The Monster of Suburbia

Isn’t it a strange irony that we want our kids to live a life that we really don’t respect? We cajole them into living a life that we would view with contempt if we were to look at it from a distance.

We want them to never face danger, or insecurity, or any of the rough edges of life. We want to build a bubble, a fortress for them, so that they get whatever is best in this world and avoid all that is bad. In some respects, this situation has been created and manufactured en masse. It is called the suburbs.

But when we think about it, the people we respect are those that have lived life to the fullest. We respect people that have faced adversity, danger, and challenges. We mostly respect those that have done it and have come out healthy. But we also respect those that have had it rough and have been defeated into addictions, suicide or cynical anger and aggression. What we don’t respect is the spoiled child and especially the spoiled child that has never had that situation challenged or corrected; the spoiled child that is no longer a child.

The mythical story of the Buddha comes to mind here. The Buddha was a prince born into wealth and his father made sure that he was never exposed to the rough edges of life. He lived in his palace and when he grew up, he was given many wives and servants. His father was insistent that he never leave the castle. But one day he did leave and when he was out there (out here) he came across a sick person, an old person, and a corpse. When he returned he asked his father; “What’s the meaning of this?” His father had tried to protect him from reality. He then went out and became an ascetic and found that he could not find the meaning there. He eventually found the meaning of Reality between the extremes while meditating under a tree at Deer Park.

We have created a whole class of little princes and princesses or rather, spoiled children that have been artificially immunized from Reality. They have grown up watching television and playing video games. They are creatures of the suburbs. They don’t know about sickness, death, or old age not so much because they have never been exposed to it, but more because they have become detached from the side of reality that is icky. They have learned that the world is really soft after all and that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. They have lived with the material comforts of relative wealth and the psychological protection that goes with avoiding all that is unpleasant.

With these protections securely in place, they can look at sickness, old age and death with complete indifference. That happens to them because they deserve it. What’s really important after all is that it will never happen to me. They can watch war on the news and starvation all over the world and be completely and utter unaffected by it. This is partially because they have become accustomed to the belief that they are somehow special, they are God’s chosen people, and also because they live it a ‘virtual’ world.

Another word for this virtual world is alienation.

This is not to suggest that all creatures of the suburbs are like this. It is likely a continuum we are all on. But there definitely has emerged a type, a class of middle class creature that stands on it's own. What is concerning is the pervasiveness of this condition and our ability to ignore it.

These folks are glib and charming. In their own way they are intelligent and most importantly, apparently intelligent. Many are completely indifferent to politics but may play up charity or partisian politics with future gain and games in mind. They are very aware of public perception and are skilled at playing up to it. They have no feeling whatsoever about the plight of others and always write off the misfortune of others as ‘their’ fault. It is the fault of the particular individual, the victim, of whatever calamity. They comfort themselves with the knowledge that ‘I’ have made all the right moves and ‘I’ have the right ethics. I am somehow blessed. This is partially the result of overprotection but more importantly, it is the result the alienation that only capitalism can manufacture. That is, the belief that the value of the human being is based in his or her exchange value. Use value means nothing. In other words, in this world presentation and status symbols are everything. Substance means nothing. It is more important to have material possessions and status than it is to genuinely love somebody.

Although many creatures of comfort are warm, loving and genuine people, the fact remains that we all know that the content of this essay is true as much as we might wish otherwise. We may want to look away but maybe that is part of the problem. Maybe that's the crux of the problem.

This really has to be turned around.

On a large scale we have to stop buying into the idea that rich people are more valuable than ordinary people. They are not; au contraire.

On a personal level, if you know these people or if you are one of these people, point yourself, or them, in the direction of Deer Park. You better do it because sickness, old age, and death will happen to you and your video games will not help you.

They are not even helping you now.

Bush Fires

The Big Bush has a lot little Bush fires sparking all around him. Here’s a few of them:

Bush fires here:

-The Downing Street Memo: The cowardly American press is finally paying some attention to it. This one is volatile and could burn him down.

-A Gallup poll found that about 6 in 10 Americans advocated a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. A slow spreading fire and it will consume Bush, the GOP, and the chicken-hawks.

-Recruitment is next to impossible as young Americans are refusing to strap on suicide vests for oil billionaires. Bush will try to put it out with a draft – like a hydra’s head lopped off, America will be in flames.

-The politicians in America are finally finding enough courage to call for a pull out from Iraq. A resolution was introduced by both Democrat and GOP Reps calling for an exist strategy from the meat grinder.


Bush fires there:

-The Sunnis are killing the Shiites in Iraq and the Shiites are killing Sunnis. And the Kurds are kidnapping Sunnis; a bit of a conundrum; a bit of a Bush fire. It is Bush’s fire.

-The elected reps in Iraq have refused to disband their local militias, thumbing their noses at the Big Bush. These sparks could go ablaze anytime.

-Clerics have been wrestling control of the Iraqi State from American puppets like the Chalabis and the Allawis. Once they see the religious writing on the wall, they might not be the dutiful puppets the Big Bush is counting on.

-Iraqi soldiers are openly defiant to their American masters and will often turn away from danger and walk away en masse.

-Iraqi soldiers are seen as untrainable by American soldiers. Both sides despise each other and don’t trust each other.

Bush fires everywhere:

-Kim Jung Il is flirting with Rho without Bush’s permission.

-Hugo Chavez refuses to be controlled by the USA.

-Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina are all talking to Chavez behind Bush’s back.

-Increasing trade is helping Cuba out of its economic isolation.

-Amnesty International has called America’s concentration camps, The Gulags of our time.

-The Sandinistas in Nicaragua are re-awakening.

And then there’s Musharraf, Palestine, Afghanistan, bin Laden, Uzbekistan, and there’s Bolton, Rumsfield, Cheney, and there is Bush himself. And there’s the internet, Counterpunch, Democracy Now, Indymedia, and socialists, and peaceniks, and Chomsky and Moore and millions of unknown subversives - like you and me.

In the future there is the Geneva Convention, The American Constitution, and The Hague.

The forecast for Mr. Bush looks like this. It’s gonna be hot.

Pass the matches around.

Class Act

Various jurisdictions in Canada have passed or are contemplating passing laws to forbid poor people from panhandling. In B.C. they have an act called "The Safe Streets Act" and generally, they are similar or will be similar to this one. It is aimed at curbing the liberty of panhandlers to prevent them from asking for money. The name implies that they present a danger to the people they do ask for spare change.

In the mid 80’s governments everywhere threw people out of mental hospitals with the promise that they would supply money for community care. That was a promise that was broken. And now that they have done this, they are worried that those who are panhandling are neglected mentally ill people and present a danger to pedestrians. That’s how karma works. If you kill little animals, little animals will give you the creeps. If you kill poor people, poor people will give you the creeps.

But poor people are simply that – poor people. Panhandlers are youth fleeing abuse, people that cannot find work, people with addiction problems, people with neglected mental health problems and generally, people that have been victimized one way or another.

These anti-panhandler laws are offensive on many levels.

The most obvious is that the people that want to pass these laws are the same people that are responsible for the massive homelessness problem; a problem that emerged in the mid-eighties. They are offended by the reality of the poverty that exists in the midst of their affluence. They would prefer to get rid of them and sweep them away from their blissful shopping trips. They find homeless people offensive – again, the karma thing.

Secondly, it is offensive to any person that believes in freedom.

These people are trying to create a class of untouchables in the developed world. The same legal freedoms and principles that work for everybody else do not apply to poor people. If they did, then salespeople could not approach people in any way to sell their wares. Asking for spare change is considerably more honest and less of a hassle than dealing with most salespeople.

But this is not about the act of soliciting. It is about class. It is a class act. And it is a violation of the basic rights of the poor.

