We Have A Democracy Crisis - Asher Platts

via Alex Steed, Bangor Daily News

Asher Platts is a State Senate candidate in Portland, Maine. He is running as aGreen Independent, and he is also Statewide Chair of the party.

Platts also maintains a vibrant blog and video channel as the Punk Patriot, though his campaign has been occupying much of his time as of late. He is also a musician, a screen printer and a volunteer. We discussed what he calls the “democracy crisis” in Maine and the country at large, the Green Party, and why the concept of political corruption is not as simple as some people think.

Alex Steed: Just to let you know, I am recording.

Asher Platts: Oh, thank you.

AS: Yes, unlike the NSA, I will let you know about it. “I welcome the debate.”You said earlier in our conversation that you made $11,000 last year doing whatever you could, which is far below the poverty line.

AP: Yes, although the most I have ever made was working at L.L. Bean in the factory and I made $17,000 a year, so I am pretty strongly coming from working class roots. [Laughs]

AS: And maintaining those roots.

AP: Yeah, if I could make more while doing the social justice work that I do, I would love to. Having to worry about making rent constantly sucks. Some of the paid work that I have done pays very little but I have gotten to travel. Last Summer I was out working on a campaign in California. They had no money to pay me but they took care of my flight out and I got $300 for three weeks of working about 80 hours a week, but I got to see the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, which was cool.

AS: So what are you up to now? Why are you knocking on doors?

AP: I am currently running for State Senate here in Portland. I am running as a Green. I spent the first ten years of my political life as a Democratic Party activist and turn after turn through the Iraq War and the way the Democrats kept authorizing funding… And saying publicly that they don’t condone torture but after leaks it would turn out that not only did they condone it, they were complicit by not doing anything about it… Between all of that and impeachment proceedings, which the Democratic Party activist base was trying to do everything in their power to bring against the Bush Administration for war crimes and the leadership was doing everything that could be done to stop that from happening. Then from 2008 to 2010, when the party controlled the House, Senate and presidency, and here in Maine they controlled the governorship and both sections of the legislature, nothing progressive happened. In fact, here in Maine in 2009, Democrats voted for a flat tax, which is just crazy to me.

I became very disillusioned. I had believed very strongly in the idea that you stay in the Democratic Party and reform it but I had spent ten years doing that and it had only gotten worse. I had worked for Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign and I saw the immune response the party has within its various apparatuses to any progressive voices and I was just like, alright, this entire power structure has been build to prevent itself from reform. So I gave up on trying to reform an essentially broken structure and decided to work towards building a different structure entirely. The Green Party is that structure.

We are trying to build the party. We’re only 4% of the vote statewide, though it is a little bit higher in Portland. We’re not at 15% and we’re not at 30%, which is where I want to see us. I am not trying to steal away registered Democrats or anything like that. It’s not going to happen. With all of the cuts that are coming from both sides of the aisle now and with Obama going even further than Bush by having a kill list, if anybody is still a Democrat at this point—if they’re not unenrolled or identifying with another party at this point—they’re not going to change.

AS: So you’re trying to pull people who are unregistered and unaffiliated to the Green Party?

AP: So many people don’t even vote. The figures are going to change from year to year, but the number of eligible voters that don’t even bother to vote hovers around 60%. And why would they? Who do they have to vote for who represents their interests?

So now I am running for the State Senate to be someone to advocate for those people. And I am also running to win, which I want to be clear about. I ran in 2012 and I think I ran a lot more tame of a campaign. I myself had this idea that my then-opponent [State Senate President Justin Alfond] really was this super progressive guy but over the past two years—and looking over the past 6 that he has been in Augusta—he has been not LePage, but I have not really seen him advance the ball down the court. So it is great that he is sentimentally for raising the minimum wage and indexing a living wage to the cost of living and changing the tax structure so the rich are taxed more fairly, but where are the bills?

AS: With the exception of Maine People’s Alliance, which occasionally calls for occupation of the State House on particular days… and it isn’t even occupation, it is usually single day actions… Why do you think that the state party does not make more earnest attempts to rally their base more assertively and radically to ensure that their rhetorical philosophies are actually turned into laws?

