by state-appointed bureaucracies rather than by those who used them, buying off unions and the working classes more generally with policies meant to guarantee high wages, job security and the promise of educational advance—all in exchange for political loyalty, productivity increases and wage divisions within national and planetary working class itself. The Sino-Soviet bloc—which effectively became a kind of junior partner within the overall power structure, and its allies remained to trap revolutionary energies into the task of reproducing similar bureaucracies elsewhere. Both the US and USSR secured their dominance after the war by refusing to demobilize, instead locking the planet in a permanent threat of nuclear annihilation, a terrible vision of absolute cosmic power.

VII
Almost immediately, though, this arrangement was challenged by a series of revolts from those whose work was required to maintain the system, but who were, effectively, left outside the deal: first, peasants and the urban poor in the colonies and former colonies of the Global South, next, disenfranchised minorities in the home countries (in the US, the Civil Rights movement, then Black Power), and finally and most significantly, by the explosion of the women’s movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—the revolt of that majority of humanity whose largely unremunerated labor made the very existence “the economy” possible. This appears to have been the tipping point.

VIII
The problem was that the Cold War settlement was never meant to include everyone. It by definition couldn’t. Once matters reached tipping point, then, the rulers scotched the settlement. All deals were off. The oil shock was first edge of the counter-offensive, breaking the back of existing working class organizations, driving home the message that there was nothing guaranteed about prosperity. Under the aegis of the newly hatched G7, this counter-offensive involved a series of interwoven strategies that were later to give rise to what is known as neoliberalism.

IX
These strategies resulted in what came to be known as “Structural Adjustment” both in the North and in the South, accompanied by trade and financial liberalization. This, in turn, made possible crucial structural changes in our planetary production in common extending the role of the market to discipline our lives and divide us into more and more polarized wage hierarchy. This involved:

· In the immediate wake of ‘70s oil shock, petrodollars were recycled from OPEC into Northern banks that then lent them, at extortionate rates of interest, to developing countries of the Global South. This was the origin of the famous “Third World Debt Crisis.” The existence of this debt allowed institutions like the IMF to impose its monetarist orthodoxy on most of the planet for roughly twenty years, in the process, stripping away most of even those modest social protections that had been won by the world’s poor—large numbers of whom were plunged into a situation of absolute desperation.

· It also opened a period of new enclosures through the capitalist imposition of structural adjustment policies, manipulation of environmental and social catastrophes like war, or for that matter through the authoritarian dictates of “socialist” regimes. Through such means, large sections of the world’s population have over the past thirty years been dispossessed from resources previously held in common, either by dint of long traditions, or as the fruits of past struggles and past settlements.

· Through financial deregulation and trade liberalization, neoliberal capital, which emerged from the G7 strategies to deal with the 1970s crisis aimed thus at turning the “class war” in communities, factories, offices, streets and fields against the engine of competition, into a planetary “civil war”, pitting each community of commoners against every other community of commoners.

· Neoliberal capital has done this by imposing an ethos of “efficiency” and rhetoric of “lowering the costs of production” applied so broadly that mechanisms of competition have come to pervade every sphere of life. In fact these terms are euphemisms, for a more fundamental demand: that capital be exempt from taking any reduction in profit to finance the costs of reproduction of human bodies and their social and natural environments (which it does not count as costs) and which are, effectively, “exernalized” onto communities and nature.

· The enclosure of resources and entitlements won in previous generations of struggles both in the North and the South, in turn, created the conditions for increasing the wage hierarchies (both global and local), by which commoners work for capital—wage hierarchies reproduced economically through pervasive competition, but culturally, through male dominance, xenophobia and racism. These wage gaps, in turn, made it possible to reduce the value of Northern workers’ labour power, by introducing commodities that enter in their wage basket at a fraction of what their cost might otherwise have been. The planetary expansion of sweatshops means that American workers (for example) can buy cargo pants or lawn-mowers made in Cambodia at Walmart, or buy tomatoes grown by undocumented Mexican workers in California, or even, in many cases, hire Jamaican or Filipina nurses to take care of children and aged grandparents at such low prices, that their employers have been able to lower real wages without pushing most of them into penury. In the South, meanwhile, this situation has made it possible to discipline new masses of workers into factories and assembly lines, fields and offices, thus extending enormously capital’s reach in defining the terms—the what, the how, the how much—of social production.

· These different forms of enclosures, both North and South, mean that commoners have become increasingly dependent on the market to reproduce their livelihoods, with less power to resist the violence and arrogance of those whose priorities is only to seek profit, less power to set a limit to the market discipline running their lives, more prone to turn against one another in wars with other commoners who share the same pressures of having to run the same competitive race, but not the same rights and the same access to the wage. All this has meant a generalized state of precarity, where nothing can be taken for granted.

X
In turn, this manipulation of currency and commodity flows constituting neoliberal globalization became the basis for the creation of the planet’s first genuine global bureaucracy.

· This was multi-tiered, with finance capital at the peak, then the ever-expanding trade bureaucracies (IMF, WTO, EU, World Bank, etc), then transnational corporations, and finally, the endless varieties of NGOs that proliferated throughout the period—almost all of which shared the same neoliberal orthodoxy, even as they substituted themselves for social welfare functions once reserved for states.

· The existence of this overarching apparatus, in turn, allowed poorer countries previously under the control of authoritarian regimes beholden to one or another side in the Cold War to adopt “democratic” forms of government. This did allow a restoration of formal civil liberties, but very little that could really merit the name of democracy (the rule of the “demos”, i.e., of the commoners). They were in fact constitutional republics, and the overwhelming trend during the period was to strip legislatures, that branch of government most open to popular pressure, of most of their powers, which were increasingly shifted to the executive and judicial branches, even as these latter, in turn, largely ended up enacting policies developed overseas, by global bureaucrats.

· This entire bureaucratic arrangement was justified, paradoxically enough, by an ideology of extreme individualism. On the level of ideas, neoliberalism relied on a systematic cooptation of the themes of popular struggle of the ‘60s: autonomy, pleasure, personal liberation, the rejection of all forms of bureaucratic control and authority. All these were repackaged as the very essence of capitalism, and the market reframed as a revolutionary force of liberation.

· The entire arrangement, in turn, was made possible by a preemptive attitude towards popular struggle. The breaking of unions and retreat of mass social movements from the late ‘70s onwards was only made possible by a massive shift of state resources into the machinery of violence: armies, prisons and police (secret and otherwise) and an endless variety of private “security services”, all with their attendant propaganda machines, which tended to increase even as other forms of social spending were cut back, among other things absorbing increasing portions of the former proletariat, making the security apparatus an increasingly large proportion of total social spending. This approach has been very successful in holding back mass opposition to capital in much of the world (especially West Europe and North America), and above all, in making it possible to argue there are no viable alternatives. But in doing so, has created strains on the system so profound it threatens to undermine it entirely.

XI
The latter point deserves elaboration. The element of force is, on any number of levels, the weak point of the system. This is not only on the constitutional level, where the question of how to integrate the emerging global bureaucratic apparatus, and existing military arrangements, has never been resolved. It is above all an economic problem. It is quite clear that the maintenance of elaborate security machinery is an absolute imperative of neoliberalism. One need only observe what happened with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe: where one might have expected the Cold War victors to demand the dismantling of the army, secret police and secret prisons, and to maintain and develop the existing industrial base, in fact, what they did was absolutely the opposite: in fact, the only part of the industrial base that has managed fully to maintain itself has been the parts required to maintained the security apparatus itself! Critical too is the element of preemption: the governing classes in North America, for example, are willing to go to almost unimaginable lengths to ensure social movements never feel they are accomplishing anything. The current Gulf War is an excellent example: US military operations appear to be organized first and foremost to be protest-proof, to ensure that what happened in Vietnam (mass mobilization at home, widespread revolt within the army overseas) could never be repeated. This means above all that US casualties must always be kept to a minimum. The result are rules of engagement, and practices like the use of air power within cities ostensibly already controlled by occupation forces, so obviously guaranteed to maximize the killing of innocents and galvanizing hatred against the occupiers that they ensure the war itself cannot be won. Yet this approach can be taken as the very paradigm for neoliberal security regimes. Consider security arrangements around trade summits, where police are so determined prevent protestors from achieving tactical victories that they are often willing to effectively shut down the summits themselves. So too in overall strategy. In North America, such enormous resources are poured into the apparatus of repression, militarization, and propaganda that class struggle, labor action, mass movements seem to disappear entirely. It is thus possible to claim we have entered a new age where old conflicts are irrelevant. This is tremendously demoralizing of course for opponents of the system; but those running the system seem to find that demoralization so essential they don’t seem to care that the resultant apparatus (police, prisons, military, etc) is, effectively, sinking the entire US economy under its dead weight.

XII
The current crisis is not primarily geopolitical in nature. It is a crisis of neoliberalism itself. But it takes place against the backdrop of profound geopolitical realignments. The decline of North American power, both economic and geopolitical has been accompanied by the rise of Northeast Asia (and to a increasing extent, South Asia as well). While the Northeast Asian region is still divided by painful Cold War cleavages—the fortified lines across the Taiwan straits and at the 38th parallel in Korea…—the sheer realities of economic entanglement can be expected to lead to a gradual easing of tensions and a rise to global hegemony, as the region becomes the new center of gravity of the global economy, of the creation of new science and technology, ultimately, of political and military power. This may, quite likely, be a gradual and lengthy process. But in the meantime, very old patterns are rapidly reemerging: China reestablishing relations with ancient tributary states from Korea to Vietnam, radical Islamists attempting to reestablish their ancient role as the guardians of finance and piety at the in the Central Asian caravan routes and across Indian Ocean, every sort of Medieval trade diaspora reemerging… In the process, old political models remerge as well: the Chinese principle of the state transcending law, the Islamic principle of a legal order transcending any state. Everywhere, we see the revival too of ancient forms of exploitation—feudalism, slavery, debt peonage—often entangled in the newest forms of technology, but still echoing all the worst abuses of the Middle Ages. A scramble for resources has begun, with US occupation of Iraq and saber-rattling throughout the surrounding region clearly meant (at least in part) to place a potential stranglehold the energy supply of China; Chinese attempts to outflank with its own scramble for Africa, with increasing forays into South America and even Eastern Europe. The Chinese invasion into Africa (not as of yet at least a military invasion, but already involving the movement of hundreds of thousands of people), is changing the world in ways that will probably be felt for centuries. Meanwhile, the nations of South America, the first victims of the “Washington consensus” have managed to largely wriggle free from the US colonial orbit, while the US, its forces tied down in the Middle East, has for the moment at least abandoned it, is desperately struggling to keep its grip Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean—its own “near abroad”.

XIII
In another age all this might have led to war—that is, not just colonial occupations, police actions, or proxy wars (which are obviously already taking place), but direct military confrontations between the armies of major powers. It still could; accidents happen; but there is reason to believe that, when it comes to moments of critical decision, the loyalties of the global elites are increasingly to each other, and not to the national entities for whom they claim to speak. There is some compelling evidence for this.