Here is an act that would be similar to other laws passed in various provinces and states:

BILL 71 -- 2004
SAFE STREETS ACT
HER MAJESTY, by and with the advice and consent of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of British Columbia, enacts as follows:
Definition


1 In this Act, "solicit" means to communicate, in person, using the spoken, written or printed word, a gesture or another means, for the purpose of receiving money or another thing of value, regardless of whether consideration is offered or provided in return.
2 (1) A person commits an offence if the person solicits in a manner that would cause a reasonable person to be concerned for the solicited person's safety or security, including threatening the person solicited with physical harm, by word, gesture or other means.
(2) A person commits an offence if the person engages, in a manner that would cause a reasonable person to be concerned for the solicited person's safety or security, in one or more of the following activities during a solicitation or after the solicited person responds or fails to respond to the solicitation:
(a) obstructing the path of the solicited person;
(b) using abusive language;
(c) proceeding behind or alongside or ahead of the solicited person;
(d) physically approaching, as a member of a group of 2 or more persons, the solicited person;
(e) continuing to solicit the person.
Solicitation of captive audience prohibited
3 (1) In this section:
"commercial passenger vehicle" means a motor vehicle operated on a roadway by or on behalf of a person who charges or collects compensation for the transportation of passengers in that motor vehicle, and includes a vehicle operated by or on behalf of the British Columbia Transit Authority or the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority to provide a regularly scheduled public passenger transportation service;
"roadway" means a highway, road, street, lane or right of way, including the shoulder of any of them, that is improved, designed or ordinarily used by the general public for the passage of vehicles;
"vehicle" includes non-motorized vehicles.
(2) Subject to subsection (3), a person commits an offence who does any of the following:
(a) solicits a person who is using, waiting to use, or departing from a device commonly referred to as an automated teller machine;
(b) solicits a person who is using, or waiting to use, a pay telephone or a public toilet facility;
(c) solicits a person who is waiting at a place that is marked, by use of a sign or otherwise, as a place where a commercial passenger vehicle regularly stops to pick up or disembark passengers;
(d) solicits a person who is in, on or disembarking from a commercial passenger vehicle;
(e) solicits a person who is in the process of getting in, out of, on or off of a vehicle or who is in a parking lot.
(3) No offence is committed under subsection (2) if the person soliciting is 5 metres or more from the following:
(a) in the case of subsection (2) (a) to (c), the automated teller machine, pay telephone, public toilet facility entrance or commercial passenger vehicle marker, as applicable;
(b) in the case of subsection (2) (d) or (e), the commercial passenger vehicle or vehicle, as applicable.
(4) A person commits an offence if the person, while on a roadway, solicits a person who is in or on a stopped, standing or parked vehicle.


And this is an excerpt from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms:


7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

We cannot, as a society, grant freedoms to some and remove them from others because some people might consider them creepy or unsightly. It is they that are creepy and unsightly.

In a free society, we have to preserve universal principles of freedom for everybody. We cannot arbitrarily remove some freedoms for some people we deem to be less than human.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states the following:

15.
(1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

Racism, nationalism, religion, gender and disability are not grounds for discrimination. Maybe those that want to make panhandling illegal would argue in front of the Supreme Court of Canada that a person’s social or economic class is not covered under the Charter. But more than likely they will argue that it is specifically “aggressive” panhandling that they are concerned about. There is a myriad of laws that already protect us from aggression. In fact, it is panhandling that they want to stop, but they use ‘aggression’ as a mechanism to give their hate and classist karma an air of legitimacy.

This is an important struggle for people that are destitute. It is also important to those that are not. It is about fundamental freedom and it is about classism. It is a struggle that has to be fought on legal grounds and these laws should be taken to the Supreme Court. It is also a political struggle and it is the front line of our ongoing class war; the war that is never acknowledged by the classes that are oppressed.

We have a responsibility to help out people that are destitute. Give them money if you can and DON'T ask them whether they will use it to buy booze or drugs. Some people do this and it is not only paternalistic and elitist; it is hateful and mean. Assuming the person asking for money is an adult, it is just one more kick in the head to treat that person like a child. It is similar to kicking a person when they are down.

But we also have a responsibility to help poor people out on a collective basis. That is, we need to fight for housing and social programs that are needed to combat homelessness, and the multitude of problems that accompany it.

Silent Violence

When we think of violence, we generally think of war, or revolution, or shooting or some sort of physical brutality. But as you read this, children, women and men all over the world are dying because they can’t access or are not free to get what they need to survive. They are dying because they don’t have the money to get the food or the medicine or medical attention they need.

When we ignore the plight of people in need we are committing an act of silent violence. There are people in our communities that are elderly, poor, and disabled that live and die in unbearable misery because they can’t access what they need. It is held back from them because – they can’t pay for it.

When we ignore people’s human needs we are committing an act of violence; a sin of omission. It is silent and unseen, so we can go to bed and concentrate on our mundane tasks for tomorrow. We can’t see the children that are hungry or the elderly person that is in pain. They have needs but – who cares?

What is it that people need? Ask somebody living in a totalitarian nightmare, they might say freedom. Ask somebody else living in the slums of India, they might say food. A poor person with an inexplicable pain in the USA might say heath care. The notion of humans needs is slippery and it may seem subjective. There are some things that we can describe objectively as basic human needs but this is no easy task.

The needs of Torontonians are different in many respects to the needs of hunter gatherers in the Amazon. As societies change and evolve, so do needs.

The discussion about individual and community needs is inexorably tied into the discussion about a free society. Our fetish of individualism costs the health of the collective. If we ignore either the freedom of the individual or the health of the whole, we will be vulnurable. There is a dialectic between the two that we have always been participating in and we always will. Too much focus on one will compromise the well being of the other.

Many people agree that freedom is a fundamental need. That is, freedom for all members of society. But this statement is often nothing more than an abstract idea. In real terms, freedom is predicated on economic and social security. If people can’t access needs that are vital for survival, the discussion about freedom is nothing more than mindless bullshit. When people are not free to access food, shelter, and medical care, the issue of freedom of speech or the freedom to practice some exotic religion is meaningless.

To achieve freedom for all we first need to achieve basic security for all. That is, people need freedom from police and state interference if citizens act to feed children or get medicine for those that are sick. But ultimately, the state and the police are there to protect profit and the rights and freedoms of the profit makers.

If it is impossible to legally acquire food or medicine for your children or yourself, then you are not free. The person that can walk into the store and pick up what he or she needs and walk out with it, is free. He may have to sell the most of his waking time to a capitalist to do it, but he has a measure of freedom those that are deprived do not have. From a capitalistic viewpoint, this discussion gets uncomfortable at this point.

It may be argued that vital needs define human needs and apart from that, you could put them in the ‘wants’ category. But this crude definition of basic needs is not sufficient. Wheelchairs for those that need them may not be vital in any strict sense, but they are basic needs nonetheless. To tell an individual that cannot walk and is deprived of a wheelchair that he or she is free is a cruel insult. Not providing these essentials is a social sin of omission. Assessing needs for individuals and communities requires constant reassessment. For an individual to access what is needed to fulfill her or his potential, the obstacles to access whatever is needed must be removed.

People in Toronto need heat in the winter. They also need telephones and transportation. As technology and social structures change, people’s needs change. Kids in Toronto also need the means to attend that school trip, running shoes for gym and numerous things that kids in the Amazon do not need.

Realistically, we have to move beyond providing food and shelter and then hoping for the best. For people to develop and grow to their potential, the obstacles to growth must be removed. If we don't provide these apparently non-vital needs, social problems grow dramatically. And so, we have what we might regard as the needs of the community. Neglecting these could mean significant sickness in the community and even death for individuals within the community.
Even if we look at this problem in cold, pragmatic terms, we have to pay serious attention to the needs of the community. If we don’t pay attention to them, we then pay for jails and rehabilitation programs such as drug rehab or halfway houses. The per diem for a stay in jail changes from place to place, but it is always very expensive. The stupid selfish approach results in spending more money on jails than on education. When that happens, we know we’ve collectively screwed up.

By being stingy on the front end, we spend much more on the other end. Simply reacting to crisis after they occur is not an intelligent social strategy. Proactive intervention is not only less costly. It also makes for a better society for all of us to live in. Silent violence has very strange and very ugly, expensive karma.

In the face of this reality, we watch as soldiers slaughter people in the name of freedom. Violent war that is an oil grab by the very people that refuse to feed the poor. And they will say, we are fighting for freedom and democracy. The word “freedom” has been so perverted in this case that it is nothing but empty rhetoric.

Needs must be addressed on a collective basis. Perhaps most importantly, any society must take care of its material production needs. This includes production, processes of exchange, distribution and so on. We need to produce before we can consume. We also need to distribute adequately for everybody to consume adequately. Another basic need is reproduction needs. That is, any society must provide pre-natal care, birthing care and it must address the developmental needs of children. Daycare and parental education are frequently neglected on a community level. Ignoring these needs is, as we can see, very expensive for both the affected individual and the wider community.

We are often encouraged to resent paying taxes for social programs by right wing ideologues. But working class people or middle class people are often a single accident away from reliance on social services to provide for them. A person may get whacked on the head and as a result is brain damaged or physically disabled. Very few people are immune from having to rely on the state or community for their vital and other basic needs. People that have this misfortune and are not covered by insurance or if their insurance company finds a way out of paying the bills may be shocked to find out how barbaric and cold social welfare systems can be.

It is worth noticing that many people that resent paying for social programs and generally resent paying taxes rarely if ever say that they resent that 30 to 40% of our tax dollars go to pay interest on the public debt. That is roughly equivalent to what is paid to fund education or health care (in Canada). The actual percentage that goes to feed people on welfare is far less.

