Why are these people, people that spread death and destruction all over the planet, so shocked when violence comes to their own doorstep?

For the past ten years or so, I’ve subscribed to and toyed with this notion of building a society in parallel to the existing society. A democratic society with the right mix of socialism and small scale capitalism bound by ecological law. Local production for local consumption. The theory being, our current system is inherently non-sustainable and will certainly collapse. After all, who can deny we’re seeing the cracks appear in the dam?

Texas, a boom state with phenomenally non-sustainable growth, is locked in year long drought and they’ve been known to have ten year droughts. But not with twenty-five million people. They’re now planning to treat sewage for drinking water. Drink their own piss to survive. Serves ‘em right, I suppose. Aquifers in the Upper Mississippi Delta are feeling the strain of industrial agriculture. Dead zones are found throughout our oceans. The air in many national parks is so bad the Park Service advises people to not visit certain areas within parks. The government is nearly bankrupt, and there’s apparently no end in sight to our insane $700 billion annual military budget. Wall Street is up and down like a roller coaster and the housing market has, finally and thankfully, collapsed. London burns and protests ring out loud and clear around the globe.

But where are our radicals? Where are our protestors?

The theory I’ve subscribed to and tossed about in leftist circles has been to build this society in parallel that will be composed of democratic, community based institutions and organizations. Employee owned companies, local businesses, cooperatives, local farming and other means of production so we can live largely unaffected by what goes on in Washington. Although I must say, that I’ve never really bought into the idea we could operate “unaffected” or remain “uninfected” by what happens in Washington. You get sucked in, and anyone that doubts that should examine the fates of many communes and subsistence communities that have attempted to exist within the capitalist system in the United States. Once the cash economy gets a foothold, you’re doomed. It’s like allowing a virus access to your hard drive.

Kenneth Dolbeare once wrote an essay about how western capitalism possesses inherent defense mechanisms that make it very difficult to topple, not the least of which is the ability of its powerful ideology to penetrate deep into the core of our society. It doesn’t maintain itself by raw power alone. It’s ideology teaches that the system is right and natural, people are naturally competitive, and that hard work, or lack thereof, is the reason for income disparity. Patriotism is another important aspect of the ideology, that people should revere the nation state and protect against “socialism, “communism” and worst of all, “anarchy.”

These things are taught to our children via a compulsory educational system. The indoctrination begins at a very young age, when we first learn the Pledge of Allegiance. And by the time we reach high school or our post collegiate careers, most of us have become willing, duped accomplices.

In the process of maintaining social control, the ruling class enjoys the enthusiastic assistance of the middle class, via a complex system of hierarchies. Lawyers, journalists, teachers, administrators, executives, etc., all committed to the ideology since their status provides a relatively comfortable life. They administer the state and make sure society conforms to the principles that make capitalism run well. If the working class becomes troublesome, they repress it as needed.

Many of the most idealistic people, ones that leave universities well educated in liberal arts and fully aware of what’s going on, end up getting sucked into the system and become silent. Frankly, they need jobs, health insurance and a way to care for their families. Most end up in the Democratic party, the formerly socially conscious organization within the “system.” It allows them to exist as capitalists and suppress their revolutionary conscience, since the Democrats have traditionally helped the poor and stood for the environment. It’s the party of compromise, a sort of social Xanax. You feel better, but it doesn’t solve the core problem.

Of course, anything that threatens this or questions its legitimacy is quickly marginalized. I faced this within groups dominated by mainstream Democrats, often virulent opposition to any discussion of moving away from the Democratic Party or god forbid, anarchism. I was blamed for Gore’s defeat, skewered, and damn near drawn and quartered because I supported Ralph Nader. I supported Nader when Obama ran. I could no longer support status quo politics and figured the only thing that would move the Democrats left was the threat of losing their base.

Despite considerable gains in educating the populace, this remains our largest hurdle, getting people to question capitalism, or more specifically, the unfair distribution of equity within our society, as well as the legitimacy of a Representative Republic that represents only the upper classes.

For those that have stubbornly supported the Democratic platform over the years, those that supported Obama, America’s great and now failed Hope, has it ever been more clear that it is time to move on? To abandon them and look to something else? Immediately after the healthcare debacle, I knew we were in trouble. I urged Democrats to protest Obama in an effort to get him to move left. I stated that continued support within his party would lead to nothing but status quo politics. No one listened, or perhaps they listened, but no one dared question our once deified President. It was hopeless on two fronts, because one, they had no intention of doing it, and two, even if they did, he wouldn’t change. Even a cursory examination of his record before his Presidency reveals he was an empty suit. His record after reaching the White House is now there for all to see. Obama opened negotiations via a secret meeting with insurance executives? The old closed door, proverbial smoke filled room meeting of fat cats planning on how they would get fatter. Then came the expansion of war and covert actions around the globe, actions that even went beyond Bush. Yet, I still heard cries from Democrats that we needed to support Obama. He was just setting things up. Bullshit. Total bullshit, but this fully illustrates the power behind the ideology and the system. It’s hard for many people, even well educated, compassionate, thinking people to break away.