Take for example when the US elites panicked at the prospect of the massive budget surpluses of the late 1990s. As Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve at the time warned, if these were allowed to stand they would have flooded government coffers with so many trillions of dollars that it could only have lead to some form of creeping socialism, even, he predicted, to the government acquiring “equity stakes” in key US corporations. The more excitable of capitalism’s managers actually began contemplating scenarios where the capitalist system itself would be imperiled. The only possible solution was massive tax cuts; these were duly enacted, and did indeed manage to turn surpluses into enormous deficits, financed by the sale of treasury bonds to Japan and China. Conditions have thus now reached a point where it is beginning to look as if the most likely long term outcome for the US (its technological and industrial base decaying, sinking under the burden of its enormous security spending) will be to end up serve as junior partner and military enforcer for East Asia capital. Its rulers, or at least a significant proportion of them, would prefer to hand global hegemony to the rulers of China (provided the latter abandon Communism) than to return to any sort of New Deal compromise with their “own” working classes.

A second example lies in the origins of what has been called the current “Bretton Woods II” system of currency arrangements, which underline a close working together of some “surplus” and “deficit” countries within global circuits. The macroeconomic manifestation of the planetary restructuring outlined in XIX underlines both the huge US trade deficit that so much seem to worry many commentators, and the possibility to continually generate new debt instruments like the one that has recently resulted in the sub-prime crisis. The ongoing recycling of accumulated surplus of countries exporting to the USA such as China and oil producing countries is what has allowed financiers to create new credit instruments in the USA. Hence, the “deal” offered by the masters in the United States to its commoners has been this: ‘you, give us a relative social peace and accept capitalist markets as the main means through which you reproduce your own livelihoods, and we will give you access to cheaper consumption goods, access to credit for buying cars and homes, and access to education, health, pensions and social security through the speculative means of stock markets and housing prices.’ Similar compromises were reached in all the G8 countries.

Meanwhile, there is the problem of maintaining any sort of social peace with the hundreds of millions of unemployed, underemployed, dispossessed commoners currently swelling the shanty-towns of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a result of ongoing enclosures (which have speeded up within China and India in particular, even as “structural adjustment policies” in Africa and Latin America have been derailed). Any prospect of maintaining peace in these circumstances would ordinarily require either extremely high rates of economic growth—which globally have not been forthcoming, since outside of China, growth rates in the developing world have been much lower than they were in the ‘50s, ‘60s, or even ‘70s—or extremely high levels of repression, lest matters descend into rebellion or generalized civil war. The latter has of course occurred in many parts of the world currently neglected by capital, but in favored regions, such as the coastal provinces of China, or “free trade” zones of India, Egypt, or Mexico, commoners are being offered a different sort of deal: industrial employment at wages that, while very low by international standards, are still substantially higher than anything currently obtainable in the impoverished countryside; and above all the promise, through the intervention of Western markets and (privatized) knowledge, of gradually improving conditions of living. While over the least few years wages in many such areas seem to be growing, thanks to the intensification of popular struggles, such gains are inherently vulnerable: the effect of recent food inflation has been to cut real wages back dramatically—and threaten millions with starvation.

What we really want to stress here, though, is that the long-term promise being offered to the South is just as untenable as the idea that US or European consumers can indefinitely expand their conditions of life through the use of mortgages and credit cards.

What’s being offered the new dispossessed is a transposition of the American dream. The idea is that the lifestyle and consumption patterns of existing Chinese, Indian, or Brazilian or Zambian urban middle classes (already modeled on Northern ones) will eventually become available to the children of today’s miners, maquila or plantation laborers, until, ultimately, everyone on earth is brought up to roughly the same level of consumption. Put in these terms, the argument is absurd. The idea that all six billion of us can become “middle class” is obviously impossible. First of all there is a simple problem of resources. It doesn’t matter how many bottles we recycle or how energy efficient are the light bulbs we use, there’s just no way the earth’s ecosystem can accommodate six billion people driving in private cars to work in air-conditioned cubicles before periodically flying off to vacation in Acapulco or Tahiti. To maintain the style of living and producing in common we now identify with “middle classness” on a planetary scale would require several additional planets.

This much has been pointed out repeatedly. But the second point is no less important. What this vision of betterment ultimately proposes is that it would be possible to build universal prosperity and human dignity on a system of wage labor. This is fantasy. Historically, wages are always the contractual face for system of command and degradation, and a means of disguising exploitation: expressing value for work only on condition of stealing value without work— and there is no reason to believe they could ever be anything else. This is why, as history has also shown, human beings will always avoid working for wages if they have any other viable option. For a system based on wage labor to come into being, such options must therefore be made unavailable. This in turn means that such systems are always premised on structures of exclusion: on the prior existence of borders and property regimes maintained by violence. Finally, historically, it has always proved impossible to maintain any sizeable class of wage-earners in relative prosperity without basing that prosperity, directly or indirectly, on the unwaged labor of others—on slave-labor, women’s domestic labor, the forced labor of colonial subjects, the work of women and men in peasant communities halfway around the world—by people who are even more systematically exploited, degraded, and immiserated. For that reason, such systems have always depended not only on setting wage-earners against each other by inciting bigotry, prejudice, hostility, resentment, violence, but also by inciting the same between men and women, between the people of different continents (“race”), between the generations.

From the perspective of the whole, then, the dream of universal middle class “betterment” must necessarily be an illusion constructed in between the Scylla of ecological disaster, and the Charybdis of poverty, detritus, and hatred: precisely, the two pillars of today’s strategic impasse faced by the G8.

XIV
How then do we describe the current impasse of capitalist governance?

To a large degree, it is the effect of a sudden and extremely effective upswing of popular resistance—one all the more extraordinary considering the huge resources that had been invested in preventing such movements from breaking out.

On the one hand, the turn of the millennium saw a vast and sudden flowering of new anti-capitalist movements, a veritable planetary uprising against neoliberalism by commoners in Latin America, India, Africa, Asia, across the North Atlantic world’s former colonies and ultimately, within the cities of the former colonial powers themselves. As a result, the neoliberal project lies shattered. What came to be called the “anti-globalization” movement took aim at the trade bureaucracies—the obvious weak link in the emerging institutions of global administration—but it was merely the most visible aspect of this uprising. It was however an extraordinarily successful one. Not only was the WTO halted in its tracks, but all major trade initiatives (MAI, FTAA…) scuttled. The World Bank was hobbled and the power of the IMF over most of the world’s population, effectively, destroyed. The latter, once the terror of the Global South, is now a shattered remnant of its former self, reduced to selling off its gold reserves and desperately searching for a new global mission.

In many ways though spectacular street actions were merely the most visible aspects of much broader changes: the resurgence of labor unions, in certain parts of the world, the flowering of economic and social alternatives on the grassroots levels in every part of the world, from new forms of direct democracy of indigenous communities like El Alto in Bolivia or self-managed factories in Paraguay, to township movements in South Africa, farming cooperatives in India, squatters’ movements in Korea, experiments in permaculture in Europe or “Islamic economics” among the urban poor in the Middle East. We have seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid association, most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the global media, often have almost no ideological unity and which may not even be aware of each other’s existence, but nonetheless share a common desire to mark a practical break with capitalism, and which, most importantly, hold out the prospect of creating new forms of planetary commons that can—and in some cases are—beginning to knit together to provide the outlines of genuine alternative vision of what a non-capitalist future might look like.

The reaction of the world’s rulers was predictable. The planetary uprising had occurred during a time when the global security apparatus was beginning to look like it lacked a purpose, when the world threatened to return to a state of peace. The response—aided of course, by the intervention of some of the US’ former Cold War allies, reorganized now under the name of Al Qaeda—was a return to global warfare. But this too failed. The “war on terror”—as an attempt to impose US military power as the ultimate enforcer of the neoliberal model—has collapsed as well in the face of almost universal popular resistance. This is the nature of their “impasse”.

At the same time, the top-heavy, inefficient US model of military capitalism—a model created in large part to prevent the dangers of social movements, but which the US has also sought to export to some degree simply because of its profligacy and inefficiency, to prevent the rest of the world from too rapidly overtaking them—has proved so wasteful of resources that it threatens to plunge the entire planet into ecological and social crisis. Drought, disaster, famines, combine with endless campaigns of enclosure, foreclosure, to cast the very means of survival—food, water, shelter—into question for the bulk of the world’s population.

XV
In the rulers’ language the crisis understood, first and foremost, as a problem of regulating cash flows, of reestablishing, as they like to put it, a new “financial architecture”. Obviously they are aware of the broader problems. Their promotional literature has always been full of it. From the earliest days of the G7, through to the days after the Cold War, when Russia was added as a reward for embracing capitalism, they have always claimed that their chief concerns include

· the reduction of global poverty

· sustainable environmental policies

· sustainable global energy policies

· stable financial institutions governing global trade and currency transactions

If one were to take such claims seriously, it’s hard to see their overall performance as anything but a catastrophic failure. At the present moment, all of these are in crisis mode: there are food riots, global warming, peak oil, and the threat of financial meltdown, bursting of credit bubbles, currency crises, a global credit crunch. [**Failure on this scale however, opens opportunities for the G8 themselves, as summit of the global bureaucracy, to reconfigure the strategic horizon. Therefore, it’s always with the last of these that they are especially concerned. ]The real problem, from the perspective of the G8, is one of reinvestment: particularly, of the profits of the energy sector, but also, now, of emerging industrial powers outside the circle of the G8 itself. The neoliberal solution in the ‘70s had been to recycle OPEC’s petrodollars into banks that would use it much of the world into debt bondage, imposing regimes of fiscal austerity that, for the most part, stopped development (and hence, the emergence potential rivals) in its tracks. By the ‘90s, however, much East Asia in particular had broken free of this regime. Attempts to reimpose IMF-style discipline during the Asian financial crisis of 1997 largely backfired. So a new compromise was found, the so-called Bretton Woods II: to recycle the profits from the rapidly expanding industrial economies of East Asia into US treasury debt, artificially supporting the value of the dollar and allowing a continual stream of cheap exports that, aided by the US housing bubble, kept North Atlantic economies afloat and buy off workers there with cheap oil and even cheaper consumer goods even as real wages shrank. This solution however soon proved a temporary expedient. Bush regime’s attempt to lock it in by the invasion of Iraq, which was meant to lead to the forced privatization of Iraqi oil fields, and, ultimately, of the global oil industry as a whole, collapsed in the face of massive popular resistance (just as Saddam Hussein’s attempt to introduce neoliberal reforms in Iraq had failed when he was still acting as American deputy in the ‘90s). Instead, the simultaneous demand for petroleum for both Chinese manufacturers and American consumers caused a dramatic spike in the price of oil. What’s more, rents from oil and gas production are now being used to pay off the old debts from the ‘80s (especially in Asia and Latin America, which have by now paid back their IMF debts entirely), and—increasingly—to create state-managed Sovereign Wealth Funds that have largely replaced institutions like the IMF as the institutions capable of making long-term strategic investments. The IMF, purposeless, tottering on the brink of insolvency, has been reduced to trying to come up with “best practices” guidelines for fund managers working for governments in Singapore, Seoul, and Abu Dhabi.

There can be no question this time around of freezing out countries like China, India, or even Brazil. The question for capital’s planners, rather, is how to channel these new concentrations of capital in such a way that they reinforce the logic of the system instead of undermining it.

XVI
How can this be done? This is where appeals to universal human values, to common membership in an “international community” come in to play. “We all must pull together for the good of the planet,” we will be told. The money must be reinvested “to save the earth.”

To some degree this was always the G8 line: this is a group has been making an issue of climate change since 1983. Doing so was in one sense a response to the environmental movements of the ‘70s and ‘80s. The resultant emphasis on biofuels and “green energy” was from their point of view, the perfect strategy, seizing on an issue that seemed to transcend class, appropriating ideas and issues that emerged from social movements (and hence coopting and undermining especially their radical wings), and finally, ensuring such initiatives are pursued not through any form of democratic self-organization but “market mechanisms”—to effective make the sense of public interest productive for capitalism.