The extremists argue that people that need wheelchairs or food should fend for themselves or rely on the whims of philanthropy. This is another way of saying that the needs of the poor and disadvantaged is not our collective responsibility. This extreme of selfishness and callous individualism has become the mantra of the extreme right which is parroted by the numbing mindlessness of the bubble gum media.

The neo conservatives would spend a million dollars to kill somebody before they’d spend five bucks to feed somebody. This seems to be an outrageous statement but it also seems to be true. There is not a whimper about the billions spent on the war in Iraq by the extremists on the right but they are always ready to pounce on any increase in social spending. The extreme-right in the USA, Canada, Europe or anywhere else seems to applaud and scream in unison. They are eerily similar - cultlike.

We need to stand up for freedom for everybody. Not some vague notion about marking an ‘x’ every four years for some self centered quisling, but real freedom. That means freedom FROM hunger and preventable sickness and freedom TO enjoy the simple pleasures of life. That means that we have to stand alongside those that do not have real freedom and against those that have so much freedom it is obscene and it has become dangerous for the rest of us.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

June 11 is a little known holiday in the mining towns of Cape Breton. In these towns it is known as Davis Day. Here, there is a history of conflict between miners and the coal company. The coal company enjoyed complete and unquestioned support from the Canadian state and the Prime Minister, a slave to the crystal ball named MacKenzie King. This local history is rife with revolutionary passion and bloody struggles between miners, steelworkers and capitalist tyranny.

It is a history that is sufficiently shameful that few, if any, students have learned about it in school. This history is spelled out in the town square of the town of New Waterford under the title, “Standing the Gaff”, and under a statue of a man named William Davis. This title is a defiant reference to a comment made by mine vice president, J.E. McLurg, and is often attributed to his boss, BESCO President Roy Wolvin, known locally as Roy the Wolf. He said of the striking miners, “They won’t stand the gaff”.

He was referring of course, to starvation.

The reason for the holiday is because William Davis was one of three coal miners that was shot on June 11, 1925 at New Waterford Lake by a gang of goons/company police. William Davis died of his wounds. This ‘police’ force was supported by and worked with the Canadian military.

In the 1920’s the miners went on strike as a result of wage cuts. The mine owners had cut their meager wages. Before the cuts, 90% of wages went to food and rent for the average miner and datal employees spent more on food and rent than they earned.

During the strikes the Canadian military were dispatched to Cape Breton equipped with guns, bayonets and machine guns. On June 11, 1925, miners decided to reconnect power to the town from the power plant. In the neighbouring town, Glace Bay, the soldiers placed a machine gun on the steps of a church and defied the miners of Glace Bay to cross a line. The miners from Glace Bay were marching to help their brothers in New Waterford.

These sadistic goons routinely rode on horseback through the streets of New Waterford terrorizing the people. Most of these goons were recruited from outside of Cape Breton where the ideological bent and character of the people was less militant.

These paid goons were beholden to their bosses who wanted the power and water cut off to the people of the New Waterford area. They had to take on the miners and Cape Bretoners being what they are, soon had the quisling company goons terrified. They began to panic and in the violence, they began shooting, jumping in New Waterford Lake and trying to escape on horseback. Many of these cowards were pulled off the horses and beaten by the miners. A local priest had to intervene to save the life of one of these men who was in the hands of the miners.

The miners were understandably angry. The company controlled their water and had cut the supply. They were there to take back the water and to take back the electricity to make life somewhat less unbearable than it had been for them and their families.

The leader of the union was a native of Scotland who had been politically seasoned in his native land. His name was J.B. McLaughlin. McLaughlin was a firey leader who understood the nature of capitalism. He had gained a good deal of his education from the brutality he had witnessed before he had come to Canada.

McLaughlin was eventually thrown into the penitentary for reporting on an incident he witnessed in nearby Whitney Pier where he watched the soldiers beat women and men in the streets. The Steel Workers there were on strike against the same ruthless privateers that owned and ruled the industry and the people of Cape Breton Island. He was convicted on trumped up charges of siditious libel and sentenced to two years in the penetentary. The real reason for his imprisonment was that he represented a threat to not only the mine owners, but to the capitalist system in Canada. They were afraid that he would become an MP (a member of Parliament). McLaughlin said, "Under capitalism the working class has but two courses to follow: crawl – or fight."

A significant part of this history was the power of the Company Store and the control that it had won for the owners (Besco) - over the miners. Many contemporary Cape Bretoners grew up in company houses and back in the day, the miners owed their wages, and as the song says, their souls, to the Company Store.

They would work all week in the dangerous coal mines deep beneath the ocean and at the end of the week the company would "check off" all that was owed. The miners often had little or nothing to show for their work because they were so hoplessly indebted to the company. The company controlled everything. The check off deducted medical bills, water, rent, food, the tools the miners needed to do their jobs; pretty much all the necessities of life. The company however did not gain control over the air the people had to breathe but the steel plant was and still is responsible for Cape Bretoners having the highest cancer rates in Canada.

Miners burned company coal to heat their company homes. They clothed their children and bought their food at the company store. They drank company water and used company electricity.

The struggles in Cape Breton against capitalist tyranny were struggles for basic subsistence and human dignity.The essential problem was that the capitalists had control of everything.

Now Paul Wolfowitz is president of the World Bank. The World Bank and the IMF operate in essentially the same way as the company store did. If you want to understand what's going on in the world today, ask a Cape Bretoner - preferably an old one, about the Company Store. What the neo-cons are doing to the working classes and the poor in the world has been done to Cape Bretoners a few generations ago.

Paul Wolfowitz is in charge of economic policy for about one hundred countries that are struggling to survive economically. His right wing neo con policies have proven to be disastrous for the working class and their methods of strangulation are similar to the old company store on Cape Breton Island. Essentially the idea is to take control of the vital necessities of life and force the people into wage slavery to pay for them.

The World Bank has pushed hard for privatization, even of the water, and Wolfowitz presided over the most extreme privatization binge in history in the embattled and now destroyed nation of Iraq. This neo con tyranny is a very real crisis for the poor and the workers of countries under the rule of the of the World Bank. The World Bank will put an extra strong effort into modernizing developing countries through what they will call free market policies (which in fact are always controlled) and they will privatize the water, the medicine, the electricity - everything. The air may remain free but it will be deadly if the neo cons have their way.

The history of Cape Breton Island as well as many other oppressed regions of the world should not be hidden from school children. It is a history that repeats itself and a history that will continue to repeat itself until we have the courage to put a stop to it. The marriage of the capitalist state to private capital is far more complete now in 2005 than it was in 1925.

Unfortunately, the mindset and the mass media fall heavily under the spell of the wolves that prey upon the innocent. Roy the Wolf terrorized Cape Bretoners in the 1920's and now Paul the Wolf is doing the same thing on a much larger scale.

It is up to the contributors to Indymedia, Usenet, and the internet in general to present the truth to those that have not heard it. The wolves do not have control of it, at least not yet.

We have a lot of work to do.

***********************************
I believe in education for action. I believe in telling children the truth about the history of the world, that it does not consist of the history of kings, or lords or cabinets. It consists of the history of the mass of the workers, a thing that is not taught in the schools. I believe in telling children how to measure value, a thing that is not taught in any school. – J.B. McLachlan

Smash Tyranny

Racism, sexism, gay bashing, woman abuse are all separate piles of the same old crap. They all have some fundamentals in common. They can all be described as tyranny and their purveyors as tyrants.

To examine the fundamentals of tyranny, let’s examine it on a personal level. Let’s examine the persistent and all too familiar problem of woman bashing. It is a problem that is maintained on government and mass media levels but here we will look at it from a more personal point of view.

If we look at the dynamics between men and women on the issue of woman battering, there are some patterns that are eerily similar from abuser to abuser. Batterers will deny, minimize, rationalize and blame the victim to defend the status quo and to let themselves off the hook psychologically.

The way out of that particular malaise is the acceptance of responsibility for the abuse. For woman abusers to begin the healing process they must first accept responsibility for what they have done. Accepting responsibility fundamentally changes the dynamic between the victim and the abuser.

Accepting responsibility is not the same as self blame. That would simply repeat the punishing approach that the abuser used on the woman he abused. Self flagellation may seem heroic, but it serves no one. The abuser objectified and demeaned his victim and repeating the same habit unto his own psyche may only increase guilt, self loathing, and anger. It is feelings like this that he may have been trying to control in the first place when he took it upon himself to control his partner. As the abuser feels the need to control his emotions, he will control his partner. The trick is to eventually learn to live an emotionally independent life. Control of emotions is also an important aspect to this puzzle. The abuser has the impression that he must control his partner because she has control of his emotions. He may believe that to be the case.