So, our choices seem few. If we insist on this program of gradually building up a society in parallel, I suggest we step on the gas a bit. We need a large scale general strike that will destroy businesses unwilling to give equity and a voice to all employees. As purchasers, we must shun and ostracize these organizations and the people that support them. We need to work as if we’re preparing for an invasion, with great fervor, opening cooperatives, growing, harvesting and selling food locally. Train doctors willing to practice medicine for the greater good and run cooperative clinics. Produce other goods locally. Open employee owned pharmaceutical companies that can produce needed medicines. Whatever we’ve been buying from the Chinese (not junk…needed items) needs to be produced in our own bioregions. If you’re working within a capitalist enterprise, you need to pose the question about greater equity distribution for employees. Yes, it’s risky business, but this is no time for apathy or cowardice.

But we don’t have much time. The sand in the top of the hour glass is running quickly.

We can hasten things via sabotage. Hacking systems, using tools like Wikileaks to expose the bad elements and in some cases, stop them cold in their tracks. Tim DeChristopher had a good idea that only needs some slight modification. The general strike. Use our heads. We’re smarter, I do know that. But we can’t have Baader Meinhof type violence. People that go that route will be crushed and play directly into the hands of the state.

What do I hope will emerge? More democracy, greater equity for workers, stronger communities. Less dependence on Washington, more power in the hands of the people. Communism? No, that’s not going to work. A rational mixture smaller scale capitalism and socialism, industrialism bound by ecology, democratic enterprises owned by the workers but still with an incentive base. All pay doesn’t have to be equal. Some people will be more valuable and better trained. But we can’t support a system where some workers earn 250 times more than the average employee. Who can possibly say that is fair or just?

I do know one thing. The time to act has passed. We have to capitalize on this moment, on the anger and unrest all around us.

Onward

An important message from my compadre on the Left Coast.

Industrial civilization is like a tsunami. You can’t stop it. All you can do is live wisely and stay out of its path. You don’t want to be part of it. You want to survive until the water recedes and returns to the sea.

It’s destructive and powerful, but it will pass.

Thus, we preserve knowledge and life ways for the survivors, like the ancients who crafted tsunami warning signs in Japan. The survivors and those that come later will rebuild. Woe be to those that ignore the signs.

What’s happened to Tim DeChristopher is most unfortunate in the short term, but in the long term, he’s going to be the winner. The government and the corporate lackeys that direct it have further entrenched Tim as a folk hero. He’ll get out and have an opportunity to be even more vocal and reach more people. So, in a way, it’s a win for our side, not theirs. Not so great for Tim for a couple of years, but I doubt he’ll serve the full sentence.

In some ways, those that oppose the shameless and misguided use of land are like the American Indians in the 19th century. We keep losing a little bit at at time. Little by little, capitalist interests are gaining greater and firmer footholds in the public sphere. But who or what is the real enemy? What really ended the empires of the Great Plains, for example, wasn’t the government so much as it was the capitalist interests that wanted the land. The government, as it is today, was little more than the advance guard of capitalism. Nothing more than a pawn.

So, in hindsight, what should they have done? What could they have done differently? Perhaps nothing would have changed the ultimate outcome, but I think if they could do it over again, there would have been a much more coordinated and forceful resistance from day one. And that’s precisely what we need. A coordinated and forceful resistance.

Ultimately, the American Indian was overwhelmed by numbers and technology. They didn’t have the same tools to fight American capitalists. But we do. The primary tools are money and the law, not guns. Let’s use our money, our minds and good lawyers, ones willing to enlist in the cause, to fight these bastards. Let’s not acquiesce, march on to the reservation with our heads bowed, and declare ourselves willing to take up “the way of the growth capitalist.” Let’s fight to the last man. To the last dollar.

“Who sows virtue reaps honor. “

In the spring, I finished Pekka Hämäläinen’s academic work, The Comanche Empire, the 2009 winner of the Bancroft Prize in History. Hämäläinen’s work is they type of work you’d expect from a historian, it’s heavy footnoted, extremely detailed and accurate. But it’s also revisionist, posing interesting challenges to many of our long held views of these people and their history on the North American continent. I highly recommend both, and I highly recommend reading them back-to-back, or simultaneously, as they compliment one another well.