What we can expect now is a two-pronged attack. On the one hand, they will use the crisis to attempt to reverse the gains of past social movements: to put nuclear energy back on the table to deal with the energy crisis and global warming, or genetically modified foods to deal with the food crisis. Prime Minister Fukuda, the host of the current summit, for example, is already proposing the nuclear power is the “solution” to the global warming crisis, even as the German delegation resists. On the other, and even more insidiously, they will try once again to co-opt the ideas and solutions that have emerged from our struggles as a way of ultimately undermining them. Appropriating such ideas is simply what rulers do: the bosses brain is always under the workers’ hat. But the ultimate aim is to answer the intensification of class struggle, of the danger of new forms of democracy, with another wave of enclosures, to restore a situation where commoners’ attempts to create broader regimes of cooperation are stymied, and people are plunged back into mutual competition.

We can already see the outlines of how this might be done. There are already suggestions that Sovereign Wealth Funds put aside a certain (miniscule) proportion of their money for food aid, but only as tied to a larger project of global financial restructuring. The World Bank, largely bereft of its earlier role organizing dams and pipe-lines across the world, has been funding development in China’s poorer provinces, freeing the Chinese government to carry out similar projects in Southeast Asia, Africa, and even Latin America (where, of course, they cannot effectively be held to any sort of labor or environmental standards). There is the possibility of a new class deal in China itself, whose workers can be allowed higher standards of living if new low wage zones are created elsewhere—for instance, Africa (the continent where struggles over maintaining the commons have been most intense in current decades)—with the help of Chinese infrastructural projects. Above of all, money will be channeled into addressing climate change, into the development of alternative energy, which will require enormous investments, in such a way as to ensure that whatever energy resources do become important in this millennium, they can never be democratized—that the emerging notion of a petroleum commons, that energy resources are to some degree a common patrimony meant primarily to serve the community as a whole, that is beginning to develop in parts of the Middle East and South America—not be reproduced in whatever comes next.

Since this will ultimately have to be backed up by the threat of violence, the G8 will inevitably have to struggle with how to (yet again) rethink enforcement mechanisms. The latest move , now that the US “war on terror” paradigm has obviously failed, would appear to be a return to NATO, part of a reinvention of the “European security architecture” being proposed at the upcoming G8 meetings in Italy in 2009 on the 60th anniversary of NATO’s foundation—but part of a much broader movement of the militarization of social conflict, projecting potential resource wars, demographic upheavals resulting from climate change, and radical social movements as potential military problems to be resolved by military means. Opposition to this new project is already shaping up as the major new European mobilization for the year following the current G-8.

XVII
While the G-8 sit at the pinnacle of a system of violence, their preferred idiom is monetary. Their impulse whenever possible is to translate all problems into money, financial structures, currency flows—a substance whose movements they carefully monitor and control.

Money, on might say, is their poetry—a poetry whose letters are written in our blood. It is their highest and most abstract form of expression, their way of making statements about the ultimate truth of the world, even if it operates in large part by making things disappear. How else could it be possible to argue—no, to assume as a matter of common sense—that the love, care, and concern of a person who tends to the needs of children, teaching, minding, helping them to become decent , thoughtful, human beings, or who grows and prepares food, is worth ten thousand times less than someone who spends the same time designing a brand logo, moving abstract blips across a globe, or denying others health care.

The role of money however has changed profoundly since 1971 when the dollar was delinked from gold. This has created a profound realignment of temporal horizons. Once money could be said to be primarily congealed results of past profit and exploitation. As capital, it was dead labor. Millions of indigenous Americans and Africans had their lives pillaged and destroyed in the gold mines in order to be rendered into value. The logic of finance capital, of credit structures, certainly always existed as well (it is at least as old as industrial capital; possibly older), but in recent decades these logic of financial capital has come to echo and re-echo on every level of our lives. In the UK 97% of money in circulation is debt, in the US, 98%. Governments run on deficit financing, wealthy economies on consumer debt, the poor are enticed with microcredit schemes, debts are packaged and repackaged in complex financial derivatives and traded back and forth. Debt however is simply a promise, the expectation of future profit; capital thus increasingly brings the future into the present—a future that, it insists, must always be the same in nature, even if must also be greater in magnitude, since of course the entire system is premised on continual growth. Where once financiers calculated and traded in the precise measure of our degradation, having taken everything from us and turned it into money, now money has flipped, to become the measure of our future degradation—at the same time as it binds us to endlessly working in the present.

The result is a strange moral paradox. Love, loyalty, honor, commitment—to our families, for example, which means to our shared homes, which means to the payment of monthly mortgage debts—becomes a matter of maintaining loyalty to a system which ultimately tells us that such commitments are not a value in themselves. This organization of imaginative horizons, which ultimately come down to a colonization of the very principle of hope, has come to supplement the traditional evocation of fear (of penury, homelessness, joblessness, disease and death). This colonization paralyzes any thought of opposition to a system that almost everyone ultimately knows is not only an insult to everything they really cherish, but a travesty of genuine hope, since, because no system can really expand forever on a finite planet, everyone is aware on some level that in the final analysis they are dealing with a kind of global pyramid scheme, what we are ultimately buying and selling is the real promise of global social and environmental apocalypse.

XVIII
Finally then we come to the really difficult, strategic questions. Where are the vulnerabilities? Where is hope? Obviously we have no certain answers here. No one could. But perhaps the proceeding analysis opens up some possibilities that anti-capitalist organizers might find useful to explore.

One thing that might be helpful is to rethink our initial terms. Consider communism. We are used to thinking of it as a total system that perhaps existed long ago, and to the desire to bring about an analogous system at some point in the future—usually, at whatever cost. It seems to us that dreams of communist futures were never purely fantasies; they were simply projections of existing forms of cooperation, of commoning, by which we already make the world in the present. Communism in this sense is already the basis of almost everything, what brings people and societies into being, what maintains them, the elemental ground of all human thought and action. There is absolutely nothing utopian here. What is utopian, really, is the notion that any form of social organization, especially capitalism, could ever exist that was not entirely premised on the prior existence of communism. If this is true, the most pressing question is simply how to make that power visible, to burst forth, to become the basis for strategic visions, in the face of a tremendous and antagonistic power committed to destroying it—but at the same time, ensuring that despite the challenge they face, they never again become entangled with forms of violence of their own that make them the basis for yet another tawdry elite. After all, the solidarity we extend to one another, is it not itself a form of communism? And is it not so above because it is not coerced?

Another thing that might be helpful is to rethink our notion of crisis. There was a time when simply describing the fact that capitalism was in a state of crisis, driven by irreconcilable contradictions, was taken to suggest that it was heading for a cliff. By now, it seems abundantly clear that this is not the case. Capitalism is always in a crisis. The crisis never goes away. Financial markets are always producing bubbles of one sort or another; those bubbles always burst, sometimes catastrophically; often entire national economies collapse, sometimes the global markets system itself begins to come apart. But every time the structure is reassembled. Slowly, painfully, dutifully, the pieces always end up being put back together once again.

Perhaps we should be asking: why?

In searching for an answer, it seems to us, we might also do well to put aside another familiar habit of radical thought: the tendency to sort the world into separate levels—material realities, the domain of ideas or “consciousness”, the level of technologies and organizations of violence—treating these as if these were separate domains that each work according to separate logics, and then arguing which “determines” which. In fact they cannot be disentangled. A factory may be a physical thing, but the ownership of a factory is a social relation, a legal fantasy that is based partly on the belief that law exists, and partly on the existence of armies and police. Armies and police on the other hand exist partly because of factories providing them with guns, vehicles, and equipment, but also, because those carrying the guns and riding in the vehicles believe they are working for an abstract entity they call “the government”, which they love, fear, and ultimately, whose existence they take for granted by a kind of faith, since historically, those armed organizations tend to melt away immediately the moment they lose faith that the government actually exists. Obviously exactly the same can be said of money. It’s value is constantly being produced by eminently material practices involving time clocks, bank machines, mints, and transatlantic computer cables, not to mention love, greed, and fear, but at the same time, all this too rests on a kind of faith that all these things will continue to interact in more or less the same way. It is all very material, but it also reflects a certain assumption of eternity: the reason that the machine can always be placed back together is, simply, because everyone assumes it must. This is because they cannot realistically imagine plausible alternatives; they cannot imagine plausible alternatives because of the extraordinarily sophisticated machinery of preemptive violence that ensure any such alternatives are uprooted or contained (even if that violence is itself organized around a fear that itself rests on a similar form of faith.) One cannot even say it’s circular. It’s more a kind of endless, unstable spiral. To subvert the system is then, to intervene in such a way that the whole apparatus begins to spin apart.

XIX
It appears to us that one key element here—one often neglected in revolutionary strategy—is the role of the global middle classes. This is a class that, much though it varies from country (in places like the US and Japan, overwhelming majorities consider themselves middle class; in, say, Cambodia or Zambia, only very small percentages), almost everywhere provides the key constituency of the G8 outside of the ruling elite themselves. It has become a truism, an article of faith in itself in global policy circles, that national middle class is everywhere the necessary basis for democracy. In fact, middle classes are rarely much interested in democracy in any meaningful sense of that word (that is, of the self-organization or self-governance of communities). They tend to be quite suspicious of it. Historically, middle classes have tended to encourage the establishment of constitutional republics with only limited democratic elements (sometimes, none at all). This is because their real passion is for a “betterment”, for the prosperity and advance of conditions of life for their children—and this betterment, since it is as noted above entirely premised on structures of exclusion, requires “security”. Actually the middle classes depend on security on every level: personal security, social security (various forms of government support, which even when it is withdrawn from the poor tends to be maintained for the middle classes), security against any sudden or dramatic changes in the nature of existing institutions. Thus, politically, the middle classes are attached not to democracy (which, especially in its radical forms, might disrupt all this), but to the rule of law. In the political sense, then, being “middle class” means existing outside the notorious “state of exception” to which the majority of the world’s people are relegated. It means being able to see a policeman and feel safer, not even more insecure. This would help explain why within the richest countries, the overwhelming majority of the population will claim to be “middle class” when speaking in the abstract, even if most will also instantly switch back to calling themselves “working class” when talking about their relation to their boss.

That rule of law, in turn, allows them to live in that temporal horizon where the market and other existing institutions (schools, governments, law firms, real estate brokerages…) can be imagined as lasting forever in more or less the same form. The middle classes can thus be defined as those who live in the eternity of capitalism. (The elites don’t; they live in history, they don’t assume things will always be the same. The disenfranchized don’t; they don’t have the luxury; they live in a state of precarity where little or nothing can safely be assumed.) Their entire lives are based on assuming that the institutional forms they are accustomed to will always be the same, for themselves and their grandchildren, and their “betterment” will be proportional to the increase in the level of monetary wealth and consumption. This is why every time global capital enters one of its periodic crises, every time banks collapse, factories close, and markets prove unworkable, or even, when the world collapses in war, the managers and dentists will tend to support any program that guarantees the fragments will be dutifully pieced back together in roughly the same form—even if all are, at the same time, burdened by at least a vague sense that the whole system is unfair and probably heading for catastrophe.