Abuse is always a choice and it is used to secure control and privilege. It is used to maintain an old collective order that the abuser finds beneficial for his particular social position. In this case the status quo is that he is the king of the castle. It is not a matter of ‘losing it’, or, ‘I was drunk’. These are merely excuses and rationalizations to excuse his majesty from guilt.

But here we will focus on the first and most important part of this problem; the acceptance of responsibility.

The acceptance of responsibility means that the tyrant must acknowledge what he has done, that it was his choice, and he must accept his victim’s feelings of betrayal. He must accept his victim’s feelings of hatred for him as a result of the abuse. He must actually see what he has done with what used to be love. He must look inside his victim’s tears and her grief and her loss. And most importantly, he must feel it.

No easy task and any man that completes it is truly a man, in fact, a true hu-man. He will rediscover love and genuine acceptance.

The refusal to take responsibility for woman abuse on a personal level is one thing, but refusing to acknowledge it as a problem (denial), or maintaining that it’s not much of a problem (minimizing), or responding to the discussion with charges that women bring it on themselves, or that women are just as violent as men (blaming), serve to deflect attention away from looking at the beast in the eye. Collectively, this is not about laying guilt at the feet of each individual man. It is accepting the *fact* that we have a problem as a gender. It manifests from sexist jokes to the murder of women because they are women. As men we must confront this reality and do something about it. We must act in solidarity with the women that are in the trenches. We have to look at the power imbalance and the fact that all of us receive favoured treatment and that as a gender we have many privileges.

Collectively, men have to acknowledge woman abuse as a problem that is perpetrated by men and by male cultural norms.

Again, this is not about blame. This is about accepting responsibility as men and that does not mean we have to take on the personal responsibility of singular crimes. There is a system at work and we must acknowledge it.

The tyranny of sexism is one front on the battle for equality. Another is racism. Still another is nationalism. They stem from a perspective, a point of view that favours the privileged – the status quo.

Vertical divisions have their basis in idealism or in this case, idiot idealism. That is, they are notions concocted from arbitrary divisions. The divisions may be race, gender, religion and so on, but they are ultimately arbitrary. There is only one division based on material reality, and that is the division between classes.

If you are a factory worker and you are White, you have a lot more in common with other factory workers, male and female, whether they are Black, Mexican, or Chinese, than you do with the owners of the factory. And it doesn’t matter if they are in Korea, Angola or Canada. And the owners of the factories and the mines and the newspapers have a lot more in common with each other than they have with us, the collective that is the workers of the world. The difference is that they, the owners, recognize that as a fact and live accordingly. We generally don’t and are willing to pick up guns and kill each other because the owners or the owner’s puppets tell us to do it. The Palestinians and the Israelis have no need to kill each other and neither do the Iraqis and the Americans. They have bought the hype of nationalism, racism and hate and it is unmitigated bullshit.

Tyrants of all kinds have to be chased out from behind their homes with the drapes closed shut. They have to be chased out of the classroom and out from the factory floor. Woman abuse is not a private family matter. This is a very public and very political matter. We all must kick those doors down and smash tyranny where it lives. This is an old war and we are all in it. There are not hundreds, not thousands, not millions, but billions of victims of tyrants and we have the power to smash tyranny and reduce it to a nightmare of a collective memory. And at some point, we will be able to forget it.

But before we get there we have to stop bashing women and gays and people with brown skin. We have to stop killing people in nationalistic insanity. And to do that we have to acknowledge our own privilege as White people. We are not followed in stores and we are not discounted by employers because we are White. We have to acknowledge our privilege as men and particularly, heterosexual men. We are not beaten because we are heterosexual and we are not treated like children as a result of our gender; on the contrary.

Donald Rumsfield, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have recently heaped scorn on Amnesty International for NOT keeping within the boundaries of what they consider to be politically correct. They are tyrants and are fundamentally the same as tyrants the world over. They happen to be among the worst.

Most importantly, we have to smash tyranny, not the tyrants. To do so would magically turn us into them.

The Cult of Capitalism

Strive to be an oddball and to think for yourself. To be ‘normal’ in the modern, western world is to be psychologically sick. We are products of our environment and the environment of capitalism is no longer a healthy one. In fact, it is no longer capitalism. It has graduated into monopolism. The ideology of psychopathic corporatism along with its values and priorities has an impact on most individuals if not all. We must understand how the sickness creeps into our psyche and how it affects us.

The average life consists of running on the wage-slave treadmill in order to avoid the destitution of not only ourselves, but of our loved ones as well. If only we could build up our own little fortress against the ravages of the future, we will have made it to safety. In the process we build up a mentality of competitiveness against our neighbour rather than a cooperative relationship with the community of trust and mutual collaboration. We learn instead to take pleasure in the misfortune of others and to feel angst when we notice evidence of our neighbours success.

The Dali Lama said that the way to true happiness is through compassion for others. We cannot be happy as long as we are selfish. But when we genuinely put the happiness and well being of others over our own, we can find happiness. It sounds like some cosmic trickery but when you think about it, you know beyond any doubt it’s true. Grasping for ‘me’ can only lead to jealousy, aggression, anger and dissatisfaction. Caring for others can take us out of our small alienated world and to direct contact with other people. In an atmosphere of insecurity and possible financial devastation, it is difficult for people to think that way.

The root of our modern problem is alienation.

Human beings have always had various means of making contact with others. We use language, sex, and work to do so. In each case, we escape our existential aloneness and share subjective experience with another human being. It is that existential aloneness that is the driving force behind our activity.

We know on some level that our thoughts are illusory and ephemeral. There is no substance to these flighty bubbles of fantasy. Our human tendency from thought is toward affirmation that our private world is not alone. But in the world of conceptualization and thinking we are alone and that presents us with a problem. Our response to this problem is to share our subjective experience with others. That is the natural human way and it is human just as building dams is the beaver way, or building webs is the spider way. Speaking and cooperative work are specific human activities.

Through work, we share our inner ideas with others through operating on the outer environment. As I write this I share my own inner world and when you read it, the process of work has taken place. When we work and especially when we work in the company of others and work together on the same thing, we share our inner life and when we see the ideas of others, we ‘see’ inside their thoughts. We can see how the mind of another is working just as you, the reader, can see inside my thoughts as you read this.

Two important things happen at that point. First, we share our inner world. We act upon the world and other human beings can appreciate what we’ve done. When they do, they appreciate me and that appreciation is beyond ego tripping. It is communion. Secondly, through work we share common goals with other people. We work together for each other whether we build a structure of wood or knit a blanket. We act upon the natural world from the ghostly world of thoughts and in the process we give substance to our flighty reality of thinking.

But something has happened along the way. Work has been appropriated by an alien force. When that appropriation occurred, the inner life of ‘me’ was rendered inconsequential.

Now the workers inner life has been completely severed from the process of work. The worker works for somebody else. It is the initiative and the will of a coercive force that guides the process of work for the worker. The important ingredients of inner will and initiative have been lost. Most importantly, control of the process of work has been lost.

Now the worker is told when to work, what will be done and what will be produced. The worker does this not to manufacture objects or services, but to get money to survive. He or she does it to manufacture even more money for his or her owner. Rather than using tools within his own field of initiative, he is a tool within somebody else’s field of initiative. He finds no joy in work and instead lives only to escape from it. What was the human expression of his or her self is now the bane of his existence, his nemesis. He lives for the weekend or the evening or for vacation. He lives for the pension.

The study of human development indicates and suggests that healthy human development depends on meeting different needs at different stages. The infant needs tactile stimulation and nourishment, the toddler needs structure and so on. There is nothing to suggest that these needs ever go away but they do become less salient though the process. And in our journey toward optimal development, initiative is a cornerstone. We build up toward initiative early on and build upon it once we achieve an inner sense of it. Stripping human beings of initiative is tantamount to stripping us of our human potential.

The values and ethics of the most dominant forces have a tendency to find their way to the majority. If the individual is valued not as a mother or father, not as a friend or lover, not as a human being, but instead is valued as an object of work and not valued in terms of use value but instead in terms of exchange value, this will have a significant impact on the identity of the individual. Further, the outward display of exchange value may become the highest priority. Status symbols such as new cars and big homes come to represent ‘who I am’ replacing substantial qualities such as kindness, community spirit or intelligence in work. The world of substantial human contact is reduced and the world of facades and masks take over. The world of shared subjectivity is replaced with a world of crass objectification.

Popular and mainstream media contribute to instilling and propping up values that otherwise would be suggestive of psychopathology. They worship idols with glib and superficial charm, self centered ego-maniacs, economic parasites, blatant liars, con artists, and so on. We learn to worship the Trumps, the Bush’s and the self serving psychopaths, the merchants and the movie stars.

The impact of capitalism on our individual identity affects us directly thorough the organization of the work process and through the larger cultural milieu as well. And it is through the formation of identity that we develop out ideological sense of values and priorities.