AP: That is a good question, though I don’t know the answer. It is really a question for the Democratic Party leadership. My theory is that it is the same reason we see Sen. Max Baucus call for police to remove single-payer activists from Affordable Care Act hearings, which is to say that both of the parties have lots of paid staff that have to make their salaries. And the leadership places a lot of pressure on people who raise money from corporations. We have this idea that a lobbyist walks into a politician’s office and drops money on the desk and then the politician is corrupted, but it works the opposite way. They are getting pressure from their party to raise the money. They are calling the lobbyists in and asking them to do fundraisers for their parties and campaigns and they tell them, “You know, this last session I did really good for your company. Can you please do a fundraiser for me and invite all of your rich friends for me and let’s raise $100,000 in a night?” I think that’s a huge part of [why no real action is taken].

Regardless of that, there is a growing disconnect between those who are in power and those who are not. As [American Economist and Green Party member] Dr Richard Wolff said, there is an abyss between the governors and the governed. Even see this in 2008 with Barack Obama, where he had this great activist network built up through Obama for America and then they just kind of changed tack and had back-door meetings with campaigns of industry. Were he a true, insurgent progressive voice, he could have worked separate from the party like Howard Dean has done with DFA. I think that has been an effective strategy to a large extent. But I think another effective strategy is just to get out of the party.

AS: The state-wide party has had a pretty active ramp-up effort. You have the most people on the ballot since 2002. Can you talk a bit about that process?

AP: We have been trying to go around the state and register more voters into the party. That is something we have been doing for a long time, but we haven’t been doing a great job of calling people to organize locally. We have had basically no money to do anything and no paid staff, so a big key component shift for us is to use data management software to keep better track of our donors, volunteers and activists so we can do a better job of turning our personal networks into a party base.

We have a real variety of people running this year. We have farmers, recent college graduates and retired attorneys. We have one guy—Mark Diehl—in South Portland who is a retired corporate attorney and he decided that he couldn’t do it anymore because he was losing his soul. Now he is running for State Senate.

AS: What is the Green Party pushing for?

AP: We are pushing for transformational politics. It is not just a matter of getting into power in the existing structure. We want to change the structure so that it is more democratic, so that there are more opportunities for citizen participation. In Iceland, the Pirate Party was able to introduce really serious structural reforms to their democracy there in addition so some of the buzz-wordy things like crowd-sourcing the constitution. There are some serious things [happening there] that I think we should look at here in Maine. They were having all of the same sort of bi-partisan problems that we have in the United States and here in Maine. They have proportional representation in their Congress. They have a none-of-the-above option [on the ballot]. And, by the way, there was a revolution in Iceland in 2009 where the government was scrapped and we didn’t really hear about it here.

We have a fiscal crisis, but really we have a democracy crisis. There is a lack of the ability to have a real say about how decisions are made in our workplaces and government and pretty much anywhere we make choices about how the resources of society are divvied up and used. We take for granted how many of our choices are made for us by extremely wealthy people on Wall Street ahead of time. We definitely have a democracy crisis. More democracy. More civic participation. That is what is going to make change. Your vote is your interaction with the government and if we have a lack of information transferring through any system of power, corporation or government, we are going to have problems of corruption. We are going to have problems of people feeling as if they have no efficacy at all.

PHOTO CREDIT: Susan Hopkins

The Illegitimacy of the U.S. Government

Originally Posted at PopularResistance.org



In this episode clip (watch the full show here) Shahid Buttar outlines why he thinks the biggest enemy to the U.S. Constitution is a domestic enemy. Also, Kevin Zeese makes the point that the U.S. government is illegitimate.

“Every member of congress swears an oath of office to protect the constitution from enemies, foreign and domestic,” explains Buttar “and the principle enemy to the U.S. Constitution is a domestic one with three letters. The only debate in my mind is whether it is the NSA or the FBI.”

Kevin Zeese adds: “It’s a harsh reality for the country to face. The corporate main stream media’s job is not to give us the truth but to give us the myth that we are the greatest democracy on earth, when in fact I think the democratic legitimacy of this country is disappearing. We just had Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer make that point in his dissent to the (Supreme Court) McCutcheon decision."

Shahid Buttar is the Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a 2003 graduate of Stanford Law School, and has appeared in media outlets including the Intercept, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, FOX News, Al-Jazeera and the Baltimore Sun. He spoke about NSA spying at Johns Hopkins recently to a packed audience organized by the Hopkins human rights working group and the New Political Society.