XIX
The strategic question then is, how to shatter this sense of inevitability? History provides one obvious suggestion. The last time the system really neared self-destruction was in the 1930s, when what might have otherwise been an ordinary turn of the boom-bust cycle turned into a depression so profound that it took a world war to pull out of it. What was different? The existence of an alternative: a Soviet economy that, whatever its obvious brutalities, was expanding at breakneck pace at the very moment market systems were undergoing collapse. Alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form; this is why it becomes an absolute imperative of global governance that even small viable experiments in other ways of organizing communities be wiped out, or, if that is not possible, that no one knows about them.

If nothing else, this explains the extraordinary importance attached to the security services and preemption of popular struggle. Commoning, where it already exists, must be made invisible. Alternatives— Zapatistas in Chiapas, APPO in Oaxaca, worker-managed factories in Argentina or Paraguay, community-run water systems in South Africa or Bolivia, living alternatives of farming or fishing communities in India or Indonesia, or a thousand other examples—must be made to disappear, if not squelched or destroyed, then marginalized to the point they seem irrelevant, ridiculous. If the managers of the global system are so determined to do this they are willing to invest such enormous resources into security apparatus that it threatens to sink the system entirely, it is because they are aware that they are working with a house of cards. That the principle of hope and expectation on which capitalism rests would evaporate instantly if almost any other principle of hope or expectation seemed viable.

The knowledge of alternatives, then, is itself a material force.

Without them, of course, the shattering of any sense of certainty has exactly the opposite effect. It becomes pure precarity, an insecurity so profound that it becomes impossible to project oneself in history in any form, so that the one-time certainties of middle class life itself becomes a kind of utopian horizon, a desperate dream, the only possible principle of hope beyond which one cannot really imagine anything. At the moment, this seems the favorite weapon of neoliberalism: whether promulgated through economic violence, or the more direct, traditional kind.

One form of resistance that might prove quite useful here – and is already being discussed in some quarters – are campaigns against debt itself. Not demands for debt forgiveness, but campaigns of debt resistance.

XX
In this sense the great slogan of the global justice movement, “another world is possible”, represents the ultimate threat to existing power structures. But in another sense we can even say we have already begun to move beyond that. Another world is not merely possible. It is inevitable. On the one hand, as we have pointed out, such a world is already in existence in the innumerable circuits of social cooperation and production in common based on different values than those of profit and accumulation through which we already create our lives, and without which capitalism itself would be impossible. On the other, a different world is inevitable because capitalism—a system based on infinite material expansion—simply cannot continue forever on a finite world. At some point, if humanity is to survive at all, we will be living in a system that is not based on infinite material expansion. That is, something other than capitalism.

The problem is there is no absolute guarantee that ‘something’ will be any better. It’s pretty easy to imagine “other worlds” that would be even worse. We really don’t have any idea what might happen. To what extent will the new world still organized around commoditization of life, profit, and pervasive competition? Or a reemergence of even older forms of hierarchy and degradation? How, if we do overcome capitalism directly, by the building and interweaving of new forms of global commons, do we protect ourselves against the reemergence of new forms of hierarchy and division that we might not now even be able to imagine?

It seems to us that the decisive battles that will decide the contours of this new world will necessarily be battles around values. First and foremost are values of solidarity among commoners. Since after all, every rape of a woman by a man or the racist murder of an African immigrant by a European worker is worth a division in capital’s army.

Similarly, imagining our struggles as value struggles might allow us to see current struggles over global energy policies and over the role of money and finance today as just an opening salvo of an even larger social conflict to come. For instance, there’s no need to demonize petroleum, for example, as a thing in itself. Energy products have always tended to play the role of a “basic good”, in the sense that their production and distribution becomes the physical basis for all other forms of human cooperation, at the same time as its control tends to organize social and even international relations. Forests and wood played such a role from the time of the Magna Carta to the American Revolution, sugar did so during the rise of European colonial empires in the 17th and 18th centuries, fossil fuels do so today. There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about fossil fuel. Oil is simply solar radiation, once processed by living beings, now stored in fossil form. The question is of control and distribution. This is the real flaw in the rhetoric over “peak oil”: the entire argument is premised on the assumption that, for the next century at least, global markets will be the only means of distribution. Otherwise the use of oil would depend on needs, which would be impossible to predict precisely because they depend on the form of production in common we adopt. The question thus should be: how does the anti-capitalist movement peak the oil? How does it become the crisis for a system of unlimited expansion?

It is the view of the authors of this text that the most radical planetary movements that have emerged to challenge the G8 are those that direct us towards exactly these kind of questions. Those which go beyond merely asking how to explode the role money plays in framing our horizons, or even challenging the assumption of the endless expansion of “the economy”, to ask why we assume something called “the economy” even exists, and what other ways we can begin imagining our material relations with one another. The planetary women’s movement, in its many manifestations, has and continues to play perhaps the most important role of all here, in calling for us to reimagine our most basic assumptions about work, to remember that the basic business of human life is not actually the production of communities but the production, the mutual shaping of human beings. The most inspiring of these movements are those that call for us to move beyond a mere challenge to the role of money to reimagine value: to ask ourselves how can we best create a situation where everyone is secure enough in their basic needs to be able to pursue those forms of value they decide are ultimately important to them. To move beyond a mere challenge to the tyranny of debt to ask ourselves what we ultimately owe to one another and to our environment. That recognize that none this needs to invented from whole cloth. It’s all already there, immanent in the way everyone, as commoners, create the world together on a daily basis. And that asking these questions is never, and can never be, an abstract exercise, but is necessarily part of a process by which we are already beginning to knit these forms of commons together into new forms of global commons that will allow entirely new conceptions of our place in history.

It is to those already engaged in such a project that we offer these initial thoughts on our current strategic situation.

Stop the War in Iraq and BTTHN

Open National Conference to Stop the War in Iraq and Bring the Troops Home Now
Cleveland, Ohio, June 28-29, 2008

National Assembly Endorser List (Partial Listing)
( * = organization or position for identification only)