In this process, we learn to sacrifice our lives to acquire more stuff and better stuff than those around us. We aspire to be like those at the top of the heap. We spend our lives housed in our suburban tombs and rather than living life, we watch television. We virtually live our virtual lives and are alienated from our work, our peers and all too often, from our families and ourselves. Too blind to see our malaise, too brainwashed within the cult of capitalism, we push our children to do exactly the same thing.

And in the end we can look back on our lives and remember all the great shows we watched on television; the great virtual escape from alienation.

Which Side are You On?

The strike on the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 may have been all that was needed to defeat America militarily. America, as we have known it, may have already disappeared into the mists of history.

America has, in the past few years, arrested people and placed them in concentration camps without charges or trial. America has taken it upon itself to use a standard of pre-emptive strikes on nations and on individuals. Once that happens, once a person is arrested for what he or she is likely to do, or will do, a line has been crossed. And once one nation takes it upon itself to strike other nations for what they may do in the future, the same dark line is crossed.

But we cannot be careless about equating war itself with specific war crimes like torture or human rights abuses. To paraphrase the Nuremberg tribunals, war contains within it all the war crimes. Once an invasion starts, once a war begins, the ultimate crime has been committed. And the people responsible for starting that war have committed the ultimate war crime.

On this side of that line we have messy societies. We have crime and problems like drug abuse and street gangs. We have known offenders lurking among us and we are waiting for them to harm somebody *before* we arrest them. We have political dissent and scores of oddballs performing all kinds of hocus-pocus rituals. We have kids with pins in their faces and trash on the streets.

We also have the freedom to write whatever the hell we want on Indymedia or advocate for the legalization of marijuana or same sex marriage. We can expect to not be spied on by the state and we can expect to remain generally unmolested by the state. We can also speak openly in favor smashing the infidels into the ground and replace their demonic society with a religious theocracy. We can associate with and hold meetings with people that are intent on replacing free society with a dictatorship. We can advocate for and strive for any political or religious society we want.

On the other side of the line there is little or no crime. There are no drug problems and criminals are arrested, killed, or controlled before they pull off the quantity of evil they manage to on this side of the line. The streets are clean and women, foriegners and homosexuals know their place. The trains run on time.

If we react to the enemies of freedom with tyranny, we have unwittingly conceded defeat. If those that want to destroy the principles of freedom can do so with terror, then the collective will of society is not on the side of freedom. It is on the side of security, cowardice, and despots. It is not on the side of rational authority because to do so, we must uphold the right of freedom for our enemies as much as our friends. This principle cannot be diluted or tampered with if we are on the side of freedom.

Western law and western sensibilities have been forged long before the writing of the American Constitution. And through time, the progression of rational based laws and rational based institutions have developed to a point where the traditional authority of kings and superstition has been lost. The personal charisma of some leader cannot usurp the principles of rational authority. Laws and institutions have their bases on rationality and that is what legitimizes our laws.

When laws are forged through emotions or through the arbitrary dictums of one person or one group, we are in deep trouble. It is then that we enact the death penalty because some visceral reaction in our collective guts tells us ‘he deserves it’. It is then that we seek to jail the pedophile before he hurts somebody. It is then that we throw potential terrorists in jail with no trail and it is then that we agree that waging war on other countries will alleviate our timid and cowering souls.

Amnesty International has lambasted the United States for it’s human rights violations and war crimes in their recently published report for 2005. Amnesty says in the report, “The US administration’s treatment of detainees in the “war on terror” continued to display a marked ambivalence to the opinion of expert bodies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and even of its own highest judicial body. Six months after the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts had jurisdiction over the Guantánamo detainees, none had appeared in court. Detainees reportedly considered of high intelligence value remained in secret detention in undisclosed locations. In some cases their situation amounted to “disappearance”.”

It remains to be seen whether this trajectory away from progress, legitimate rational authority, freedom and human rights on the part of the United States is the sinister work of a small cabal that have taken the reigns of power or if it is the collective and cowardly will of the people. And it is more than the United States in question. Canada has instituted repressive ‘security certificates’ at the behest of W. Bush. Britain has implemented its own security laws in accordance with the American Patriot Act and other nations have followed suit.

Undoubtedly, those that planned and carried out the attacks on 9-11 imagined that the impact of their terror would be enormous. They probably did not dream that the towers would actually fall to the ground. And in their wildest delusions of grandeur, they could not have dreamed that their act of terror would actually change the fundamental basis of what America is and will be.

It is not too late and it is vital to all free societies that we have the courage to take on those that attack civilains with international and lawful tribunals and not war. And with the courage to uphold freedom; not through tyranny.

We must also bring their accomplices inside the American state to justice. When those that are responsible for the sudden appearance of torture in Guantanomo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the practice of rendition are brought to justice with the full support of the American government and the American people, America will have stepped back from the twilight zone.

But for the ongoing carnage in Iraq, America may never be absolved. Some crimes can never be undone.

The Value of Workers

Everything around you that you own and use is the result of effort of a vast army of unseen workers. The great attribution error of history is the erroneous assumption that we need the thieves to make it all possible.

All over the world we find ourselves in the midst of a grand Globalization experiment that has devastating consequences for the vast majority. The promise is, it will get much worse. It is the economic experiment penned by Milton Freidman, Mises, and Hayek as well as the French economist Say. On the question of value, these marginalists have parted company with Adam Smith and Ricardo who knew that it was central to scientific economic study to understand what it is that determines value. They tackled questions about what it is that encourages wealth to grow and what determines its distribution between classes in society. They saw an objective measure of value as a precondition for coming to terms with these problems. Smith suggested it was to be found in labour. Ricardo built his work from these notions and developed the idea of use-value as opposed to exchange-value to be elaborated on later by Karl Marx.

There is no doubt that that the more shallow focus of the marginalists, the invisible hand, which serves as their basis for economic theory, is valid, especially on a micro level. However, when we consider the confounding factors of the larger economy, supply and demand curves and marginal utility curves simply can't explain much. It is superficial and it is 'vulgar economics'. We must go deeper to discover what it is that determines value. We must go to Ricardo, Smith and for more depth, Marx.

Any notion that the invisible hand of supply and demand will produce what is best for society is simply wrong. For example, a given society may need more medicine or health care or housing, whatever the case may be. The market suggests however that producing Play Stations is more profitable. Play Stations will be produced in accordance with the laws of supply and demand. Capitalism is very good at producing trinkets, shiny toys, and killer hamburgers.

At this point capitalism seems to be beyond Keynes and it may be that Keynes policies and recommendations are simply archaic. Keynes undoubtedly provided capitalism with a longer life expectancy than unbridled capitalist anarchy could have expected. It also could be argued that defense spending has done more for the overall health of capitalism in the 20th century than Keynes distribution policies. It certainly cultivates and maintains hegemony.We can see that advanced capitalism is not living up to the promise of stability or equilibrium. Capitalism is showing itself to be an anarchistic loose hose, flipping and whipping depending on the mood of speculators. Rather than stability, the economy is subject to the whims of a grand global casino game.

The theory of supply and demand helps explain the price of something in a given time or place but it does not explain why things have the exchange value they have. The theory that does have far more explaining power is Smith's labour theory of value. According to this theory, the exchange value of commodities is determined by the amount of labour measured in working hours necessary to make them (given current levels of technology). Socks sell for less than cars because it takes fewer hours to make socks than it does cars. In the same period of time, a person may make many socks but only one car. Smith and other economists tested this theory by comparing prices of commodities with the necessary labour time needed to produce them. They found that while it does not explain the exact price of things, it does explain why they exchange for their approximate prices. This theory takes the mystery out of the concept of value by relating it, exchange value, to human labour. Consider the fact that the basis of capitalist economies is surplus value, that is, the hours of labour beyond what the worker is paid for and the value that is appropriated by the capitalist; that this is the basis of the wealth of capitalists. And when we consider what can be done with labour power in terms of developing priorities, goods and services, we may then consider possibilities beyond the poor and short sighted rationality of the marginalists, popularly known today as neo-liberals. We might abandon the superstitious nonsense that the theft of the value that is produced by labour as an indispensable ingredient to economic success. In other words, we can afford to abandon the notion that exploitation, greed, and theft are necessary evils for societies to function well. At that point, we may go beyond the tyranny of the twit class.

The neo-classical experiment is on and we are in the midst of it. Patterns are beginning to emerge and they are looking grim. From these patterns and hardships an awareness of the true nature of capitalism is growing.