Oh, and I should also mention Dispossessing Wilderness, Mark David’s Spence’s book about Indian removal from the National Parks. I just finished that one, as well, and give it very high marks. Digging deeply into that history will challenge your views about the National Park Service, because frankly, what happened to those people, particularly the Blackfeet, is a national embarrassment. A huge mistake! There should be Blackfeet in Glacier today, but of course, there’s nary a one. Plenty of gift shops, restaurants and SUV’s. Industrial tourism run amok!

But it’s also been interesting to read these books as our nation’s so-called leaders haggle back and forth over the debt limit, our ongoing wars, unemployment and the economy in general. I keep thinking back about how the Indians lost a little here and a little there until they lost everything. The Blackfeet, for example, signed a treaty that gave them what they thought were perpetual hunting rights in Glacier. As along as it was “public land.” They didn’t expect the trickery that would follow, however, when judges ruled the Indians had the same hunting rights as American citizens (which means no rights), since when Glacier became a National Park, it was no longer “public land.”

Huh?

The logic, or lack thereof, was that public lands can be sold, and since Glacier was a National Park and couldn’t be sold, it wasn’t public land. So, you have no rights, Redman. Get in line and get some rations. How ’bout a blanket?

And we of course know public lands (think BLM) can be sold. To the highest bidder, so the bidder can bulldoze, extract and destroy as it sees fit.

Fast forward to the present day and ponder our system. A perpetual capitalist growth machine that requires new markets and new opportunities ad infinitum. Eventually, however, it hits a limit, a wall. There’s nowhere to go. And when it does this, it starts devouring its host, which is us. Like a parasite, it turns on its own people. The ideology, as Edward Abbey said, of the cancer cell.

Little by little, just like the Indians, we’re losing things. In order to prop up Wall Street and the sinking financial services industry, an evil coalition of political leaders and corporate hegemons have devised a plan to privatize Social Security. They’re demonizing it through a carefully orchestrated plan of lies and propaganda so they can hand over trillions of our money to their corrupt friends. They need a boost. What better than to rob the national treasury and hand over the trillions in the Social Security fund?

The same thing is happening in healthcare, as they’re demonizing the Medicare so they can turn that over to private interests. They’re selling our public lands. There’s the commodification and centralization of renewable energy (you didn’t think they were really going to allow decentralized energy to gain a foothold, did you?) Slowly but surely the vice is tightening and we’re gradually becoming similar to reservation Indians. But it’s not government handouts we’re dependent upon. Our nation’s most vulnerable are becoming completely dependent on the private sector, an entity which has only one responsibility, profit and returning shareholder value, not meeting the needs of the less fortunate.

Think about a world without Social Security and Medicare for a moment. For most of us, that means our security as seniors will be placed entirely in the hands of profit motivated, poorly educated, mostly selfish crooks. Look at the track record. A lot of people will basically just be reduced to begging. They’ll find themselves in squalor. When Social Security was enacted, nearly fifty percent of seniors were in poverty.

Some doctors are already refusing Medicare patients. They only want the higher returns paid by private insurance. Pretty soon, there will come a day when if you don’t have private insurance, and you’ll be required by law to have it, you’ll have nowhere to turn.

The inescapable, cold, sobering reality is a lot of people will simply die. They won’t have the money saved, and they won’t be able to afford private insurance. They’ll die under a viaduct, cold, sick and destitute.

And so, it’s autumn in America. The season before winter, before the death throes set it. You can feel the chill in the air, those cold northern winds starting to kick up. The leaves are turning and soon they’ll fall. Except its anything but pretty like golden Aspen in late September. This is ugly. It’s brutal.

It’s the gloaming of America, a nation that turned on its own people but in doing so, insured its own death. Then again, maybe it was inevitable. Maybe we’re getting what we deserved, since our history is stained with the blood of so many innocents. How we built our nation is shameful. There’s no denying it. Maybe it’s just our time to face the music.

Let’s hope that out of the ashes we can build something better.

“The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient.”-Edward Abbey

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“Which way did he go, which way did he go….”

May 28, 2011
The New York Times
For Anarchist, Details of Life as F.B.I. Target
By COLIN MOYNIHAN and SCOTT SHANE
AUSTIN, Tex. — A fat sheaf of F.B.I. reports meticulously details the surveillance that counterterrorism agents directed at the one-story house in East Austin. For at least three years, they traced the license plates of cars parked out front, recorded the comings and goings of residents and guests and, in one case, speculated about a suspicious flat object spread out across the driveway.