1. Cindy Sheehan, Gold Star Families for Peace*
2. Howard Zinn, Author, Historian, Social Critic, Political Scientist, Playwright
3. U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW)
4. Veterans for Peace
5. Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Utah Chapter
6. National Lawyers Guild
7. North Shore AFL-CIO Federation of Labor (Formerly Cleveland AFL-CIO)
8. Donna Dewitt, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO*
9. Navy Petty Officer Jonathan W. Hutto, Author of “Anti-War Soldier” and Co-Founder of Appeal For Redress*
10. Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, Los Angeles, CA
11. Progressive Democrats of America
12. A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism)
13. The Iraq Moratorium
14. United Teachers Los Angeles
15. Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition (NOAC)
16. Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General
17. Green Party of Ohio
18. Progressive Action, a coalition of the Duluth Central Labor Body, Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, and the Duluth Area Green Party
19. Scott Ritter
20. Anti-War Committee of the Thomas Merton Center, Pittsburgh, PA
21. Colia Lafayette Clark, Chair, Richard Wright Centennial Committee, Philadelphia, PA
22. Ohio State Council UNITE HERE
23. Women Speak Out for Peace and Justice – the Cleveland Branch of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
24. Chris Silvera, Secretary-Treasurer, Teamsters Local 808*, Long Island, NY
25. Cleveland Peace Action
26. Peninsula Peace and Justice Center, Palo Alto, CA
27. Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition (STWC)
28. John W. Braxton, Co-President, American Federation of Teachers Local 2026*; Faculty and Staff Federation of Community College of Philadelphia*
29. Eduardo Rosario, Executive Board, NY City Chapter – Labor Council for Latin American Advancement*
30. RI Mobilization Committee to Stop War and Occupation
31. Steve Early, Member, National Writers Union/UAW*, Labor Journalist
32. Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace
33. Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee
34. Cynthia McKinney, Former Congresswoman from Georgia
35. Allen Cholger, United Steelworkers Union Staff Representative*, Southfield, MI
36. Malcolm Suber, Reconstruction Activist; 2007 City Council Candidate in New Orleans, LA
37. Greg Coleridge, Coordinator, Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition; Economic Justice & Empowerment Program Director, Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee
38. Marilyn Levin, Member, Coordinating Committee, Greater Boston United for Justice with Peace; Founder, Middle East Crisis Coalition
39. Jeff Mackler, Founder, Mobilization for Peace, Jobs and Justice, San Francisco, CA
40. Jerry Gordon, former National Co-Coordinator of the Vietnam-era National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC); Member, U.S. Labor Against the War Steering Committee, Cleveland, OH
41. Barbara Lubin, Director, Middle East Children’s Alliance
42. Jamilla El-Shafei, Kennebunkport, Maine, (the Kennebunkport Peace Department)
43. Mumia Abu-Jamal
44. Alan Netland, President of the Duluth Central Labor Body and AFSCME Local 66*
45. Will Rhodes, Chair, Minnesota 8th Congressional District, Green Party; Steering Committee of the Duluth Area Green Party
46. Leonard Weinglass, Attorney for the Cuban Five
47. Gail Schoenfelder, Co-Chair, Clayton-Jackson-McGee Memorial; Board Member of the Duluth League of Women Voters*
48. California Peace and Freedom Party
49. Greater Cleveland Immigrant Support Network
50. Wasatch Coalition for Peace and Justice of Northern Utah
51. Alan Benjamin, Member, Executive Board, San Francisco Labor Council; Member, National Steering Committee, U.S. Labor Against the War
52. Rev. Dr. Diana Gibson, Co-Director, Council of Churches of Santa Clara County, San Jose, CA*
53. Sacramento Chapter, Labor Council for Latin American Involvement (LCLAA), AFL-CIO, Sacramento, CA
54. Iranians for Peace and Justice, CT and Texas Chapters
55. Youth Against War & Racism, MN
56. Samina Faheem, Executive Director, American Muslim Voice
57. National Education Association Peace and Justice Caucus
58. Union de Trabajadores Inmigrantes (Union of Immigrant Workers), Madison, WI
59. The L.A. Palestine Labor Solidarity Committee, Los Angeles, CA
60. San Jose Peace and Justice Center
61. Andy Griggs, Board of Directors, United Teachers Los Angeles; Chair, National Education Association Peace and Justice Caucus; Continuations Committee, American Federation of Teachers Peace and Justice Caucus*; Steering Committee Member, U.S. Labor Against the War, Los Angeles, CA
62. Office of the Americas, Los Angeles, CA
63. Fernando Suarez del Solar, Founder and Director, Guerrero Azteca Peace Project Escondido, CA
64. Doug Bullock, 1st Vice President, Albany Federation of Labor and Member of the Albany County Legislature
65. Arlington (MA) United for Justice with Peace
66. Sarah Martin, Member, Women Against Military Madness, MN
67. Paul Krehbiel, Iraq Moratorium, Los Angeles, CA
68. Sharon Smith, Haymarket Books
69. Francesca Rosa, Member SEIU Local 1021, Delegate, San Francisco Labor Council*, Member, Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace and Justice*
70. National Benedictines for Peace
71. Elizabeth Aaronsohn, Professor of Education and Faculty in the Peace Studies Program*, Central CT State University, New Britain, CT
72. Adirondack Progressives
73. Pam Africa, International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Move Organization
74. AfterDowningStreet.org
75. Kali Akuno, Member, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Gulf Coast Reconstruction Movement activist, New Orleans, LA*
76. Richard Brooks Alba, Co-Chair Emeritus, SF Pride at Work (AFL-CIO), Berkeley, CA
77. Mike Alewitz, Labor Art and Mural Project, New Britain, CT
78. All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (G-C), Washington, D.C.
79. Stephen Allen, Steve Allen Painting, Akron, OH
80. Alliance for Global Justice
81. Dr. Sabah Alwan, Associate Professor of Leadership & Organizational Behavior, College of St. Scholastica, Duluth, MN
82. American Federation of Musicians Local 1000, NY, NY
83. Andy Anderson, Veterans for Peace, Chapter 80
84. Jeff Anderson, Duluth City Councilor
85. Thomas Atwood, Community Organizer, Peninsula Interfaith Alliance (PICO); Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Redwood City, CA*
86. Mark Bailey, member and seminary student, United Church of Christ*, Elyria, OH
87. Jared A. Ball, Producer, Independent/Mixtape Journalism: FreeMix Radio, Words, Beats and
Life Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture, Washington, D.C.*
88. Russ Banner, Co-Coordinator, Pax Christi – Manasota Chapter, FL
89. Hans Barbe, Iraq Moratorium, Students for a Democratic Society, Grosse Pointe Park, MI
90. Ana Barber, UTLA Board of Directors, Long Beach, CA
91. Bay Area United Against the War
92. Karen Bernal, International Longshore Workers Union Project Organizer, San Francisco, CA
93. Dennis Bernstein, Producer Flashpoint/KPFA Radio, Berkeley, CA
94. Marcia Bernsten, North Shore Coalition for Peace & Justice, Evanston, IL
95. Prof. Hal Bertilson, Professor of Psychology and UWS Psychology Program; Coordinator; Member, Amnesty International; Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth Peace and Justice Committee
96. Thomas Bias, President, Northwest New Jersey Peace Fellowship
97. Stephen Bingham, Attorney, Political Activist, San Francisco, CA
98. Bloomington Peace Action Coalition, Nashville, IN
99. Roy Blount, President, Taxi Workers Alliance of Pennsylvania
100. Iver Bogen, Progressive Action Secretary, Duluth, MN
101. Scott Bol, St. Croix Valley Peacemakers, Stillwater, MN
102. Bolivarian Circle of Los Angeles “Ezequiél Zamora”, Sherman Oaks, CA
103. Blasé Bonpane, Director, Ofice of the Americas, Los Angeles, CA
104. Theresa Bonpane, Executive Director, Office of the Americas, Los Angeles, CA
105. Boston May Day Coalition, http://www.bostonmayday.org
106. Laura Bothwell, Founder of the St. Scholastica College Democrats; Former Director, Programs at the Columbia Univ. Center for the Study of Science and Religion; NY, NY
107. Frank Boyle, Wisconsin State Representative, 73rd Assembly District
108. Patrick Boyle, Progressive Action Steering Committee, Duluth, MN
109. Heather Bradford, Co-Founder, Students Against War, College St. Scholastica
110. Lenni Brenner, Author, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
111. Lyn Broach, Steve Allen Painting, Akron, OH
112. Brooklyn Greens, Brooklyn, NY
113. Don Bryant, President, Greater Cleveland Immigrant Support Network
114. Cafe Intifada, Los Angeles, CA
115. California Federation of Teachers
116. Joseph Callahan, member, Coalition to March on the Republican National Convention & Stop the War; Iraq Peace Action Coalition; Twin Cities, MN*
117. Campaign for Labor Rights
118. Campus Antiwar Network
119. Campus Anti-War Network, Fordham University Chapter
120. Michael Carano, Ohio Progressive Democrats of America State Co-Coordinator
121. Patrick Carano, Ohio Progressive Democrats of America State Co-Coordinator
122. Steve Carlson, Peace North, Northern Wisconsin Coordinator for the Iraq Moratorium Project
123. Mary Carmichael, Northwoods People for Peace, Ironwood, MN
124. Tim Carpenter, National Director, Progressive Democrats of America
125. Central CT State University Progressive Students Alliance, New Britain, CT
126. Central CT State University Peace Studies Program, New Britain, CT
127. Central Ohioans for Peace
128. Chapter 39 (Northeast Ohio) Veterans for Peace
129. Chatham Peace Initiative
130. Chelsea Unièndose en Contra de la Guerra, Chelsea, MA
131. Chicago Coalition Against War and Racism, Chicago, IL
132. Chicago Labor Against the War, an affiliate of U.S. Labor Against the War
133. Chicago Socialist Party
134. Chippewa County Anti-War Coalition, Dafter, MI
135. Jim Ciocia, Staff Representative, Ohio Council 8, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)*, Cleveland, OH
136. Citizen Soldier
137. Cleveland Middle East Peace Forum
138. Coalition for World Peace (CFWP) – An affiliate of UFPJ, Los Angeles, CA
139. Code Pink, Pittsburgh Chapter
140. Columbus Campaign for Arms Control/For Mother Earth
141. Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES – Los Angeles, CA)
142. Common Ground Relief/New Orleans – Malik Raheem, Co-Founder
143. Dave Conley, Douglas County Board Supervisor, WI
144. Jan Conley, Founder and President of Environmental Assn. for Great Lakes Education
145. Polly Connelly, International Representative, United Auto Workers (retired), Tucson, AZ
146. Cliff Conner, Author, “A People’s History of Science” New York, NY
147. Victor Crews, Utah Jobs with Justice, Wasatch Coalition for Peace and Justice, United for Peace and Justice Steering Committee Member
148. Cuba Solidarity, NY, NY
149. Tony Cuneo, Duluth City Council*
150. Denise D’Anne, Senior Action Network, San Francisco, CA*
151. DailyRadical.org, Boston, MA
152. Alan Dale, member, Iraq Peace Action Coalition, MN
153. Warren Davis, Former International Executive Board Member, United Auto Workers, Cleveland, OH
154. De Kalb Interfaith Network for Peace and Justice, De Kalb, IL
155. Declaration of Peace – San Mateo County, San Mateo, CA
156. Declaration of Peace, Bloomington, IN
157. Democratic Socialists of Central Ohio
158. Jesse Diaz, Jr., University of California, Riverside; Political Action Committee – La Hermandad Mexicana Transnacional, Riverside, CA
159. Ron Dicks, International Vice President, Western Region, International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees (IFPTE), San Francisco*
160. Different Drummer
161. Frank Dorrell, Addicted to War, Los Angeles, CA
162. Doug Dowd – Political economist, author, professor, Bologna, Italy
163. Dubuque Peace & Justice, Dubuque, IA
164. Mark Dudzic, National Organizer, Labor Party*
165. Larry Duncan, Labor Beat Co-Producer, Chicago, IL
166. East Central Ohio Green Party
167. Jebb Ebben, lead vocal of The Dear Astronaut band, Milwaukee, WI
168. Charlie Ehlen, Member, Veterans for Peace, Glenmora, LA
169. El Militante Sin Fronteras
170. Erie Benedictines for Peace, PA
171. Every Church a Church of Peace (Duluth, MN area chapter)
172. Farid Farahmand, Iranians for Peace, New Britain, CT
173. Christian Fernandez, Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition
174. Bob Fertik, founder of Democrats.com
175. Jeanne Finley, Albany, NY
176. First Presbyterian Church of Palo Alto, CA
177. Milton Fisk, South Central Indiana Jobs with Justice; Emeritus Prof. of Philosophy, Indiana Univ.- Bloomington
178. Jon Flanders, member and past president IAM Local Lodge 1145; Trustee, Troy Area Labor Council, NY
179. Carlos Flores, Secretary-Treasurer, Graphic Communications Conference-IBT Local 4N*
180. Focus the Nation, Portland, OR
181. Folk the War, Kent, OH
182. Dennis Foster, Westlake, OH
183. Christine Frank, Climate Crisis Coalition of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN
184. FreedomJournal.Tv, Akron, OH
185. Freedom Socialist Party, Seattle, WA, Henry Noble, National Secretary
186. Frente de Mexicanos en el Exterior/FME (Front of Mexicans Aboard), Sacramento, CA
187. Anna Fritz, Retiree, Cleveland Heights, OH
188. Emily Gaarder, Assistant Prof. of Sociology/Anthropology, Univ. of MN-Duluth, MN
189. GABNet, a Philippines women’s organization
190. Dennis Gallie, Member UAW Local 235, St. Louis, MO*
191. Sharla Gardner, Duluth City Councilor and Former Executive Board Member of AFSCME Local 66, Duluth, MN
192. Christine Gauvreau, Organizing Committee, CT United for Peace*
193. Gay Liberation Network, Chicago, IL
194. Paul George, Director, Peninsula Peace and Justice Center, Palo Alto, CA
195. Mirène Ghossein, member of Adalah-NY: Coalition for Justice in the Middle East*, WESPAC (Westchester County Peace and Action Network)*
196. Isaac Alejandro Giron, Chairman of the SLC Autonomous Brown Berets
197. Martin Goff, Minnesota UNITE HERE Organizer*
198. David Goldberg, UTLA Treasurer, Los Angeles, CA
199. Sam Goldberger, We Refuse to Be Enemies, West Hartford, CT*
200. Marty Goodman, Transport Workers Union Local 100*, NY, NY, former Executive Board member
201. Dayne Goodwin, Secretary, Wasatch Coalition for Peace and Justice, Salt Lake City, UT
202. Steve Gordon, Former President of UTU Local 1732 & Lead Vocalist for the bands Workerand Black Market Bombs, Conway, SC
203. Kevin Gosztola, Author for OpEdNews; member, Peace Movement
204. Grandmothers for Peace, Northland Chapter
205. Grandmothers for Peace International, Elk Grove, CA
206. Greater Glastonbury for Peace and Justice, Glastonbury, CT
207. Green Party of Brooklyn, Brooklyn, NY
208. Green Party of Rhode Island, Providence, RI
209. Suzanne Griffith, Professor of Counseling, Univ. of Wisconsin-Superior; Member of Women in Black
210. Guerrero Azteca Peace Project, Escondido, CA
211. Cheryl Gustafson, Western University (Salt Lake City) Community Relations*
212. Ioanna Gutas, Middle East Crisis Committee, New Haven, CT*
213. Guyanese American Workers United, New York, NY
214. Jim Hamilton, St. Louis; Member, State Executive Board of American Federation of Teachers, MO*
215. Carol Hannah, Peace North, Hayward, WI
216. Mo Hannah, Ph.D., Chair, Battered Mothers Custody Conference
217. John Harris, Co-Founder, Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, Boston, MA; Co-Founder, Chelsea Uniéndose en Contra de la Guerra, Chelsea, MA; Regional Coordinating Committee member, New England United*
218. Alan Hart, Managing Editor, UE News, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE)*
219. Hawaii Solidarity Committee, NY, NY
220. Rose Helin, Former President, Students Against War, Univ. of Wisconsin-Superior
221. Stan Heller, The Struggle Video News Network, West Haven, CT*
222. Melissa Helman, former School of the Americas Protest Prisoner of Conscience, Ashland, WI
223. Inola F Henry, UTLA Board of Directors, Los Angeles, CA
224. Laura Herrera, Co-Coordinator, The Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Northern California
225. Fletcher Hinds, Vietnam Veteran, MN Veterans & Military Families for Progress*, Duluth, MN
226. Fred Hirsch, Plumbers and Fitters Local 393 Executive Board; Delegate to the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, San Jose, CA*
227. Suzanne and William Hodgkins, Niskayuna, NY
228. Marvin Holland, http://www.homestationonline.org, Jersey City, NJ
229. Julie Holzer, Staff Representative, District 12, United Steelworkers Union*
230. Dr. Bill Honigman, Progressive Democrats of America, California State Coordinator, Laguna Hills, CA
231. Kathleen Hopton, Mentor, OH
232. Houston Coalition for Justice Not War, Houston, TX
233. Humanity, Asheville, NC
234. Jeff Humfeld, Board of Directors, KKFI Community Radio, Kansas City, MO*
235. ICUJP-Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace, Los Angeles, CA
236. Interfaith Council for Peace in the Middle East, Cleveland, OH
237. International Socialist Organization (ISO)
238. Iraq Peace Action Coalition, Twin Cities. MN
239. Khalil Iskarous, Middle East Crisis Committee, New Haven, CT*
