"The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country"-- Rage Rally in Pittburgh
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: "The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country"-- Rage
Rally in Pittburgh
Date: Sep 21, 2009 11:18 AM
ARTICLE BELOW
We can either fight the Bigs or we can fight each
other. If we could only convince duh Whitey-Tighty
PseudoChristian Evangelitards and duh cops to figger
out they're on the wrong side and selling out their own
posterity...
Remember, the American Wussies didn't kick butt
during the last Great Depression, but this time we don't
have the excuse of ignorance. We know what happened.
We didn't vote for the oil wars and the 911 stunt:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.med.diseases.lyme/browse_thread/thread/6940a8d9e0024621/8591b95e0ece47f7?q=Bush%2FGore+ENERGY+&rnum=1#8591b95e0ece47f7
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.med.diseases.lyme/browse_frm/thread/e4359868117b8d81/e066f6566802741e?q=lehrer+bush+gore+bombs+bursting+in+air&rnum=1#e066f6566802741e
http://www.actionlyme.org/070326.htm
We did not vote for the 911 ^^^ show and Dancing Israelis
and Foxcom and Israeli wiretapping of the whole nation
and we did not vote for the the baddaboomjets and the
Halliburton concentration camps. We picked the
guy who was going to do new energy.
We did not ask to demolish Social Security in order
http://www.actionlyme.org/PNAC.pdf
to pay for Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger to make
oil and pipelines deals with the Turks or to sell nuclear
weapons technology to the A-rabs...
We did not order that movie.
Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
==========================
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/21
Published on Monday, September 21, 2009 by TruthDig.com
Globalization Goes Bankrupt
by Chris Hedges
The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into
camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. Movements are
building on the ends of the political spectrum that have lost faith in
the mechanisms of democratic change. You can't blame them. But unless
we on the left move quickly this rage will be captured by a virulent
and racist right wing, one that seeks a disturbing proto-fascism.
Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we
have the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the
meeting of the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is
hoping we will do-stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.
"The leaders of the G-20 are meeting to try and salvage their power
and money after everything that has gone wrong," said Benedicto
Martinez Orozco, co-president of the Mexican Frente Autentico del
Trabajo (FAT), who is in Pittsburgh for the protests. "This is what
this meeting is about."
The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in
Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They
are a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the
established centers of power. The power elite grasps, even if we do
not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal
class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who
were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful
cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who
will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this
is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign
concept.
The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world's wealthiest
nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat
battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down
the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the
streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city's police
force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have
begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to
provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been
detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web
sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and
many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their
phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.
Larry Holmes, an organizer from New York City, stood outside a tent
encampment on land owned by the Monumental Baptist Church in the
city's Hill District. He is one of the leaders of the Bail Out the
People Movement. Holmes, a longtime labor activist, on Sunday led a
march on the convention center by unemployed people calling for jobs.
He will coordinate more protests during the week.
"It is de facto martial law," he said, "and the real effort to subvert
the work of those protesting has yet to begin. But voting only gets
you so far. There are often not many choices in an election. When you
build democratic movements around the war or unemployment you get a
more authentic expression of democracy. It is more organic. It makes a
difference. History has taught us this."
Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a
tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve
corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion,
looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other
financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation
and ruined the world economy. They have formulated trade deals so
corporations can speculate across borders with currency, food and
natural resources even as, according to the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 1.02 billion people on the
planet struggle with hunger. Globalization has obliterated the ability
of many poor countries to protect food staples such as corn, rice,
beans and wheat with subsidies or taxes on imported staples. The
abolishment of these protections has permitted the giant mechanized
farms to wipe out tens of millions of small farmers-2 million in
Mexico alone-bankrupting many and driving them off their land. Those
who could once feed themselves can no longer find enough food, and the
wealthiest governments use institutions such as the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization like
pit bulls to establish economic supremacy. There is little that most
governments seem able to do to fight back.
But the game is up. The utopian dreams of globalization have been
exposed as a sham. Force is all the elite have left. We are living
through one of civilization's great seismic reversals. The ideology of
globalization, like all utopias that are sold as inevitable and
irreversible, has become a farce. The power elite, perplexed and
confused, cling to the disastrous principles of globalization and its
outdated language to mask the political and economic vacuum before us.
The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic
and political constructs caused the crisis. It led the G-20 to
sacrifice other areas of human importance-from working conditions, to
taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution-on the
altar of free trade. It left the world's poor worse off and the United
States with the largest deficits in human history. Globalization has
become an excuse to ignore the mess. It has left a mediocre elite
desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved and, more
important, trying to save itself. "Speculation," then-President
Jacques Chirac of France once warned, "is the AIDS of our economies."
We have reached the terminal stage.
"Each of Globalization's strengths has somehow turned out to have an
opposing meaning," John Ralston Saul wrote in "The Collapse of
Globalism." "The lowering of national residency requirements for
corporations has morphed into a tool for massive tax evasion. The idea
of a global economic system mysteriously made local poverty seem
unreal, even normal. The decline of the middle class-the very basis of
democracy-seemed to be just one of those things that happen,
unfortunate but inevitable. That the working class and the lower
middle class, even parts of the middle class, could only survive with
more than one job per person seemed to be expected punishment for not
keeping up. The contrast between unprecedented bonuses for mere
managers at the top and the four-job families below them seemed
inevitable in a globalized world. For two decades an elite consensus
insisted that unsustainable third-world debts could not be put aside
in a sort of bad debt reserve without betraying Globalism's essential
principles and moral obligations, which included an unwavering respect
for the sanctity of international contracts. It took the same people
about two weeks to abandon sanctity and propose bad debt banks for
their own far larger debts in 2009."
The institutions that once provided alternative sources of power,
including the press, government, agencies of religion, universities
and labor unions, have proved morally bankrupt. They no longer provide
a space for voices of moral autonomy. No one will save us now but
ourselves.
"The best thing that happened to the Establishment is the election of
a black president," Holmes said. "It will contain people for a given
period of time, but time is running out. Suppose something else
happens? Suppose another straw breaks? What happens when there is a
credit card crisis or a collapse in commercial real estate? The
financial system is very, very fragile. The legs are being kicked out
from underneath it."
"Obama is in trouble," Holmes went on. "The economic crisis is a
structural crisis. The recovery is only a recovery for Wall Street. It
can't be sustained, and Obama will be blamed for it. He is doing
everything Wall Street demands. But this will be a dead end. It is a
prescription for disaster, not only for Obama but the Democratic
Party. It is only groups like ours that provide hope. If labor unions
will get off their ass and stop focusing on narrow legislation for
their members, if they will go back to being social unions that
embrace broad causes, we have a chance of effecting change. If this
does not happen it will be a right-wing disaster."
© 2009 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges
graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades
a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of
many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What
Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The
Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
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