The Suffocation of Justice By Charity

"When you look around and see how many NGOs are on, say, the Gates Rockefeller, or Ford Foundation's handout list, there has to be something wrong, right? They turn potential radicals into receivers of their largesse - and then, very subtly, without appearing to - they circumscribe the boundaries of radical politics. And you're sacked if you disobey . . .. sacked, unfunded, whatever. And then there's always the game of pitting the 'funded' against the 'unfunded,' in which the funder takes center stage. So I mean, I'm not against people being funded - because we're running out of options - but we have to understand - are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you?  . .. . Everywhere - not just in America . . . . repress, beat up, shoot, jail those you can, and throw money at those whom you can't - and gradually sandpaper the edge off them. They're in the business of what we in India call Paaltu Sher, which means Tamed Tigers. Like a pretend resistance . . . so you can let off steam without damaging anything. . . . So many activists [have] turned into travel agents, just having to organize tickets and money, flying people up and down. The [World Social] forum suddenly declared 'Only nonviolence, no armed struggles' ...  They . . . turned Gandhian.

"Many of the radical struggles were out. And I thought, fuck this. My question is, if, let's say, there are people who live in villages deep in the forest, four days' walk from anywhere, and a thousand soldiers arrive and burn their villages and kill and rape people to scare them off their land because mining companies want it - what brand of nonviolence would the stalwarts of the establishment recommend?  . . . Nonviolence should be a tactic - not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence . . . 

"It's not the imagination of trusts and foundations that's going to bring real change . . . .The bigger game is keeping the world safe for the Free Market. Structural Adjustment. Privatization, Free Market fundamentalism - all masquerading as Democracy and the Rule of Law. Many corporate-foundation-funded NGOs - not all, but many - become the missionaries of the 'new economy.' They tinker with your imagination, with language. The idea of 'human rights,' for example - sometimes it bothers me. Not in itself, but because the concept of human rights has replaced the much grander idea of justice. Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum - all we are supposed to expect - but human rights aren't enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.

"But this discourse of human rights, it's a very good format for TV - the great atrocity analysis and condemnation industry (laughs). Who comes out smelling sweet in the atrocity analysis? States have invested themselves with the right to legitimate violence - so who gets criminalized and delegitimized? . . . usually the resistance.

"I sound as though I'm trashing human rights. . . . I'm not.  All I'm saying is that the idea of justice - even just dreaming of justice - is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust - and then tries to make it more accountable. But then, of course the catch-22 is that violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.

". . . talk loud enough about human rights and it gives the impression of democracy at work, justice at work. There was a time when the United States waged war to topple democracies, because back then democracy was a threat to the Free Market. Countries were nationalizing their resources, protecting their markets . . . Now we're in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodeled to be market friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to install democracies. First it was topple them, now it's install them . . .. And this whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility - it's all part of a New Managed Democracy. . . .

"They moved in to the spaces that were left when 'structural adjustment' forced states to pull back on public spending - on health, education, infrastructure, water supply - turning what ought to be people's rights, to education, to health care, and so on, into charitable activity available to a few. Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed and we don't even know it. . . . The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against 'corruption' and for 'transparency.' They want the Rule of Law - as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardize a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment. Cage the People, Free the Money. The only thing that is allowed to move freely - unimpeded - around the world today is money . . . capital. . . . 

"Stable markets, unstable world."

-----Arundhati Roy, Things That Can And Cannot Be Said

Fox T.V. Host Says Revolution Is Coming In The U.S.

"Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn't responsible for the many disasters America's leaders created. Trump didn't invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street. He didn't lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. You couldn't really know what Trump might do as president, but he didn't do any of that". . . . . 

"Trump's election wasn't about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America's ruling class. It was a gesture of contempt, a howl of rage, the end result of decades of selfish and unwise decisions made by selfish and unwise leaders. Happy countries don't elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do."

"Trump won the Republican primaries, and Republican leaders immediately began plotting to take his nomination at the convention. Trump won the general election, and elites schemed to have the results nullified by electors. Trump assumed office in Washington, and the permanent class in Washington worked to sabotage his administration."

"In retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: Ignore voters for long enough and you get Donald Trump. Yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. Instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, America's ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. Beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:

Trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters."

"Trump won because Russian agents 'hacked' the election."