Kevin Zeese is an attorney and political activist who works on peace, economic justice, criminal law reform and reviving American democracy. He co Directs It’s Our Economy, serves on the steering committees of the Chelsea Manning Support Network, and is an organizer atPopularResistance.org.

Dennis Trainor, Jr. is a writer, filmmaker, producer, and activist. His documentary on the Occupy movement, American Autumn: an Occudoc, garnered critical praise from The New York Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and more.  He also wrote and directed Legalize Democracy, a documentary short about the Movement To Amend the Constitution.

Dropping Knowledge Like a Clumsy Librarian {#NSA edition}

Originally posted at PopularReistance.org



note This clip is an excerpt. Watch the full show here.

Shahid Buttar, the Executive Director of The Bill of Rights Defense Committee drops knowledge on the NSA in his new House track The NSA vs. the USAwhile appearing on a recent episode of Acronym TV.

A sample verse:

Some people think Edward Snowden is a Traitor /
They forget everything that happened later /
Congress LIED TO by EXECUTIVE OFFICIALS /
We’re talking about CORRUPTION in the Capitol FO SHIZZLE /
Democracies FIZZLE when their people are watched /
That’s why the NSA’s got to be STOPPED

Shahid Buttar is the Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a 2003 graduate of Stanford Law School, and has appeared in media outlets including the Intercept, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, FOX News, Al-Jazeera and the Baltimore Sun. He spoke about NSA spying at Johns Hopkins recently to a packed audience organized by the Hopkins human rights working group and the New Political Society.

Full Show: Disband The NSA {aTV002}

Originally Posted at PopularResistance.org

Shahid Buttar, the Executive Director of The Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and Kevin Zeese of Popular Resistance sit down with host Dennis Trainor, Jr. in this episode of Acronym TV to discuss, among other things:

The Utility of the NSA | The 4^th Amendment | Edward Snowden | The Espionage Act | Why the MSM treats Glenn Greenwald as a criminal | An update on Chelsea Manning | The Reset the Net Campaign | The Criminalization of Dissent | The Campaign to cut off Water to the NSA | and we ask the question: In what significant ways is President Obama different than the Straussian, noble liars that preceded him?



Also, you will want to stick around for part two of the show to see Shahid perform the lyrics for his new house track called The NSA Vs. The USA. 

Episode introduction:
The Pulitzer Prize for public service, among the most prestigious awards in journalism, was awarded to The Washington Post and Guardian U.S. for their articles based on National Security Agency documents leaked by the former government contractor Edward Snowden. Snowden released astatement, which read in part: (The Pulitzer decision) “is a vindication for everyone who believes that the public has a role in government. We owe it to the efforts of the brave reporters and their colleagues who kept working in the face of extraordinary intimidation, including the forced destruction of journalistic materials, the inappropriate use of terrorism laws, and so many other means of pressure to get them to stop what the world now recognizes was work of vital public importance.”

In stark contrast to the work of vital public important is the overwhelming majority of content produced by the main stream media; one that demonizes anyone who questions the right and might of the American Empire to do whatever it deems necessary to expand its imperial reach by any means necessary.

Guests on this episode of Acronym TV with Dennis Trainor, Jr.:

Shahid Buttar is the Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a 2003 graduate of Stanford Law School, and has appeared in media outlets including the Intercept, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, FOX News, Al-Jazeera and the Baltimore Sun. He spoke about NSA spying at Johns Hopkins recently to a packed audience organized by the Hopkins human rights working group and the New Political Society.

Kevin Zeese is an attorney and political activist who works on peace, economic justice, criminal law reform and reviving American democracy. He co Directs It’s Our Economy, serves on the steering committees of the Chelsea Manning Support Network, and is an organizer atPopularResistance.org.
(Disclosure – Acronym TV receives partial financial support from Popular Resistance.)

Dennis Trainor, Jr. is a writer, filmmaker, producer, and activist. His documentary on the Occupy movement, American Autumn: an Occudoc, garnered critical praise from The New York Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and more.  He also wrote and directed Legalize Democracy, a documentary short about the Movement To Amend the Constitution. Trainor was an embedded YouTube personality/media advisor on the staff of Dennis Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaign and his work is regularly published on The Huffington Post, Truth Out, The Real New Network, Popular Resistance and several others.

Coming Soon: This Planet Will No Longer Support Civilization

Originally posted at PopularResistance.org

Dr. Jill Stein on Capitalism, the most important question of the climate struggle, and just how long we have before the planet will no longer support civilization.