A specter is haunting the planet…

Seething Contempt Diplomacy

Much of the world holds seething contempt for Bush and his neo-con design to take over the world. What is emerging today is some light at the end of the tunnel. Not so long ago the neo-cons appeared to be ready to really take over - but not anymore. The best side of this is that it may well happen, eventually, that another age of Keynesian-like politics and economics will result as a reaction to this present age of neo-con insanity. Everything 'rightwing' is coming out and showing itself for what it is. On the other hand, monopoly capitalism itself matures with or without Bush and to a large degree it is what dictates to Bush. It demands him to be imperialistic.

But still, there’s room for a shade of optimism because as powerful and mighty as W. Bush is, he doesn’t get much respect. The Europeans and the Canadians have stood up to Bush. When the madman was screaming for blood in Iraq, he was given the diplomatic version of the finger by all those that could afford to do it. Canada recently waved Bush away regarding the space wars scam that had a large portion of Canadian tax dollars earmarked for the rich playboys in the War Party. The Europeans and the Canadians have lost much of their traditional unbridled enthusiasm to bow and scrape to the President of the United States.

Heads of state, diplomats, media insiders, as well as taxi drivers, barbers and school teachers have taken to whispering about Bush behind his back. Bush and his cabal are widely seen as an aberration, a summer dust devil that will soon spin out and disappear. In the meantime, people watch in annoyed amazement as the dust devil grows – too big. Too big and out of control – yes, but Bush has spent his political capital. He can’t get respect from anybody that is not on the payroll

Bush pressures the Europeans not to sell arms to China - they sell arms to China. He tells the Russians not to deal with Iran, they deal with Iran. He tells them not to sell military hardware to Chavez in Venezuela (who repeatedly thumbs his nose at Bush), and they sell to Venezuela. Germany, Britain and the French are also dealing with Iran against the whine of an increasingly alienated and secretly ostracized Bush.The Iraqis Shiite religious leader, the Iranian Sistani, has called the shots over the timing of the recent Iraqi election against the wishes of Bush. Bush's hit man, Allawi, managed to buy about 14% of the vote. Not to be outdone by democratic processes, Bush’s neo con man, Chalabi, has wrestled key posts (the Oil Ministry and a deputy Prime Minister seat) away from possible control by ‘real’ Iraqis. Another Allawi, the cousin of the previous Mafioso (Fourteen Percent) Allawi and also a cousin of Chalabi, has also slid into the top political layer of Iraqi politics. Although this kind of open gangsterism was widely expected, it doesn’t serve to buy Bush or any of his accomplices much ‘political capital’.

Bush wants to make war on Iran and Syria and at the same time is saddled with Shiites gaining a degree of political power in the same country they spent many billions of dollars to take control of. It’s a bit of a conundrum. It may be difficult to make war with these countries with Sistani lurking over their shoulders. Kim Jung Il of Pyongyang is telling Bush, 'you want weapons of mass destruction - I got weapons of mass destruction; c'mon and take them'. Noticing the gleam in Jung Il's eyes, Bush screams to make war on puny Syria and he can't even do that as American tanks spin their threads in the sands of Iraq. Meanwhile, the Russians are flirting with the Chinese, the Chinese are flirting with the North Koreans who are flirting with the South Koreans, The Europeans are flirting with Iran as is everyone else. Chavez is flirting with Castro and telling Bush to back to fuck away or he'll cut off the oil. Condolences Rice recently went to Latin America to try to seduce the kings to no avail. And Bush, he can't even get a date with Canadian quisling, Paul Martin.

The Bush that was there before 9-11, the Bush that was a stunned version of Gerald Ford, is still there behind the deranged mad-man mask. He is the goofy puppet we see dangling from those strings. Although he is involved in an orgy of mass murder, it’s still ol’ Dubya; the rich redneck that can can’t track or follow particularly well.

Although there may be room for optimism, there are a few wild cards out there. Bush himself may be the wildest card of all and who knows, he may force respect from world leaders after he returns from his Creationist Bible School classes in Kansas.

While there may be room for optimism, it is compromised by the assortment of hawks and psychopaths (Wolfowitz, Bolton, Negroponte, Gonzales etc.) that Bush has appointed in key positions.

Following 9-11, the world seemed to hold its collective hand out to America. Ordinary Americans lost their lives in those horrific attacks and it not only affected Americans in the gut, it affected everybody viscerally. America and Bush had not only respect but genuine sympathy from all corners of the globe at that time. But there isn’t much left of either at this point.

The War Party is looking less and less to be something to respect than to fear. It looks like all over the world people are waking up to the fact that Bush and his gang are crazy.

Abandon Affluence

Do you ever consider what goes in to bringing you a glass of Coke?

One hundred years ago the soil of the United States felt a lot different than it does today. The reason for that is that many of the nutrients and much of the organic matter has been washed out to sea. They have been replaced with much less porous chemical fertilizers. The amount of soil, that is, the thickness of it, is a fraction of what it used to be.

We eat these nutrients and we flush them down the toilet. They go out to sea and as a result, the land loses some of its wealth.

We live inside of extremely large and wasteful systems and those systems must be either flushed down the toilet of history or radically changed.

The simple act of having a snack and a glass of coke requires a monumental effort that happens behind the scenes. The sugar is shipped to the factory from the plantation and a warehouse. This requires ships, trucks and forklifts. The sugar is packaged on the way and that requires cutting trees, processing the paper which is a large expenditure of energy in itself. The paper is then packed and shipped. It is then made into the specific packaging material for the sugar. This all requires many workers to get in their cars and go to work, using even more energy. The sugar is packaged and then moved to the factory that makes the Coke. This factory ships in many different materials that go into the recipe for Coke. Then there is glass and cans which start out as rock and are processed into cans and bottles. It would take a lot of effort to trace every worker that goes into a glass of coke.

So, you have your Coke and a pastry which is in cellophane wrapper which in turn is in a colourful box. Again, the process is far too involved to even write out here. Little by little by little, every day, every week and every year, the earth and the eco-systems provide their micro treasures for our macro systems so we humans can consume. We are addicted to bath oil, and hair conditioner and cigarettes and fat. And as the wealth of the eco-systems offer up their treasures to us, we flush them down toilets, burn them, and contaminate them irreparably.

We have to abandon affluence and our multitude of petty addictions. We have to abandon our spoiled comfort. We have to stop the madness of having our Coke and our snack and then driving in our cars to Curves to work off our guilt and excessive fat. We have to stop packing goods inside of packages that are inside of packages. We have to stop cutting tress to make paper to advertise to tell people they must consume what they don’t need and what will make them sick. We have to learn to eat from the local soil, to drink water from our local ground, and to stop all the shipping and flushing and burning.

We have to change our minds.

But when we consider that even something as minimal as the Kyoto Protocol has run into stiff opposition from those that are most addicted to the party, we know that we have to win a huge battle before we start cutting down the large macro party machines of capitalism.

Our children and grandchildren and their kids have an enemy in our midst. This enemy is equal to the bus driver that jumps from the bus with busted brakes to save himself instead of taking the risk to save the children who all perish off the side of a cliff. They are George Costanza pushing children and feeble old women down to escape what he thinks is a fire in the kitchen. They are the selfish and comfortable cowards that we think of as capitalists. They are them and their million lackeys and they are the enemies of humanity and the earth.

Everybody doesn’t have to work to distribute and produce wealth. That idea is part of capitalistic indoctrination. Capitalism has given us many gifts of technology, know-how, and toys. Thank you capitalism, we appreciate it. But it has come at a price and the sooner we start paying it back to the earth, the less expensive it will be. We have to change our economic systems, our production systems and our distribution systems if we want to save the eco-systems.

We will produce most of what we need locally and we will start living with each other in communities again. We will say good-bye to our alienated lives in front of television sets. We will produce what we need and we will distribute what is needed as it is needed. We may need bicycles and buses, we don’t need cars. We need to distribute water where it isn’t locally available, we don’t need Coke. We don’t need bath oil or bath oil beads.

We live inside big wasteful production and distribution systems but we also live inside many other systems. We live inside eco-systems and we cannot destroy them. We cannot continue to abuse the earth because we are as much a part of the earth and the nutrients we put in our mouths and flush down the toilet. As we destroy the earth, we destroy our grandchildren. They are the earth and they will come from the earth long after we return to it.

A Clever Admission of Racism

The following statement is one of the more clever displays of camouflage ever devised. It seems to be used mainly by White liberals. Conservatives that take the trouble to try to appear non-racist may also resort to it. The statement is: "I'm a racist and we are all racists."

It looks very good at first. Making such an admission takes courage and insight, you'd think.

It is like the tactic of a crow, hiding in plain sight. Soon, nobody pays attention to them.

The reason for this admission is to normalize racism. It is one the most hateful tactics of social and psychological subterfuge ever devised. This clever admission of guilt serves to legitimize the myriad of the crimes of racists; from subtle ostracization to lynchings and genocide. It provides a rationale for White privelege, a privelege that has been won through a long history of mass murder, ruthless theft, and racist declarations to affirm our nefarious birthright.

