OWS leaderless? Let a hundred Chomskys bloom!

“Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.” 
Archimedes

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
Rahm Emanuel

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How can any movement function without leaders? Dumb question, a much better question would be: how can any movement function with leaders, when all leaders will immediately get purchased with corporate money?

The danger of having a "leader" is staring at us from our TV screens every night: Barack Obama, the enthusiasm he aroused and the paucity of his achievements.

Watching president Obama floundering around in the middle of the biggest financial meltdown since the 1930s after all the expectations he raised, has turned out to be the final proof that the political system is no longer connected in any significant way to the needs of the people... And that is a frightening thought if ever there was one.

In many ways, the United States, which is not a defined ethnic or religious group with centuries of common history, only exists as a political system. Some countries have had several different regimes in the space of a hundred years, each with a different constitution,  and still have remained perfectly recognizable. What would glue together the people who populate today's United States  if something similar happened in America?

The challenge then is to take or retake the system from outside the system, without destroying the system.

Lets take a stroll down memory lane and see how America's clearest thinking political mind sized things up just after Obama got elected:

Obama's organizers regard the network they constructed "as a mass movement with unprecedented potential to influence voters," the Los Angeles Times reported. The movement, organized around the "Obama brand" can pressure Congress to "hew to the Obama agenda." But they are not to develop ideas and programs and call on their representatives to implement them. These would be among the "old ways of doing politics" from which the new "idealists" are "breaking free." (...) In earlier periods of American history, the public refused to keep to its assigned "function." Popular activism has repeatedly been the force that led to substantial gains for freedom and justice. The authentic hope of the Obama campaign is that the "grass roots army" organized to take instructions from the leader might "break free" and return to "old ways of doing politics," by direct participation in action. Noam Chomsky - November 25th, 2008

Regular readers of my blog may remember that back in 2008 I predicted that Barack Obama would bitterly disappoint the young people who worked, and hoped, so hard to get him elected and that I also feared that this would tragically turn off an entire, heretofore supposedly apathetic, generation of American young people from politics forever. I got the first part right, but fortunately not the second part, but of course, Noam Chomsky - may he live a hundred years - got both parts right.

We are looking at a sea change brewing here. For the first time we have the educated middle class being proletarized… The business of “99% vs. 1%” is baby talk for “class struggle”. This is a radically new feature, not seen in America for generations.

Americans normally have tolerated more inequality than the people of other similarly developed countries because they thought that anybody who worked hard could better their situation and that their kids would live better than they did. That was the deal and the deal has been cancelled. The American dream has been called off because of rain.

I think that we are looking at the very timid beginnings of a real critique of the whole system by those, who up till now, have been the very pillars of the system. It is very exciting to think about and it could change the whole world if it continues to develop. The Democrats and the Republicans could end up in the attic gathering dust with the Whigs.

Chomsky speaks of "direct participation in action". What sort of action?  What should be the immediate objective of that action?

In my opinion the retaking of the system from outside the system, without destroying the system can only be effected by changing the consciousness of the American people in large numbers. That is what OWS is on the threshold of doing right now: changing the way the American people see themselves, individually and as members of a collective.

What would the changed consciousness finally look like if it happened, and how would it change the system without destroying the system?

Here is a brutally simple example of what I mean. Imagine if a majority of American came to view certain types of financial transactions with the same visceral disgust that they now view the sexual abuse of small children. No amount of corporate money could change that opinion, just as no amount of corporate money and lobbying could justify child pornography or create laws to protect it, because the culture of the people would simply not tolerate it.

How can that change of consciousness take place?

The answer is to continue what is going on now: occupations and assemblies, the creation of a vast national conversation, symbolized by the occupations, a conversation carried on over the Internet and around kitchen tables, where all the participants compare their experiences and research together and consensus grows organically in contact with their objective realities, so that individual experience becomes a collective experience. This has happened before, witness the civil rights struggle.

Other types of direct action such as foreclosure defense and student debt strikes serve to attract public attention to the "conversation", which is symbolized by the occupations. The important thing is the un-intermediated conversation. The fundamental thing is not to "waste the crisis" and to use it to change the consciousness of the American people.

What America needs now and this crisis may provide,  is hundreds, thousands, of citizens who can analyze the reality of the nation with the acute vision of Noam Chomsky, like him, peeling back the layers of media induced mental fog and hypocrisy and communicating what they find as clearly as he does. That is why I entitled this post "let a hundred Chomskys bloom". Today with tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, a spontaneous and viral creation of countless teaching "cells" can channel the energy  the American people showed in the Obama presidential campaign toward real "change they can believe in".