Days before the Earth Day to May Day Global Climate Convergence kicked off, Dr. Jill Stein talked with Dennis Trainor, Jr. of Acronym TV in a wide-ranging conversation about her hopes for the Convergence, a first response to ShowTime’s new series Years of Living Dangerously, and why the Climate Justice movement is all about jobs.

Check out these short clips below, or watch the full episode here.

Are Capitalism and Climate Justice Compatible?


The Most Important Climate Issue We Face


Coming Soon: This Planet Will No Longer Support Civilization


According the Global Climate Convergence website:

“The Global Climate Convergence is an education and direct action campaign that begins this spring, with “10 days to change course,” running from Earth Day to May Day. It builds collaboration across national borders and fronts of struggle to harness the transformative power we already possess as a thousand separate movements springing up across the planet. Earth Day-to-May Day 2014 (April 22 - May 1) will be the first in a series of expanding annual actions.

As you know, the movement for democracy and justice is sweeping the globe – from democracy revolutions to occupy protests, movements for the rights of workers, students, immigrants, women and Indigenous peoples; resistance to NSA spying, endless war, prison pipelines, tar sands, fracking, nuclear power, GMOs and more. The accelerating climate disaster – now predicted to dismantle civilization as we know it as soon as 2050 - intensifies all these struggles, and provides new urgency for collaboration and unified action. Clearly there is no time to lose.

The Convergence calls for a solution as big as the crisis barreling down on us – an emergency green economic transformation, including full employment and living wages; 100 percent clean renewable energy by 2030; universal free health care and education; food and housing security; an end to deportations and mass incarceration; economic and political democracy; demilitarization; ecosystem restoration and support for the rights of Mother Earth; and more.

These goals will only be achieved by masses of people coming together in a unified movement, which is exactly what the Convergence is working towards!”

Saying ‘Hell No’ To Obamacare

Originally posted at PopularResistance.org

Recently, Dr. Margaret Flowers initiated an online petition declaring herself a consciences objector to the Affordable Care Act and asking others to send a message to President Obama that the ACA is a scam.



In this short clip (above), Dr. Flowers states:
“The most important question we should be having right now, knowing that insurgence is not protective, is do we want to continue to treat health care as a commodity and people only get what they can afford, or do we want to join the rest of the industrialized nations in the world and treat health care as a public good and create a system where people can get what they need.”

You can watch the full interview below:



Dr. Margaret Flowers (MFlowers8) is a pediatrician from Baltimore who is an organizer at PopularResistance.org, co-directs ItsOurEconomy.us and co-hosts Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio. She is adviser to the board of Physicians for a National Health Program and is on the steering committee of the Maryland Health Care is a Human Right campaign.




Tags
Obamacare, Healthcare.gov, Affordable Care Act, ACA, Obama health insurance, Conscientious Objector To Obamacare, Health Insurance, health insurance industry, universal healthcare, Single payer health care, Margaret Flowers, Dr. Margaret Flowers,

Full Show: Climate Catastrophe Now + The Most Important Question About Obamacare {aTV 001}

Originally Posted at PopularResistance.org



Dennis talks with Dr. Jill Stein, President of the Green Shadow Cabinet about the recently published U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fifth assessment on climate change. The findings, combined with the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community, paint a picture of humanity committing a collective genocide and ecocide. The end of civilization scenarios, once projected for your grandchildren’s grandchildren are now a reality for anyone ho plans to be alive in 2050.

“The IPCC has finally stepped up to the plate in saying what we are up against,” says Dr. Stein, “but they have not begin to step up to the plate, in fact they are really not qualified to say how we fix this. The IPCC is not calling for radical transformation. They have yelled, ‘fire!’ and come out with a squirt gun. What they are calling for is not what we need.”

In the second half of the show, Dennis sits down with Dr. Margret Flowers.

Recently, Dr. Flowers initiated an online petition declaring herself a consciences objector to the Affordable Care Act and asking others to send a message to President Obama that the ACA is a scam.

“The most important conversation we should be having right now in the United States is not how many people are insured,” says Dr. Flowers “knowing that insurance is not protective, it’s: do we want to continue to treat healthcare as a commodity where people only get what they can afford, or do we want to join the rest of the industrialized nations in the world and treat healthcare as a public good and create a system where people can get what they need.”