240. lbrahim Jibrell, Trinity College Antiwar Coalition, Hartford, CT*
241. Jeni Johnson, Former News Editor for the Promethean newspaper
242. Laurie Johnson, Former Duluth City Councilor; Business Agent AFSCME Council 5, Duluth, MN
243. Peter Johnson, Progressive Action Steering Committee & Duluth Professional Firefighters Union*, Duluth, MN
244. Todd Jordan, Future of the Union, UAW Local 292*, Kokomo, IN
245. Paul Kangas, Vice President, Veterans for Peace
246. Kansas City Labor Against the War, a U.S. Labor Against the War affiliate
247. Dan Kaplan, Executive Director, AFT Local 1493; San Mateo (CA) Community College Federation of Teachers*
248. David Keil, Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition; New England United*
249. Kemetic Inst, Columbus, OH
250. Kent State Anti-War Committee, Kent, OH
251. Sky Keyes, CT United for Peace, Middletown, CT
252. Tim Kettler, Secretary, Green Party of Ohio
253. Joel Kilgour, Truth in Recruiting Committee, Duluth, MN
254. John Kirkland, Stop the War Committee, Carpenters Local 1462*, Bristol, PA
255. Philip Koch, Professor, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD
256. Dr. Gary Kohls, Every Church a Church of Peace
257. Bob Kosuth, Steering Committee of the Northland Anti-War Coalition
258. Gene Kotrba, Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition (NOAC), Berea, OH
259. Dennis Kucinich, U.S. Representative, Lakewood, OH
260. Rev. Kurt Kuhwald, Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, Palo Alto, CA*
261. Rick Kurki, Board Member of the Tyomies Society, Highbridge, WI
262. Zev Kvitky, President, SEIU Local 2007, Stanford, CA
263. La Hermandad Transnacional , Los Angeles, CA
264. Ray LaForest, International Haiti Support Network, New York, NY
265. Lake Superior Greens
266. Werner Lange, Professor of Sociology, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania*
267. Ben Larson, Singer for the band Crew Jones
268. Prof. Mark Lause, Department of History, University of Cincinnati
269. Peter LaVenia, Co-Chair, New York Green Party
270. Paul Le Blanc, Prof. of History, LaRoche College; Member, Anti-War Committee, Thomas Merton Center, Pittsburgh
271. James Marc Leas, National Lawyers Guild
272. Fernando B. Ledezma, UTLA Board of Directors, El Monte, CA
273. Rosemary Lee, Member, CFT Civil, Human and Women’s Rights Committee*, Los Angeles,
CA
274. Pat Levasseur, East Coast Director, Lynne Stewart Defense Committee; former political prisoner, Ohio 7
275. Libertarian Party of Northeast Ohio
276. Liberty Street Agitators, Ann Arbor, MI
277. Jack Lieberman, Jewish Arab Dialog Association*, Miami , FL
278. Jerimarie Liesagang, CT Transadvocacy Coalition, Hartford, CT
279. Peter Linebaugh, Author, Magna Carta Manifesto
280. Michael Livingston, Professor of Psychology, St. John’s University, Collegeville, MN
281. Janet Loehr, Middle East Peace Forum, Cleveland, OH
282. Joe Lombardo, Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace and Coordinator, Northeast Peace and Justice Action Coalition
283. Los Altos Voices for Peace, Los Altos, CA
284. Jennifer Lyon, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW)*, Las Vegas, NV
285. David Macko, Chairman, Libertarian Party, Northeast Ohio*, Solon, OH
286. Dorotea Manuela, Co-Coordinator, Boston May Day Coalition, Boston, MA
287. Jorge Marin, Circula Bolivarimo – Martin Luther King, Jr.*, Boston MA
288. Jennifer Martin-Romme, Editor, Zenith City Weekly Newspaper
289. Logan Martinez, Green Party West Central Ohio
290. Jamshid Marvesti, M.D., Author of four books, most recently “Psycho-Political Aspects of Suicide Warriors, Terrorism and Martyrdom,” Manchester, CT
291. James Mattingly, Kaukauna, WI
292. Mayday Books, MN
293. Bob McCafferty, Andover, NJ
294. Prof. Bud McClure, Faculty Against War, Univ. of Minnesota-Duluth
295. Rick McDowell, Belmont, ME
296. Kay McKenzie, Douglas County Board Supervisor, WI
297. Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice, Detroit, MI
298. The Middle East Crisis Committee, CT
299. Mimbrez Publishers, Oklahoma City, OK
300. Judy Miner, Office Coordinator, Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice*, Madison, WI
301. Minnesota Labor Against the War
302. Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
303. Suren Moodliar, Mass Global Action*
304. Hal Moore, Progressive Action Treasurer, Duluth, MN
305. More than Warmth, Nashville, TN
306. Tess Moren, Intl. Peace Studies Student Assn., Univ. of Wisconsin-Superior
307. Dorinda Moreno, Co-Moderator, indyiraqaction; Convenor, Fuerza Mundial Collaborative, Santa Maria, CA*
308. Amy Moses, Leader, Young Adult Group, of the 1st Unitarian Universalist Society of SF
309. Denis Mosgofian, Graphic Communications Conference-IBT Local 4N, past president,
current Delegate to San Francisco Labor Council*
310. Peter and Gail Mott, Co-Editors INTERCONNECT: (national newsletter)
311. David Moulton, Loaves & Fishes Catholic Worker Community, Duluth, MN
312. MoveOn/East Bay, Barrington, RI
313. Bill Moyer and The Backbone Campaign
314. Jorge Mujica, March 10 Coalition*
315. MJ Muser, World Can’t Wait-Cleveland
316. Muslim Solidarity Committee
317. Muslim Youth Brotherhood for Political Action (MYB). Chaplin, CT
318. My Homework Channel, Cambridge, MA
319. National Network on Cuba, San Francisco, CA
320. Native Earth Education Project, Shelburne, MA
321. Kamran Nayeri, Political Economist, University of California
322. Near West Citizens for Peace and Justice
323. Neighbors for Peace, IL
324. Nevada Workers Against the War, Las Vegas, NV
325. New England United
326. New York State Greens/Green Party of New York, New York, NY
327. Nicaragua Network
328. Mary Nichols-Rhodes, Ohio Progressive Democrats of America State CD Organizer
329. Victor Nieto, President of Lodge 1043 Transportation and Communications Union*, Bronx, NY
330. North Shore Coalition for Peace and Justice, IL
331. Northland Anti-War Coalition
332. Jim Northrup, Native American Playwright, Poet, Author and Syndicated Columnist of Column “Fond du Lac Follies”
333. NY Metro Raging Grannies, New York, NY
334. Ohio State Labor Party
335. Barb Olsen, President, Progressive Action, Political Commentator for KUMD-FM Radio and Political Columnist for the Reader Weekly Newspaper
336. Bill Onasch, Midwest Chapter Representative, Labor Party Interim National Council*
337. Steve O’Neil, St. Louis County Board Commissioner, Duluth, MN.
338. Organized Workers for Labor Solidarity, Seattle, WA
339. Debbie Ortman, National Field Director of the Organic Consumers Assn.; Former Hermantown, MN City Councilor; President, Duluth League of Women Voters
340. Our Spring Break, Washington D.C.
341. Pan-African Roots, Washington, D.C.
342. Jeff Panetiere, Western Connecticut State Univ. Youth for Justice, Danbury, CT*
343. Parma Democratic Committee, Hilton, NY
344. Pax Christi Northern California, San Jose, CA
345. PDX Peace Coalition, Portland, OR
346. Peace & Social Justice Committee*, La Roche College, Pittsburgh, PA
347. Peace Action of San Mateo County, San Mateo, CA
348. Peace and Freedom Party, Sacramento, CA
349. Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine, Bangor, ME
350. PeaceMajority Report, Lindenhurst, IL
351. Josh Pechthalt, UTLA/AFT Vice President, Los Angeles, CA
352. Paula J. Pedersen: Assistant Professor of Psychology, Univ. of MN-Duluth
353. Penn Action, Pittsburgh, PA
354. Helen Pent, President, Northland College Student Assn.
355. People of Faith CT, West Hartford, CT
356. Peoples Fightback Center, Cleveland, OH
357. John Peterson, National Secretary, U.S. Hands Off Venezuela
358. Millie Phillips, Editorial Board, The Organizer Newspaper*
359. Physicians for Social Responsibility, Hudson-Mohawk Chapter
360. Jan Pierce, Retired National Vice President – Communications Workers of America District One
361. Angela T. Pineros, Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition
362. Larry Pinkney, Black Activist Writers Guild & Columnist, Twin Cities, MN*
363. Andy Pollack, Adalah–NY: Coalition for Justice in the Middle East,* Brooklyn, NY
364. Joseph Pollard, Transport Workers Union Local 100*, NY,NY
365. Portage Community Peace Coalition, Brady Lake, OH
366. Michael L. Postell, Transport Workers Union Local 250A, Chairperson, Green Division, San Francisco Municipal Railway*, San Francisco, CA
367. Dolores Perez Priem, Iraq Moratorium and UUs for Peace, San Francisco, CA
368. Progressive Action Steering Committee, Duluth, MN
369. Progressive Democrats of America Los Angeles (PDALA) Los Angeles, CA
370. Progressive Democrats of America – Ohio
371. Progressive Peace Coalition, Columbus, OH
372. Radical Women, San Francisco, CA
373. Radio Free Maine, Augusta, ME
374. Dr. Chengiah Ragaven, Professor of International Relations, Central CT State Univ., New Britain, CT*
375. Rainbow Affinity Tribe/Yippies, Brooklyn, NY
376. Walter Raschik, Host, Walt Dizzo Show on KUWS-FM Radio
377. Jack Rasmus, Co-Chair, Natl. Writers Union, UAW Local 1981, Richmond, CA*
378. Sami Rasouli , Founder & Director, Muslim Peacemaker Teams*, Najaf, Iraq
379. Austin Reams, Oklahoma City, OK
380. Revolutionary Workers Group, San Francisco, CA
381. Rogelio Reyes, California Faculty Association, Calexico, CA *
382. Sergio Reyes, Co-Coordinator, Boston May Day Coalition
383. Marc Rich, Delegate, LA County Federation of Labor
384. Walter Riley, Civil Rights Attorney, Political Activist, San Francisco, CA
385. Adam Ritscher, Douglas County Board Supervisor; Northland Anti-War Coalition
386. Christopher Robinson, Cambridge, MA
387. Rockland Coalition for Peace and Justice, Chestnut Ridge, NY
388. Lorena Rodriguez, International Partnership Coordinator of the Student Trade Justice Campaign, Duluth, MN/Montevideo, Uruguay
389. Mike Rogge, Co-Founder, Students Against War, College of St. Scholastica.
390. Al Rojas, Coordinator, FME (Front of Mexicans Abroad), Sacramento, CA
391. Emma Rosenthal, Los Angeles, CA
392. Martin Rosner, NY Social Activist
393. Donald Rucknagel, M.D., Ph.D., Cincinnati, OH
394. Barb Russ, Progressive Action, Duluth, MN
395. Carl Sack, Northland Anti-War Coalition, former Northland College Student Senator
396. Sacramento for Democracy, Sacramento, CA
397. Sundiata Sadiq, Former President, Ossining, NY NAACP
398. San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice, San Diego, CA
399. San Mateo County Central Labor Council AFL-CIO, Foster City, CA
400. Ajamu Sankofa, National Conference of Black Lawyers*, Brooklyn, NY
401. Tony Saper, ATU Local 1287 Representative to the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance, Kansas City, MO
402. Evan Sarmiento, Outreach Coordinator, Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition
403. Renee Saucedo, Director, La Raza Centro Legal; Member, SEIU Local 1021, San Francisco*
404. Fred Schnook, former Mayor of Ashland, WI.
405. Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone, Co-producers, Taking Aim-WBAI Radio-NY, Vallejo, CA
406. Paul Schrade, former International Executive Board Member, United Auto Workers, Los Angeles, CA
407. John Schraufnagle, Northland Anti-War Coalition, Superior, WI
408. Michael Schreiber, Editor, Socialist Action, San Francisco, CA
409. Rodger Scott, Delegate and Past President, American Federation of Teachers Local 2121, City College of San Francisco
410. Mary Scully, member, Iraq Peace Action Coalition, Twin Cities
411. Steve Seal, UTLA Board of Directors/Chair, Human Rights Committee*, Los Angeles, CA
412. Vann Seawell, Assistant Director, UNITE HERE, Columbus, OH
413. Leonard Segal, UTLA Board of Directors, Northridge, CA
414. Rob Segovia-Welsh, Agriculture Rural Labor Inspector for the State of North Carolina
415. Dallas Sells, Director, Ohio State Council, UNITE HERE
416. Shaker Heights High School Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Shaker Heights, OH
417. Peter Shell, Anti-War Committee of the Thomas Merton Center, Pittsburgh, PA
418. Adam Shils, Vice-President, Aptakisc Education Association (NEA)*
419. Shura Council, Anaheim, CA
420. Joel Sipress, Duluth Area Green Party, former candidate for MN State Senate, Duluth, MN
421. Debbie Ginsberg Smith, Social Activist, New York
422. Michael Steven Smith, Co-Producer, Law and Disorder, WBAI radio
423. Social Action Committee, Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Redwood City, CA
424. Social Action Committee, West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, Rocky River, OH
425. Socialist Action
426. Socialist Alternative
427. Socialist Organizer
428. Socialist Party, Boston
429. Socialist Party of CT
430. Socialist Party of Massachusetts
431. Socialist Party USA (National Committee)
432. Socialist Viewpoint
433. Solidarity, Detroit, MI
434. Asiyahola Somburu, Co-Chair of the Emerging Black Leadership Symposium
435. Gary Sorenson, President of Veterans for Peace, Chapter 80
436. South Dakota A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, Brandon, State Council
437. Southeast Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers, Rochester, MN
438. Mark Stahl, Event Coordinator, Rhode Island Community Coalition for Peace
439. Lynne Stewart, Lynne Stewart Organization, NY, NY
440. Judith Stoddard, First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco*
441. Students for a Democratic Society, Kirtland, OH
442. Students for Change, Norwich, CT
443. Hal Sutton, Member, UAW Local 1268 Retirees Chapter, Rockton, IL*
444. David Swanson, Washington Director, Democrats.com and of Impeachpac.org; Co-Founder, AfterDowningStreet.org
445. Shakeel Syed, Executive Director, Shura Council, Culver City, CA
446. Teach Peace Foundation
447. Tennessee Code Pink, Summertown, TN
448. Texans for Peace, Austin, TX
449. Linda Thompson, Guilford Peace Alliance, AFSCME Retirees, CT United for Peace
450. Sara Thomsen, singer/songwriter, South Range, WI
451. Gale Courey Toensing, Editor, The Corner Report, NW CT and Member, Middle East Crisis Committee, CT*
452. Troops Out Now Coalition, New York, NY
453. Troy Area Labor Council, Troy, NY
454. Jerry Tucker, former International Executive Board Member, United Auto Workers, St. Louis, MO
455. Twin Cities Peace Campaign-Focus on Iraq
456. Twin Cities Year 5 Committee to End the War Now
457. U.S. Hands Off Venezuela
458. Imam Warith Deen Umar, Chaplain for 25 years in New York state prisons
459. United Educators of San Francisco
460. Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Redwood City (entire congregation), Redwood City, CA
461. University of Toledo Anti-War, Toledo, OH
462. Upper Hudson Peace Action, Albany, NY
463. Utah Jobs with Justice, Salt Lake City
464. Utah Peace & Freedom Party, Salt Lake City, UT
465. James E. Vann, Architect; Co-Founder, Oakland Tenants Union, Oakland, CA
466. Chuck Vaughn, UTLA Board of Directors, Pico Rivera, CA
467. Venezuela Solidarity Network
468. Veterans for Peace, Chapter 80
469. Veterans for Peace, Chapter 118, Utah
470. Veterans for Peace – Chapter 153, Iraq Moratorium Project, Peace North, Hayward, WI
471. Carlos Villarreal, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild*, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter
472. Voters Evolt!, Long Beach, CA
473. Voters for Peace, Baltimore, MD
474. Julie Washington, UTLA Elementary Vice President, Los Angeles, CA
475. Washington Peace Center, Washington D.C.
476. Harvey Wasserman, Founder of Solartopia.org, Bexley, OH
477. WE Project, Los Angeles, CA
478. Carl Webb, Iraq War Veteran; Texas National Guard
479. Tegan Wendland, Douglas County Board Student Representative, WI
480. Coly Wentzlaff, Students for Peace, Univ. of Minnesota-Duluth
481. West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church Social Action Committee, Rocky River, OH
482. Don White, Peace and Justice Activist, Los Angeles, CA
483. Craig Wiesner, President, MicahsCall.org, Palo Alto, CA*
484. David Wilson, Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York*, NY,NY
485. Marcy Winograd, President, Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles*, Los Angeles, CA
486. Dorothy Wolden, Events Coordinator for the Northland Chapter of Grandmothers for Peace and former Douglas County Board Supervisor, WI
487. Women Against War, Capital District, New York
488. Women for Democracy and Fair Elections, Chicago, IL
489. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Peninsula Branch, Palo Alto, CA
490. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Pittsburgh Chapter, Pittsburgh, PA
491. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, U.S. Section; Philadelphia, PA
492. Kent Wong, Founding President of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, Los Angeles, CA
493. Worker to Worker Solidarity Committee, Tucson, AZ
494. Workers International League (Socialist Appeal)
495. World Prout Assembly, Highland Heights, KY
496. Mark Wutschke, UTLA Board of Directors, Los Angeles, CA
497. Gustav Wynn, Writer & Contributing Editor, OpEd News, NY,NY
498. Carol F. Yost, Member, ADALAH-NY Coalition for Justice in the Middle East* Steering Committee Member, Private Health Insurance Must Go Coalition*
499. Youth for International Socialism
500. Marela Zacarias, Founder of Latinos Against the War, Hartford, CT