Racism is not normal and it isn't human nature. It is part of an artificial continuum of domination that is hundreds of years old. Racism is a means of promoting, securing and legitimizing White privilege for the people and the heirs of the people that have killed, enslaved, and ostracized Blacks, Asians, and Aboriginals. People that take comfort in that privilege will both rationalize racism with statements like, "everybody is a racist and it's human nature" and then contradict themselves by saying that racism is either not a problem or not much of a problem.

You see a very similar pathological dynamic with religious zealots. People like George W. Bush and other members of the Christian Right will proclaim themselves to be sinners; that we are all sinners and if we ask our Lord for forgiveness and believe in Him, we will be granted out rightful place in heaven.

A bit of a cartoonish mental scam but one that is surprizingly common and resilient against the light of rationality and common sense.

These humble servants of the Lord then proceed to slaughter thousands to steal their resources. They hold a gun in one hand and a bible in the other. They spit venom through their fangs and declare war on evil.

Like the liberal racists that ignore their own racism, they take comfort in their sick and pathological skill at ignoring the immense pain that they inflict.

Revolution or Bust

After World War 2 the Western World began a grand party that certainly climaxed in the late 60’s. Optimism was everywhere. Tons of gadgets were being invented and bought and suburbs were growing out of Henry Ford’s factories. Everything was on the upswing. Social programs and workers benefits meant that the children of capitalism were secure and the future was brilliant. There was only one direction – up. Sure there may have been bumps and grinds, but there was a definite positive, upward trend.

In the mid-1970’s, when nobody was looking, the direction changed. We have been on a downward slide ever since and lately, it’s becoming uncomfortably noticeable. We have been tightening belts, cutting programs, cracking down on senior citizens and poor people and slaughtering thousands of Arabs for oil. Those factories that were the economic basis for the suburbs have been closing and the inner cities are starting to rot. Some American states spend more on jails than they do on education.

Capitalism has grown into an ugly insatiable beast that has no loyalty to anyone. Shiny toys will be made where they can be made cheapest. Monsters like Wal-Mart manufacture in so-called communist China, where the state controls capitalism as opposed to the other way around, and they can sell goods for lower prices than anyone else. Manufacturing firms have been moving to Mexico and Vietnam and the suburb dwellers kids won’t have a pot to piss in.

Workers in Quebec were heroic enough to become the first unionized Wal-Mart in North America. Last week the monster spit those heroes out like a bad meal and sent a message, not only to other Wal-Mart workers with the guts to demand enough to eat and buy Christmas toys. They send a message to all workers. This is a message from the private sector (courtesy of Wal-Mart) to workers period. There is a class war on and whether you bury your head in the sand or not, you can’t escape reality. It’s all over the place. And in reality, the message is, we don’t need you. You need us.

The optimism of the past is gone. We may be afraid to look at where we’re headed, but eventually we will have to. The working class, waged and unwaged, is entering the dark ages of capitalism and there is nothing short of revolution that will stop it. The ideological madmen have taken over politically. Not because it’s suddenly fashionable to be a neo- con as much as capitalism grows and it grows fast, and it matures. We happen to be fortunate enough to be living in a time when it is getting rotten. The capitalist corporation and the capitalist state are unapologetically intertwined and they are shamelessly taking over the world like madmen in a 60’s Batman movie.

They used to say that if we (workers) organize they (the owners) will close up shop. Most times, it was a bluff. But they ain’t bluffing anymore. Real wages have been going down for three decades now and capital can flee across borders at the tap of a keyboard.

The real bottom line is this. All wealth, everything you see around you is there because workers mined the ore, we shipped the ore, we cut down the tress, we built the gadgets and the factories and the homes and the hospitals, we loaded and unloaded, and hammered and transported – everything. Every dime that is in a rich man’s(sic) pocket is the result of the labour of workers. That wealth and the concomitant power isn’t legitimately theirs. The bottom line is the workers have all the wealth and the power. It has been misplaced into the pockets of parasites that don’t ship, mine, manage, build, or engineer. They just play the grand casino and they play politics and they play - and they play. But they are parasites and they are consuming the host and some day the game will be over.

We have a choice. We can take matters into our own hands now, or our kids and grandkids can do it later. We at least owe it to them to prepare them for this monumental struggle that they will have on their hands far more than we do. It could get real ugly. It will.

kim jee yoon and me

Profound Disappointment

Over the years we argue on usenet; conservatives and liberals, socialists and capitalists, Christians and atheists, and through it all the collective nightmare of Hitler's fascism is somehow remembered even though many of us cannot actually remember the killings, the concentration camps and the torture.

We assume that there are lines that none would cross because of that nightmare. Essentially we are all working toward the same things; a better life, progress, a greater measure of equality, freedom and democracy. We may have very different ways of achieving a better society and a better future and this is the basis of our arguing.

But there are lines that none of us would cross, I had assumed. We would not accept any mass slaughter of innocent people by one state against any people. We would not accept a single country actually advocating and believing that it is up to them to rule the world. We would not accept torture and concentration camps - never again. The nightmare of Hitler at least serves that purpose. We know what evil is. We know what lines *not* to cross.

But here we are in 2005 and it is quite common to argue with people that argue in favour of global imperialism and these despicable quislings believe that the will of those with the most power is worth bowing and scraping to. The sovereignty of other nations is just pretentious nonsense. They even apologize for concentration camps and torture carried out by the madmen intent on conquering the world.It wasn't so long ago that I wondered how Hitler actually managed to get people to follow his insane designs on the world and his sadistic state/corporate imperialism. I don't wonder any more. Unfortunately, I sometimes argue with the same kind of people that followed Hitler. They accept that America has the legitimate right to tell other countries what to do and the right to invade other countries to prevent THAT enemy from future aggression. They accept a state that arrests people BEFORE they commit the crime. They accept their master’s torture of foreigners or any perceived enemies. They accept their masters right to lock people up in concentration camps without trial and their right to actually torture them. I've argued with people here who minimize the torture as if it's not really torture proper. These people cannot be trusted. They are as real an enemy as Hitler and his hordes of murderers.

Many right wingers that used to support American meddling have shut up about it, and I have noticed it and I'm pleased by that. But then there are the Hitlerite apologists. You are clearly an enemy as the Nazis were in the last century and I expect that eventually this fight will progress beyond arguing. If that is your intent, so be it. You cowards will be defeated again.

A few short years ago I saw these arguments on usenet as a game, a way of sharpening my debating skills. But now I realize that this is not a rehearsal. We are into the real thing and I am arguing with real fascists.

I am profoundly disappointed.

( Psychologists have done experiments, most notably Milgram, and found that about one third of the population are quislings that bow to authority and are willing to do so on the pain of others. One third - remember that.)

The Good Old Days

In the past, men were sent to war by the state and the reaction was predictably subservient. People would march into certain death with the same grim determination to conform as the modern day suicide bombers in the Middle East. We have come a long way since then and when the state wants war, many people oppose it. There is more natural opposition to war today than there was during the Vietnam era.

In the past a man ruled his castle as he saw fit. Many men saw it fitting to beat the hell out of his wife and kids. Mothers also routinely beat the hell out of children and generally, anybody in an authority role had the power to arbitrarily abuse those under them. Teachers did it, bosses did it, parents did it, and people were generally ruled by fear as opposed to reason.

These social structures of the past were rooted in feudal tyranny and religion. Today, thanks to the nature of capitalism and it's intolerance of obstacles to profit, these feudal social monstrosities have been reduced to small corners of fanatics that long for the time when everyone knew his, and perhaps more importantly, her, place. Traditional authority has lost most of its legitimacy and has been replaced by rational authority.

It is natural that people like George W. Bush and his ilk have declared war on judges. Although they tend toward ruling in favour of the rulers, they are ruled by and are conduits of rational authority. Their loyalty has to be to whatever legal bill of rights they happen to be operating under. People like Bush and the cabal that is running America these days are obviously tyrants and the Constitution of the USA is a nusance and an obstacle to their brand of tyranny. They look at judges and they see subversive "activists" with enough power to retard the neo-con agenda.

But to come to the point here, and it is a good one.

The point is that we are progressing forward. With the regressive forces of inertia and reactionary panic, history is still moving forward in a positive direction. Even in the face of those with power, and the present American administration has biblical power, the movement into the future continues on. In the face of this extreme conservative climate that exists now, we continue to move toward socialism and away from feudalism. And we have the rationality and freedom that is inherent in capitalist society to thank for it. It is an amazing journey we are all on.

Gay marriage is the latest issue in a long, long list. The social engineers of conservatism will try their best to stop it, but this is the will of the people and thy will be done, - on earth. Hegel was correct.