“The content could not be determined from the street,” an agent observing from his car reported one day in 2005. “It had a large number of multi-colored blocks, with figures and/or lettering,” the report said, and “may be a sign that is to be used in an upcoming protest.”

Actually, the item in question was more mundane.

“It was a quilt,” said Scott Crow, marveling over the papers at the dining table of his ramshackle home, where he lives with his wife, a housemate and a backyard menagerie that includes two goats, a dozen chickens and a turkey. “For a kids’ after-school program.”

Mr. Crow, 44, a self-described anarchist and veteran organizer of anticorporate demonstrations, is among dozens of political activists across the country known to have come under scrutiny from the F.B.I.’s increased counterterrorism operations since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Other targets of bureau surveillance, which has been criticized by civil liberties groups and mildly faulted by the Justice Department’s inspector general, have included antiwar activists in Pittsburgh, animal rights advocates in Virginia and liberal Roman Catholics in Nebraska. When such investigations produce no criminal charges, their methods rarely come to light publicly.

But Mr. Crow, a lanky Texas native who works at a recycling center, is one of several Austin activists who asked the F.B.I. for their files, citing the Freedom of Information Act. The 440 heavily-redacted pages he received, many bearing the rubric “Domestic Terrorism,” provide a revealing window on the efforts of the bureau, backed by other federal, state and local police agencies, to keep an eye on people it deems dangerous.

The rest is here.

A recent article in our local newspaper caught my attention. It was all too typical, a story about a wealthy developer clearing a swath of land to build new mega-homes. Nothing new here, except the fact the developer is trying to dress it up and call it a “sustainable” development when it surely isn’t. Where are those materials coming from? How is a house of more than 5,000 square feet “sustainable? ” The lots alone cost $400,000, and while that may seem cheap to folks in California, around here, it’s a princely sum. Add the $500,000 house, and it’s a million dollar home.

Despite what the brochure says, they’ll suck more energy than a Ford F-250 drinks gas, and then there’s the landscaping. Oh, those perfect lawns, little monocultures created with chemicals, all of which are endocrine disruptors so little Winthrop and his mummy can develop bizarre tumors and learning disabilities while wiping out the local amphibian population. If there’s such a thing as putting lipstick on a pig, this is it.

I decided to post some comments on the paper’s website. As you might expect, they were critical comments and met with a fusillade of attacks from the conservative, pro-development, crowd. The comments were typical, some were even funny:

“We’ll live however we want to live!” I believe that’s been well established.
“You’re just jealous. You probably don’t even have a job.” I wish I didn’t.
“You’ve got to be the grumpiest person I’ve ever seen.” Thank you. Best compliment I’ve received thus far. Guilty as charged.
“This is just left wing dribble.” I think he meant “drivel,” but language and reading comprehension has never been a strong suit of conservatives.

One suggested I was crazy. Didn’t Edward Abbey say only the half-mad were wholly alive?

One suggested that everyone should pay close attention to what I was saying (please do), since my “positions reflect much of what is be espoused by the current administration in Washington, DC.” Oh, how I wish that where true.

But the best one of the day was the lady, “coacheswife,” that suggested I “take a happy pill.” Actually, a profound statement since that seems to be the answer to coping in our over-industrialized, fascist society. All of the sudden, sprawl and packed interstate highways look like dreamy landscapes filled with opportunity for all. I don’t live in Memphis. I live in Candyland. Running for the shelter of mommy’s little helper is standard operating procedure in my own community. Thousands of nervous, evangelical soccer moms and doctors wives (U. suburbanus), jacked up on Xanax and Chardonay, texting, driving their 8,000 pound steel mastadons at excessive rates of speed so they won’t be late for Jazzersize or Bible study. Terrified their doctor husbands will leave them if they have a normal body weight, their diets consist mostly of Diet Cokes and a few crackers with a single grape. They have a strange look in their eyes, a sort of deranged look combined with a eerie smile that makes you immediately think “Stepford Wives” or “Mommy Dearest.”

But I don’t want to sound like a grumpy, over-generalizing, stereotyping, misogynist, since it’s mostly greedy, pig-headed (apologies to pigs) men doing all the damage. Men driven by greed and their oversized egos. Men willing to do whatever is necessary to fatten their own wallets, even if it means terrorism in their own backyards.

What can be done? Probably nothing, at least until oil hits $200 per barrel or higher. That’s the only hope we have of slowing the growth locomotive. Until then, just pass the bourbon and the pills.