Some “Inflammatory” rhetoric…

About the Labor Day Fire on Pike’s Peak last year… And the Fascist editor at Westside Pioneer.

You can tell whose pockets the El Paso County Fire Control District are in.

The wealthiest of course.

Y’all remember the fire, right?

Wasn’t a red-hot week later the self-serving rag Westside Pioneer was reporting that it was a homeless person who started the fire.

Somebody was seen leaving the scene, nobody knows who, (I personally have been in a couple of wildfires, and let the Voice of Experience speak, I got the hell as far away from those fires as fast as I possibly could…)

The Fire Marshall or whatever the sell-out bastard’s title is pronounced that the fire MIGHT have been started by a carelessly tossed Cigarette, or MIGHT have been started in a campfire. It was mid morning, 80 degrees Fahrenheit, nobody had no damn campfire going.

And, the clincher of their messed up argument, it was in a “disheveled” homeless campsite.

The editor of the Pioneer, sounds kind of to the Right of Mussolini, arrogantly assumes that it WAS a homeless “Bum” (to use his phrase) who started the fire.

And proceeded to blame the homeless for every ill befalling society today.

    Now, here’s MY theory, and it’s a doozy.

That the camp was all torn up and littered up, that sounds like what happens when Socially Retarded Animated Sphincter Rich-Bitches teach their kids that “bums” are less than human, and that it’s ok to break into their camps (Not while they’re in camp, of course, no no, COWARDS don’t like to risk being confronted by the PEOPLE they’re assaulting)

They steal anything that might be worth money and then break or tear apart everything else. …

    … and in many cases, They Light The Place On Fire…

Occasionally, if there’s a chance that somebody in the camp would defend himself, and they might get more than their Piggy Pride hurt… they’ll call the cops, who are so bootlicking subservient that they’ll take care of the problem, “of course you’re right sir, the poor are causing all the problems of the world and no, sir, you should be insulated from seeing the suffering of your fellow humans, and we’ll take care of the “Bum”, sir”.

Now, I don’t have proof that some out-of-control Rich Bitch Punk Cowards, such as those who infest the multi-million dollar houses on Stolen Land along Gold Camp and Bear Creek roads, are the ones who actually started the fire.

Then again, my evidence is more substantial than theirs, AND, the aforementioned PIGS refuse to even consider such a possibility.

In their PIGGY minds, it has to be the fault of “Bums”, no questions need be asked.

Now, here’s a neat little Teach The Punks A Lesson thought:

Get a cheap tent, right, a cheap sleeping bag, some clothes books and such…
Set it up in an area Known To Be Infested with the “camp raider heroes”

Boil up a mess of poison ivy. Cook it just like collard greens (only without the hamhocks) and pour the “tea” all over the tent and clothes, let it dry, (or not, it wouldn’t make any difference, they would just assume it was soaked in a rainstorm, happens often enough.)

And then let their ChickenShit nature take its course…

An American Socialism?

In the current housing bankruptcy “crisis” which was in fact created by the privately owned Fed through interest rates that reached 1% in 2003 combined with lax oversight of the banks, the bail out now being talked about in Congress will help… no surprise… the banks by and large. It is meant to deceive the public again by using words such as “helping” the homeowners, or “saving” peoples homes. NOTE: When you save a mortgage you save the bank’s payments by insuring they keep coming in. Besides the fact that people don’t own their homes, the banks do!

Regardless, in a socialist system this kind of gross manipulation would never have happened in the first place. And the half honest sensible solution by these charlatans in Congress should be to refi these homes to these homebuyers at the new lesser value. Because the value is lost anyway. And these homes were wildly overvalued by an out of control speculatory financial cabal. Besides, the bundled debt obligations and structured investment vehicles are worthless. Adding misery, the value of these homes will keep crashing. The rub? The banks and Investors made millions off these paper schemes and walked away… and probably paid little or no taxes. And now, the home buyers who were preyed upon by these lenders, owe money on a devalued home that was used only as a commodity by the “gentlemen” on Wall St. to manipulate, through the creation of CDO’s and SIVs? Sure! That’s capitalism. Systemic political and corporate corruption. And it’s going to get worse.