As Gordon Lafer writes in The Nation, this is a very special moment, one where a critical mass of the people realize that there has been some sort of corporate coup d'etát that impedes any meaningful change:

This is not because the agenda is unpopular—54 percent of Americans support OWS, with only 23 percent opposed—but because the system is corrupted beyond repair. This slowly dawning realization is both invigorating—an invitation to engage in the kind of bold, blue-sky strategic thinking that leftists have not entertained for decades—and disturbing, a harbinger of just how nasty the future may get.

Make no mistake, as this change of consciousness gathers momentum, this is bound to turn ugly. The defenders of privilege's traditional answer to the natives getting restless, is to start wars and foster fear and paranoia. The Tea Party is only a tame lapdog compared to the wolves they might be prepared to turn loose. For some reason this behavior is called "conservative".

For what is being mislabeled "conservative" in the USA is no longer any rational political option.  Its basic goal is, in fact, to make rational thought as difficult as possible, because those who sponsor it rightly fear that if people could think straight for even a moment... they might come to the same conclusions as the OWS. You can easily understand why people like the Koch brothers would happily spend millions and stop at nothing, however vile, to keep that from happening.

But this is a struggle that can be won. Americans are first and foremost children of revolution.

I opened this post with Archimedes boast, that given a fulcrum and a lever he could move the whole world.

Because of America's unique position in world affairs, the Occupy Wall Street movement is a chance that the American people have found for themselves to change their own lives, and while they do, change, move,  the whole world with them. For nothing will ever really change until America does. DS

Thought for the day

Mirror, mirror on the wall

"What the foreign visitor finds the most frightening, the most dangerous, is the voter who, after eight years of abject catastrophe, continues to pray "Please, please, give me a reason to vote for the person who says that things are all right, after all." Someone like Bush." Bradley Burston - Haaretz

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Counting chickens before they hatch is something most of us do all the time. Unhatched chickens are so much fatter and tastier than what finally pops out of the egg. I fear that many Democrats are succumbing to that temptation today.

Because of Bush's personal unpopularity it is easy to jump to the conclusion that voters have had an epiphany and that now their hearts and minds are in the progressive camp.

Here are a few things to mull over.

It should give pause to think what astounding levels of stumbling incompetence and how many years of it was needed to bring Bush's ratings to where they are today. It should give pause to think how much Kool-Aid was eagerly drunk before the slightest gag reflex kicked in.

It should give pause to think that Dick Cheney, who makes Richard Nixon look like Macaulay Culkin, has never, in eight years, been in danger of impeachment.

Like a monk with a Zen koan, progressives should roll around in their minds how a lifelong foul ball like Bush was ever nominated in the first place for the world's most important job and how he got reelected when all of today's disasters were easily visible.

The answer to these questions might be that the majority of Americans were always in agreement with what Bush was selling; that they were totally untroubled by the moral implications of things like invading countries that had never harmed or threatened them, or torturing prisoners or wiretapping, but have only come to detest Bush's obviously incompetent execution of those policies... never the policies themselves.

Despite having a larger proportion of university graduates than any other nation on earth Americans give most of the world the impression of not playing with a full deck. Remember that Noam Chomsky (may he live a hundred years) always says that if Americans studied politics with the same attention and sophisticated knowledge with which they study sports it would change the world.

Americans didn't used to be so stupid, once upon a time they were able to follow the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. What exactly has happened to the American brain since then must be very complex.

At the bottom, I think it is because there is a fundamental contradiction between America's republican institutions and its elite's, imperial, hegemonic, obsessions. I have the feeling that it was decided (perhaps by an unspoken consensus) that the only way to preserve America's institutions and to try to rule the world at the same time was to mentally castrate the American population.

The problem is not really Bush, we should be grateful that his abysmal incompetence has allowed us to see how our system actually works, grateful for the mirror he holds up for us. No, I'm afraid that the problem is with Americans themselves: by their fruits ye shall know them: the people themselves will or wont finally change the politics, it will never be the politicians who do it.

The future looks rather frightening, to say the least. We have seen that the American people can tolerate Dick Cheney and yet simultaneously be enchanted by the empty rhetoric of Barack Obama. It follows logically that America's future probably holds a politician who combines the heart of a Cheney and the mouth of an Obama... Hopefully he (or she) will be as incompetent as Bush. DS

Take, eat this Valium

“... I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.” Barack Obama

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I confess I cannot understand how someone who dares to use this type of language is not greeted with a shower of tomatoes -- as any horticulturist knows, it is hard to find horse manure in sufficient quantity these days -- or at least with raucous horse laughter.

To employ this tone with a straight face, one has to be either the most cynical demagogue who has ever graced our fair Republic, or bat shit crazy... or both.

People are lining up to vote for him?

No problem, we are talking about the same folks that first chose John Kerry as electable and then reelected George W. Bush.