"Trump won because mouth-breathers in the province were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links."

"Trump won because he's a racist, and that's what voters secretly wanted all along. . . . "

"What message do voters take from all of this? All your fears are real. You may have suspected our democracy was actually an oligarchy. Now you know for sure. You can vote all you want, but voting is a charade. Your leaders don't care what you think. Shut up and obey."

-----Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools - How A Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America To The Brink Of Revolution

Shed Your Unwanted Brains - Embrace Imperial Feminism!

"There was a time when the women of Afghanistan - at least in Kabul - were  out there. They were allowed to study; they were doctors and surgeons, walking free, wearing what they wanted. That was when it was under Soviet occupation. Then the United States starts funding the mujahideen. Reagan called them Afghanistan's 'founding fathers.' It reincarnates the idea of 'jihad,' virtually creates the Taliban. And what happens to the women? In Iraq, until before the war, the women were scientists, museum directors, doctors. I'm not valorizing Saddam Hussein or the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which was brutal and killed hundreds of thousands of people - it was the Soviet Union's Vietnam. I'm just saying that now, in these new wars, whole countries have slipped into mayhem - the women have just been pushed back into their burqas - and not by choice.  I mean, to me, one thing is a culture in which women have not broken out of their subservience, but the horror of tomorrow, somebody turning around and telling me: 'Arundhati, just go back into your veil, and sit in your kitchen and don't come out.' Can you imagine the violence of that? That's what has happened to these women. In 2001, we were told that the war in Afghanistan was a feminist mission. The marines were liberating Afghan women from the Taliban. Can you really bomb feminism into a country? And now, after twenty-five years of brutal war - ten years against the Soviet occupation, fifteen years of US occupation - the Taliban is riding back to Kabul and will soon be back to doing business with the United States. I don't live in the United States, but when I'm here (in the U.S.- ed) I begin to feel like my head is in a grinder - my brains are being scrambled by this language that they're using. Outside the United States it's not so hard to understand because people know the score. But here, so many seem to swallow the propaganda so obediently."

------Arundhati Roy, Things That Can And Cannot Be Said, p. 21-22

Remembering The Workers From The Seattle General Strike of 1919

They eagerly snatched up pamphlets about revolution to learn the secret of production without bosses. They opposed the U.S. occupation of Siberia, and in fact, openly supported the Bolshevik Revolution, which was then only months old. They flatly refused to load arms destined for Admiral Kolchak, self-proclaimed "Supreme Ruler of Russia," who was engaged in wholesale butchery of the Russian peasantry as head of the "white" army. They beat up scabs who came to rob them of their jobs.

They discussed "workers' power" as an immediate concern, not a utopian guidepost, and looked to take over the city's shipyards. When they struck to raise pay for the unskilled, Washington withdrew its federal contracts to induce the shipyard owners to resist. The workers appealed to the Seattle Central Labor Council to recommend a general strike. In less then two weeks, one hundred and ten locals voted overwhelmingly to do so.

On the morning of February 6, 1919 streetcar gongs fell silent, newspaper boys tossed their unsold papers in the street, schoolchildren scurried homeward, and 65,000 workers streamed out of factories, mills, stores, restaurants, and workshops. At 10:00 a.m. an eerie quiet hung over the city.

Workers at the anti-union Seattle Times stopped the presses and pro-union dailies wrote the news. A long line of businessmen and city officials humbly trekked to the general strike committee to request exemptions and approvals. Firemen, garbage wagon drivers, and laundry drivers serving hospitals got them, sporting signs on their vehicles: "Exempted by the General Strike Committee."

Milk wagon drivers set up thirty five neighborhood milk stations, purchasing from small dairymen near the city and distributing without resort to managers. Food service workers served 30,000 meals a day in twenty-one halls around the city. Ex-military men organized a "Labor War Veteran's Guard" to "preserve law and order without the use of force." They carried no weapons.

Awash in hysterical anti-Communist propaganda spread by the owners, public fears of a long and bloody siege propelled customers into the stores to stockpile necessities. Hardware store owners reported that they could not keep pace with the demand for guns.

Denouncing the strikers as "scoundrels" who "want[ed] to take possession of our American government to duplicate  the anarchy of Russia," Mayor Ole Hanson requested federal troops. "The time has come," he insisted, "for the people in Seattle to show their Americanism," then as now a euphemism for blind adherence to state doctrine.