Congress desperately needs this property tax, interest payment, revenue stream to keep flowing to the banks and the states. But the reason this is a problem for Congress of “what is the best poison” to cure this, is that to bail out the home buyer who got screwed, is using tax money to keep receiving tax money. It’s double taxation!! And a zero sum game… besides rewarding the crooks. More deficit spending. But the Fed doesn’t care about homeowners and thusly told Congress as much by introducing Paulson’s new scheme to have the Fed take over the duties of the SEC and oversight of the big investment banks and their financial debauchery and chicanery. To keep the graft and secret deals going. The “dark trades” as they’re called. And spineless Congress cannot protest. They are owned by the Fed. In fact they are linked in responsibility by their repealing of the Glass-Steagall act with Greenspan’s urging (which Clinton didn’t veto) and attaching the Commodities Reauthorization Act attached to an appropriations bill in 2000. Ahhh the rewards for the capitalist elite are sweet indeed. No accountability, no worries, no chance of getting the blame. The yellow press at their beckon call.

Socialism would put all properties under the ownership of the people with all rents going to the citizens public fund and distributed to each social association for necessary services, loans, needs. There is no reason for housing or land to have any kind of increased value over the years. NONE. Ask yourself why your car then, doesn’t appreciate in value? Or your furniture? Real estate has been another way to oppress and exploit people by putting them into massive debt and making them pay banks twice the value of the home over the term of the loan. Besides the fleecing by the middlemen realtors and speculators using homes as commodities,(thus the current death spiral in housing). Have you ever looked at your amortization schedule? On a fixed rate 30 year loan? You pay twice or more of purchase price, if you paid off your loan! And you’re paying the bank first. We are insane for agreeing to this but that’s why the banks are the most powerful sector of capitalism. Which include the privately owned Federal Reserve. Oh you say, I made thousands when the market was good! No, you made the banks richer and more powerful by putting the next person into new debt for 30 years at 1 1/2 to 2 times the mortgage payment. Now your house increasing in value, puts upward pricing pressure on all homes and finally drives them out of reach of buyers. Thus the 1% housing bubble. For every person who “wins” in the capitalist system, 8 people lose (and those who depend on them). Otherwise you wouldn’t have a system where 10% of the population own 85% of the household wealth and property. The trick is to keep you thinking you’re winning when you’re really just up to your neck in debt in this American Casino Land.

Capitalism is a constant barrage of fairy tales and propaganda aimed at deluding the masses into believing there is no other way a social/economic system can be run. And that to be rich (or at least have the opportunity-possibility to be) is the ultimate goal because that is the genuine expression of self freedom and self worth! Or the lie that mercantilism and worker owned production could not work alone… without the corporate structure or Wall St. But the facts on the ground show us the truth, that capitalism is a fascist system designed to concentrate wealth at the top, steal our productive gains, and by doing so, makes those at the top the most powerful, privileged members of a society. It’s Monarchical. A plutocracy. Oligarchs rule. Fascism! Congress, the court system and state/city regulatory systems are subservient in every way to maintaining the fascist construct. Question: Ever taken part in an organization by volunteering to help change one of the many injustices in this country? You know what I’m talking about then. Wall after wall after obstacle after pot hole after bought off politician …all lined up to trip you, slip you and flip you upside down. New rules to increase petition signatures required for public ballots. Electronic vote stealing and manipulation. Redistricting. Third parties crushed. City council and board meetings held during weekdays. Hundreds of fees and licenses required to run business. Lobbyists at every turn. Zoning codes that dis-allow creative housing solutions and energy use. State insurance commissions. Mineral rights sold for pennies on the dollar… On and on and on… Unless of course your organization/church is involved in taking up the slack for capitalisms failures… then you’re a Mother Theresa! What’s that saying? “I work to feed the poor, they call me a saint. I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

Many people I talk to, on all fronts, are frustrated. And many realize that it is the corporate structure, their power to manipulate policy, to move jobs overseas, encourage wars, and the massive deregulated profit taking and currency manipulation that is at the center core of this American milieu. Besides the fact that no one I talk to has make a thin dime or dollar on Wall St. But the thing I keep running into are differences on how to solve the problem without changing the system drastically. A hypothesis that can be presented is that there is much delusion and neurosis in this land. The idea that we can somehow keep the system we have and make it work for the masses of productive working people, is the delusion as repeatedly, the corrupt one party system consistently proves otherwise. The neurosis is contained within this same idea that is the crux of the delusion. Knowing that something needs to change drastically and on the other hand knowing (by experience or observation) that it is irrational and impossible within the corrupt fascist matrix that will not allow drastic change that is needed. This creates neurosis. The constant tension of this negative psychic entrapment, is energy that has to be released and is finally. Usually negatively in some way. But it could be positive and productive IF there were a real alternative to work toward. Democratic socialism.

Socialists are realists. They are objective creative intelligent humanitarians who know that this delusion and neurosis is not healthy and requires a clean break from the causation. Often I am scoffed at by others for this view. Where? Where would – could this happen? I think that if it’s possible anywhere it would be in a state that seceded from the nation. Vermont’s trying and testing the water. Though even then, there would be no consensus for a socialist form of citizen led, decentralized government. No, until the public is re-educated as to the true intent and purpose of democratic socialism and its platform, and can be persuaded that exploitation of man by man is unacceptable, they will forever bicker and fight among themselves, as children who fight for a place in the lunch line or over possessions. Seemingly without the skills to reassess, re-strategise, and break away from the malignancy present all around us. Socialism takes a deep commitment and concentration to assess the situation on the ground (objectivism) and rationalize, then actualize the alternatives that will then benefit the real producers of capital (us) and replace the owners of the means of production and pushers of propaganda. It’s time to consider socialism as the correct answer to our dilemma.

American liberalism lost in La La Land

American liberalism is lost in La La Land. Just look at the issues for them. ‘Anybody but McCain’; Send in the Troops to Punish China; We Love Al Gore!

Without a Socialist Left anymore, lumpenized middle class liberals cannot focus on anything beyond what the corporate media focuses for them to focus on. As one example, here is Common Dreams once again pushing corporate preaching by Al Gore on being green and clean, blah, blah, blah.
Gore Launches Ambitious Advocacy Campaign on Climate

To the lumpenized American liberal, this is big news to have the illustrious –NOT– Al Gore preaching to them and the world. It’s like they long for Jimmy Carter to be resurrected on Easter, or some such other liberal Christian Miracle. This just is not an alternative vision at all.

Somehow, the world needs to create a New Left, one that moves way beyond and in advance of the traditional Left Guard, composed of Imperialist Social Democracy, Academic Left Libertarianism, and Stalinoid Old Marxism. It’s just plain obvious that the liberals will not ever get anything done on their own. We need a New Left.

Corrupt Fed wants control

These bastards are brazen thieves and agents of disinformation. Has the entire fricking country gone stupid? We are witnessing the transfer of vast sums of our money… not theirs, ours… to them!! And a Fed who wants to get the SEC out of the way so they can do it! Paulson, Bernake, Greenspan, Volker, Rubin… all wall street thieves and crooks, liars and scum. This is the fascist business model in full head long dive to the bottom with the Fed cleaning up the mess and divvying up the bailout money to their wall street buddies. For the next 6 months.

This had to be planned. No concerned economic professional in their right mind would have let this happen. The Fed is responsible for the housing bubble, the subprime crime, the weak dollar and now for looting the U.S. citizen treasury!! JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank America… they’re all going down. They’ve all got the CDO-SIV-Hedge Fund cancer bad. Why is the Fed taking on all this worthless paper and risk? All for show. They create and destroy money all the time.

Regardless, they will bail them all out… on our tab. Bear Stearns was sacrificed to keep JP Morgan on life support. But you can bet the Bear Stearns management got out before the crash of stock price. I think the SEC would investigate that right? And how is it that the Fed can act alone on these things, and the Congress (many of whom voted to repeal the Glass-Steagal act with Clinton) [there’s a question for Hillary] in the aftermath asks their sniveling little questions of how the deal was structured? Because the Fed runs the show. It is a private banking system… not a government agency! We are witnessing the power of the central banking system that was set up in Europe by the Bauers (Rothchilds), the Greens, the Schifts, the Warburgs…all German banking Zionists. Then brought to the U.S. (The Money Masters -dvd). Talmudist Jews by the way. Sold out Germany with the British to bring U.S. into WWI. Even though Germany was offering England a return to peace with no reparations or conditions.

Now, what happened to that 2.4 trillion that went missing from the Pentagon… just before 9-11? Hmmmm Dov Zakhiem might know. Another Zionist and dual Israeli/U.S. citizen who was in charge of the Pentagons budget as comptroller. Funny how that “plane” hit the accounting area of the Pentagon, destroying all evidence and records of misplaced funds. Darn the luck. Who’d have thought?

Will economic stimulus avoid recession?

The capitalists system is in meltdown. The apologist candidates won’t tell us what the real problems are because they were asleep at the wheel and have voted in support of and taken part in the corrupt capitalist system. They’re all millionaires!!!! It’s time to start a new economy and new currency, end war, cut the military budget to 1/4 of what it is and dismantle the Fed. …and the parasitical Stock Market gambling casino that robs those who produce goods and services of their bounty.

Will Economic Stimulus Measures Stave Off Recession?
by Richard C. Cook

The 2008 Presidential Election: Concepts Progressives Must Know About Monetary Policy and History

Greenspan’s Dark Legacy Unmasked
by Stephen Lendman

C.H. Douglas: Pioneer of Monetary Reform – A National Dividend and Social Credit. by Richard C. Cook

Sovereign Wealth Funds
http://www.goldenjackass.com

Is the Green Party still alive?

Cynthia McKinney for PresidentIt is political suicide to run a political party the way the Greens run themselves. Are they still alive at all?

This Sunday there will be debate in California that may very well answer that question. It is very late and too little at this point IMO. The Greens have themselves to blame for allowing the Democratic Party to infiltrate their campaign and then dismantle it as their candidate Cobb did with his candidacy in 2004. Nothing afterwards has much put the party back together again. They are essentially a political Humpty- Dumpty that has taken a great fall.

Parasitical capitalism exposed

Got Real Player?
 
Two hours of excellent deconstruction of the big financial parasites and how 2008 will see a depression and a transfer of tax burden (bail out) onto the working and what’s left of the middle class. Banks are calling in loans on hedge funds and hedge funds don’t have the money (lost it gambling) so they are selling their assets (any assets) which include stocks. That’s why we see the big drops in the stock market. And the writing off of billions by the banks …large and small. And their stock price declining.

If the Fed keeps lowering interest rates (printing money to save their banking and wall street buddies) we’re screwed and it won’t help. That’s the same as me giving someone more money who is already in deep debt and has no way to repay me. They, the Fed, has screwed things up so bad we’d still be f__ked if they raised interest rates. It’s a liquidity fix one way and a credit tightening the other. But either way credit is cut off due to all the debt.

And all of this due to the subprime and criminal mortgage lending practices of the banks the Fed is supposed to be watching. Greenspan is a crook of magnificent proportion! He should be behind bars!! But it’s a systemic problem of corrupt fascist business model since the Fed took over the management, value and issuing of our currency in 1913. And largely amplified after the 1971 de-coupling of gold from the dollar. Dr Hudson explains how it’s all working to our demise.

This was in August before we see now Kucinich, like Paul, is being kept out of the debates and marginalized by the media. Hudson is Kucinich’s financial adviser. Some of you may not agree with his tax solutions but regardless, this is a scathing indictment of the current globalist capitalist financial/economic system. Deeply corrupt and terminal.

Dr. Michael Hudson on Financial corruption and collapse
Part 1 – Aug 15
Part 2 – Aug 22

Links on this site to the Aug 15 and 22 interviews.