Capitalism has pushed all the -isms under the brilliant glare of reason. Sexism, racism, and all the other -isms must stand the scrutiny of reason because we have become reasoning beings. We no longer hide behind bibles and tyrants in ignorant fear. We demand reasons for all laws and policies.

But there is one more -ism, and it is a dandy, that has to withstand the glare of reason. It is classism. It's about time we begin to examine it.

A Story About Two Soldiers

A Story About Two Soldiers

From the time we are born we follow a path and that path is unique and our own. Through the course of life many people cross our path and some leave a mark or alter the future. We make choices and other people make choices for us.

To what extent are we authors of our own lives? As our paths meander through cities and bedrooms and through pleasure and pain, do we ask ourselves who is in control or do we just follow along the path of least resistance?

This is a story of two men whose paths intersect with devastating consequences.

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One soldier joined the reserves in New Jersey because he needed the money. He enjoyed playing video games and watching war movies and he even fantasized sometimes about being a war hero. But he never believed that he would be in the real thing, a real war with real death and real gore.

But he was. Events far beyond his control had young American men and women packing up their troubles in their old kit bag; again. Few of them were smiling. He was being sent to Iraq and to hide the fated and persistent feelings of horror and fear, he told folks that he's up for it; that signing up was about America, not a few extra bucks to buy a car as his younger brother suggested. He told people that Saddam had to go. Then there was 9/11 and the threat of terrorism and by the time he was talking about freedom and democracy he was rambling. He didn't get the story line down pat and it seemed to him that nobody had a really good story line.

But he had begun to preen the image of a soldier for the benefit of all who knew him and for his own psychological benefit. This true blue identity had a sense of honour and dignity to it; he was a warrior, not a part time soldier. Iraq was full time and then some. There was a personal and psychological investment in this whole thing. But the whole thing turned to a jumbled mess in his mind whenever he had to think about the reality of what's happening. Privately, he thought to himself, "What's all this about - freedom for Iraqis? I wish I had enough freedom to get out of this mess". Privately and secretly, he prayed for a way out. Privately and secretly it was a mess and it had the potential to send his life on a trajectory he didn’t want any part of. But in public moments, and his life was all public moments, he was a soldier even more than he was husband, a father or a security guard.

His name is Harold and he said good-bye to his pregnant girlfriend a lifetime ago. He keeps in touch with her as much as he can but now he is feeling that even thinking about her and their three month old baby is disturbing. They live on another planet, a planet he was jealous about and a planet he longed for.

Harold felt confusion and guilt over these growing feelings of detachment but really, how could they understand him anymore? He watched the side of a friend's head blown open by a rocker propelled grenade, a weapon that featured big and center in many of his now familiar Iraq nightmares. There was no way for him to describe to her or his folks or to his little brother what it is really like to be here. And as a result he began to feel distance from them all. He told them about his friend's head being blown open but their reactions were somehow peculiar - off somehow. It almost seemed as if they didn't believe him or didn't hear him.

Something substantial changed. He used to be fluffy and concerned. Now he was the dirt and he was flat. His family could hear it on the phone and in his e-mails. Not once did any of them ever speak it out loud. But they knew inside themselves that their Harold had disappeared.

Harold understood their crass attitudes. He was now in a hell far worse than he could have ever imagined while he was still a normal Joe. How could they possibly conceive of war and this was not just a run of the mill war. This was as war as war gets. The Iraqis smile at him and try to kill him all in the same breath. Iraqi allies who are supposed to be on his side may snuff his life out at any moment. Safe areas are really not safe and no go zones really are no-go zones.

He and his crew are returning from a trip to Sadr City and were returning back to the Green Zone where they could freely exhale. A firefight erupts from nowhere and before he knows what's happening, he's running down an ally with a two of his comrades. Inside their blocked humvees the Americans are sitting ducks. They would take the fight to the terrorists. Both of his friends are suddenly shot dead before his eyes. He didn't even see the assailants. It was an ambush. As soon as they are shot, Harold manages to slide down another side ally and now his body is trembling involuntarily. An icon of his friend’s ghastly last moment is stubbornly salient in his mind. He must have his wits about him now more than ever. He feels like this whole soldier thing was the worst mistake of his life. The whole environment around him seemed sinister before the attack but now it was absolutely evil. He could see evil in the concrete and the walls around him. Without warning an Iraqi man is standing ten feet in front of him pointing a gun straight at his face. The fear and the sense of evil seem to vanish from Harold replaced with singular lucidity. He is looking directing into the eyes of a mortal enemy. Eyes that are melting and tears run down the Iraqi's cheek. The surreal now has become very real.

"I am sorry, I have to kill you", the Iraqi said in English. "I give you minute to pray, but I kill you".

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The second soldier also enjoyed war movies and videos and also fantasized about being a war hero. But all his life he has felt dread about the possibility of war in his country and prayed that it would never come to pass. He knew he was standing on a sea of oil and that it meant trouble. And he knew that America had started a war a long time ago and that it was never really over. Its conclusion had been like waiting for the second shoe to drop for the people of Iraq. The shoe did drop and it dropped with a far more violent thud than most had expected. They not only invaded but they invaded with a savagery that would make Saddam or Attila the Hun blush He watched in trembling fear as they bombed his neighbourhood and set up checkpoints that were volatile killing zones. Iraqis knew to avoid those American checkpoints and that they were guarded by nervous and heavily armed gangsters.

His name was Ahmed and it was hard for him to believe the stories about American atrocities. He wanted to believe that in many cases the stories were either lies or gross exaggerations. Why would Americans hate the Iraqi people with such passion? But he knew the Americans could be ruthless. He personally witnessed bombings and a checkpoint shooting where civilians were killed. He watched the Americans shoot into a demonstration and he read the news as often as he could. Ahmed knew that many of those horrific stories were either true or perhaps exaggerations of some kind. One thing he knew for sure was that the Americans would have to go. Too much had happened and they simply had to go.

Ahmed was married a month before the invasion. His wife implored him to avoid fighting but she knew that under the circumstances it was an unavoidable predicament for her husband. Even if he wasn’t cursed with pride, and he was, he would have to join his relatives and friends to fight the vicious animals that were destroying their country, their society and the people. What man would allow the same foreigners that crippled the whole nation with a decade of deprivation to come in and annihilate them and take away their natural resources? Such men were crawling out of their cowering holes but Ahmed was not one of them.

Ahmed wanted his wife to stay with family in Jordan until the Americans were driven out. She didn't want to go and Ahmed backed away from his demand that she leave. But they fought over the war and they fought about her staying in Baghdad and Ahmed’s role in the resistance. They also fought over money problems and the toilet seat. Like all Iraqis, the sanctions and the war placed an enormous strain on their marriage. They suffered the stress of everyday life in a war zone.

As far as Ahmed believed that human life could descend into hell, it had descended further - much further.

They had to be driven out - he knew - and until they are, he and all other Iraqis will not have security or freedom or a future. Nobody was making plans for the future now except for the quislings that help the invaders in their bloody mission. He had friends and relatives killed by American bombs and guns.

Everybody around him is in a state of constant fear and they are making plans to kill Americans and their quisling collaborators. As far as Ahmed was concerned, the Iraqi collaborators are a far more treacherous animal than the Americans. He knew that most of these Americans are here because they have no choice in the matter. But that didn't stop his intense hatred for them. "They are occupying my country and telling us, the Iraqis, what to do in our country". He felt humiliated, weak, and embarrassed to be dominated by an army of plastic foreigners.

Ahmed finds himself in a firefight resulting from an ambush his unit carried off against a small American convoy. He and his comrades are being chased by the Americans through ally-ways. Their tactic was working. Ahmed and his band of fighters know the buildings and secret passages. He ducks into a hiding place and the Americans run by only several feet from the hiding, camouflaged, Ahmed. He knows they will meet certain death a half a block away and he watches from his vantage point. Suddenly, two of the three are gunned down by his comrades but the other one escapes. Ahmed watches him run through another ally and has to run through a warehouse to cut him off. Ahmed steps out into the ally-way, AK 47 first and is ready to pull the trigger and blow the American’s head off his shoulders. He looks at the quivering young man and the panic in the young man's face brings an overwhelming feeling of sadness to Ahmed. This is a boy who is shitting in his pants right in front of Ahmed and at this moment, the American is helpless. He is at the mercy of Ahmed, the enemy. Ahmed feels rage bleaching out his empathy for the young American but he wishes it wasn’t like this. He had never killed a human being and although he believed that Allah would bless such a deed under the circumstances, something inside him resisted pulling the trigger. He wants to ask the American what he is doing here, he wants to let him escape, but he knows that he must kill him.

A cold shiver inexplicably runs through a young mother in New Jersey.

Harold's prayer was answered. But it was not God and it was not Allah that answered it. It was Ahmed.