Your honor I rest my case.

Quite logically, several of my readers have asked me, that since I think Obama is such a sinister figure, who then do I suggest voting for. I am very flattered they ask.

Look, I am just standing around here on my street corner ranting, you're on your own, but, if you really are interested in my opinion, this is how I see it.

I am always joking about my "inner Lenin" and, like Humpty Dumpty in Through a Looking Glass, "when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less," however, one of the meanings could be the steady, unyielding pursuit of transformation and great tactical inventiveness and flexibility in designing the route to that goal.

What is the goal?

My goal, in any other country, would be as mild as sparkling rosé, but in the United States of America it is as corrosive as white lightening. What, in any other rich and highly developed country, would be only mild and natural reform, in the USA would rival the October Revolution. I am talking about creating a welfare state on the Scandinavian model on America's fair shores: womb to tomb, from sea to shining sea.

On the rocky road to that paradise of social justice, one figure, soon to be of blessed memory, has been been a true giant of transformation: George W. Bush.

People don't give President Bush enough credit... Nobody has ever gotten more Americans of all ages reading Noam Chomsky and his ilk and asking awkward questions about what the United States really is and what it is really doing, than George W. Bush.

Ugly though he is, Bush reeks of reality.

Obviously the empty and rhythmic strokes of Barack Obama's sterile, red-herring, Lampedusan rhetoric is the system's way of draining the life out of all that Chomskian curiosity, of siphoning off all that energy and of lobotomizing all that restlessness. Marcuse's word made flesh.

"Change we can believe in" bears the same resemblance to real change as Disneyland's "Main Street USA", has to the downtown of a real, American, rust belt village: it is just another shrink-wrapped, vacuum packed, pre-digested, pre-sanitized, 'just add water and stir', American "experience".

Real change in the United States will come from within the society itself or it will never come at all. People's heads have to change and only they can change them.

The system itself will never "heal" anything.

The system is corrupt and decadent... The trained seal performance of the candidates for the world's most powerful office, as they groveled before AIPAC, should erase any doubts in that respect.

The culture must transform itself, this is the time for artists, intellectuals and philosophers to step forward, not peddlers of vacuous drivel. A truly great novel, an essay or a film or the appearance of another MLK might change America much more than a hundred president Obamas.

What to do in November?

Irreparable hardship must be avoided, especially for women: in order to keep the Republicans from appointing the Supreme Court justices that would shoot down Roe vs. Wade, I recommend voting for Democrats straight down the line for the Congress and Senate.

The Democrats should have a majority sufficient to block those Supreme Court Neanderthals and to override a presidential veto and pass a true health care package, mandates and all.

For President, McCain. If he could work with Russ Feingold and Teddy Kennedy, he should be able to survive in such an environment

Since, sadly, the old fellow seems quite a sensible chap, I don't imagine he will lead so many Americans to reading Chomsky as Dubya has, but he may come close to that "third term" we need so badly in order to bring the goal of true social change just another step closer. DS

John Kass: Obama's mettle was forged in city's dubious furnace - Chicago Tribune Abstract: International change agent Barack Obama stood in Daley Plaza on Friday and paid public fealty to the political machine boss who holds this city in a wrought iron fist. Obama waxed happily about Chicago possibly hosting the 2016 Olympics and joked about finishing his second term as U.S. president and hanging out with the boss, Mayor Richard Daley, a fellow who doesn't mind great change in Washington, as long as Chicago remains impervious to reform. "In the interest of full disclosure, I only live two blocks away from where the Olympics are going to kick off in 2016, and so I am just going to be able to walk over there. I might have to rent my house," Obama said, meaning the house he bought when he was pals with Tony Rezko, not the White House where he'll be living. "I don't know how much it's going to be worth."(...) These days, with vague Orwellian slogans like "change" and polling and a national media obviously in thrall with him, there seems to be an effort to ignore Obama's Chicago political connections, to consider him as having been hatched, perhaps immaculately from a floating soap bubble, spotless and clean to the world. But Chicago was where he was boiled down and honed, where the community organizer was rendered, where the politically independent junior senator began cozying up to the Daleys and their machine and the new presidential Barack was formed. Illinois politics are dirty and slimy and known to all, but I'm sure Arizona politics aren't all that clean either, not when it comes to federal military land swaps for developer friends and fundraisers of Republican John McCain. McCain has the war hero record, but he's also got SunCor Development Co. hanging around his neck. USA Today reported that he helped secure millions in federal funds for a land acquisition program that benefited a developer whose executives were big-time political donors. If true, it sounds like a story that could have come out of Illinois politics, right out of our own state GOP, with the boss hog Republicans cutting deals with City Hall Democrats, everybody's head in the trough except for the taxpayers who fill it. READ IT ALL