But the expected "Bolshevik" bloodbath never materialized. During the five-day strike not a single person affiliated with it was arrested and crime plummeted in the city. Nor was the city ever without food, coal, water, heat, or light. Major General Morrison, in charge of federal troops in Seattle, commented that he had not seen such a quiet and orderly city in forty years.

The violent ones were the private owners of the economy, the Associated Industries of Seattle, who shamelessly called for violent repression in an ad published in the Tacoma Leader and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:  "We must smash every un-American and anti-American organization in the land. We must put to death the leaders of this gigantic conspiracy of murder, pillage, and revolution. We must deport all aliens, Socialists, Non-Partisan Leaguers, 'closed shop unionists,' Syndicalists, 'agitators,' 'malcontents,' all these must be outlawed by public opinion and hunted down and hounded beyond the horizon of civic decency."

Keep the peace, but don't let your guard down.

Happy Labor Day.

Sources:

Jeremy Brecher, "Strike," (South End Press, 1972)

William S. Graves, "America's Siberian Adventure, 1918-1920," (New York, 1931)

Murray B. Levin, "Political Hysteria in America - The Democratic Capacity For Repression," (Basic Books, 1971)

Stewart Bird (with Dan Georgakas and Deborah Shaffer), "Solidarity Forever - An Oral History of the IWW," (Lake View Press, 1985)

Philip S. Foner, "History of the Labor Movement in the United States - Postwar Struggles, 1918-1920" (International Publishers, 1988)

Mental Rape and the Disappearance of Justice

"Our tragedy today is not just that millions of people who called themselves communist or socialist were physically liquidated in Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, not just that China and Russia, after all that revolution have become capitalist economies, not just that the working class has been ruined in the United States and its unions dismantled, not just that Greece has been brought to its knees, or that Cuba will soon be assimilated into the free market - it is also that the language of the Left, the discourse of the Left, has been marginalized and is sought to be eradicated. The debate - even though the protagonists on both sides betrayed everything they claimed to believe in - used to be about social justice, equality, liberty, and redistribution of wealth. All we seem to be left with now is paranoid gibberish about a War on Terror whose whole purpose is to expand the War, increase the Terror, and obfuscate the fact that the wars of today are not aberrations but systemic, logical exercises to preserve a way of life whose delicate pleasures and exquisite comforts can only be delivered to the chosen few by a continuous, protracted war for hegemony - Lifestyle Wars."

-----Arundhati Roy, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said," p. 37

Is The White Working Class Being Replaced By Immigrants?

The notion that corporate globalization seeks to replace U.S. working class whites with workers from abroad is currently categorized by the corporate media as a paranoid conspiracy theory of white supremacists. Unfortunately for the professional talking heads, the idea has much wider currency than they would like us to believe. For example, Bill Kristol, formerly of the Weekly Standard, has flat-out stated that the poor quality of the stereotypical Trump voter makes such replacement necessary: 

"Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don't you want to get new Americans in? . . . You can make a case that America has been great because every - I think John Adams said this - basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work, everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled - whatever."  

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is of a similar mind, writing following the 2016 elections: 

"So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future. In other words, just the kind of people we used to be - when 'we' had just come off the boat." 

Stephens claimed to be writing ironically, but his conclusion made this difficult to believe: "We're a country of immigrants - by and for them, too. Americans who don't get it should get out."

In other words, if you think immigration rates are currently too high, or don't like the flouting of U.S. immigration law, you should get out. Whether one shares these concerns or not, clearly there are calls in the mainstream to replace working class whites with workers from abroad. So why the surprise, shock, and horror when angry whites march chanting, "You will not replace us"?


(quoted material from Victor David Hanson's, "The Case For Trump" pps. 59-61)

"Always Believe The Woman" Theology

"I had a dream yesterday through Jungian analysis. I dreamt that Hillary Clinton and Rachel Maddow pinned me down and took advantage of me. I don't know where; I don't know how; I don't know when. I don't have any corroborating evidence but I promise you it happened. And you have to believe me because I am a Lebanese Jew who is a war refugee. How could you not believe me? I must be telling the truth."

-----Gad Saad, "My Thoughts on the Brett Kavanaugh Ordeal" (The SAAD Truth_731)