Bios:
Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) is a mother, physician, longtime teacher of internal medicine, and pioneering environmental-health advocate. She was the 2012 Green Party presidential nominee and current president of the Green Shadow Cabinet. She is also an initiator behind the Global Climate Convergence, which is an education and direct action campaign running from Mother Earth Day to May Day. It seeks to build collaboration across national borders and fronts of struggle to harness the transformative power we already possess as a thousand separate movements springing up across the planet.

Dr. Margaret Flowers (MFlowers8) is a pediatrician from Baltimore who is an organizer at PopularResistance.org, co-directs ItsOurEconomy.us and co-hosts Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio. She is adviser to the board of Physicians for a National Health Program and is on the steering committee of the Maryland Health Care is a Human Right campaign.

Dennis Trainor, Jr. (@DennisTrainorJr) is a writer, host and producer. His documentary on the Occupy movement, American Autumn: an Occudoc, garnered critical praise from The New York Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and more.  He also wrote and directed Legalize Democracy, a documentary short about the Movement To Amend the Constitution. Trainor was an embedded YouTube personality/media advisor on the staff of Dennis Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaign and his work is regularly published on The Huffington Post, Truth Out, The Real New Network, Popular Resistance and several others.

This episode of Acronym TV was filmed at The Real News Network in Baltimore, MD.

Director - Jamar Jemison

Assistant Director + Camera op - Chris DeMillo
Audio - Charles Waters
Camera- Denise Rivera, Michael Johnson
Makeup - Kelsey Johnson
Writer – Dennis Trainor, Jr. 

* Disclosure: PopularResistance.org provides partial funding for Acronym TV



tags
Global Climate Convergence, Obamacare, ACA, Affordable Care Act, Jill Stein, Dr. Jill Stein, Climate Justice movement, workers rights, Earth Day to May Day, Margaret Flowers, Dr. Margaret Flowers, Single Payer, Years of Living Dangerously, James Cameron Showtime, Dennis Trainor Jr,

Happy Easter from David Lynch

Austerity and Corporate Counter-Insurgency Tactics

This rather disturbing account comes from Women & Gender Studies Department Director Lucinda Cole:

"Several faculty members have asked me to make public this post about corporate bullying at USM, so here it is. Thanks for all the support.

March 30, 2104

To the ‪#‎USMfuture‬ Student Who Asked Me That Question:

At last three faculty meetings I attended at the University of Southern Maine, armed guards hovered outside the door or circulated through the rooms, hands moving to their hip holsters whenever faculty members raised their voices. Never before in my 25 years at USM had I witnessed such shows of state force against the faculty, even when the campus mobilized in 1995 to demand the ousting of then-Chancellor Michael J. Orenduff, a protest that eventually lead to his departure for an institution in the southwest.

After Friday’s faculty meeting (March 28, 2014) of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, which was devoted, in part, to a controversial plan designed to reduce the number of departments in the college, an observing student asked me why so many faculty either remained silent or debated details of the plan without ever attending to its consequences for students, for shared governance, or for tenured faculty whose retrenchments will be played out in courts over the coming year. What drives this behavior, he asked—self-delusion or self-interest?

While both are likely candidates, I suspect the real answer is fear.

Although the newspapers have done a good job of presenting the numbers that the UMaine System provides to justify their reallocation of resources, and sometimes publishing counter-evidence, what the newspapers cannot capture is the culture of fear created by the anti-labor lawyers and their cronies on the Board of Trustees. This anti-labor culture is enacted by the President and Provost, the former brought out of retirement to implement their policies, the latter an appointee of a deposed University President. The Provost serves “at the pleasure of the President,” as he keeps repeating, which means that she can fire him if he steps out line or refuses to do her bidding. much as I, as Director of Women and Gender Studies, serve “at the pleasure of the Provost.” Our Dean in CAHS is herself an appointee of that same deposed president, her job deeply dependent on staying in the good graces of the President and the BOT.

This lack of job security has a chilling effect on the ability of Deans and Directors to contest the reallocation of resources and to protect their faculty against arbitrary decisions on the part of the Provost and President.
Long before the spectacle of tenured and tenure-track faculty being herded in to receive their retrenchment papers while students protested in the halls, this administration has been cultivating a culture of fear. Theo Kalikow’s appointment began with the creation of a “Leadership Institute” into which hand-picked members of the staff, faculty, and administration were inducted.

Their first assignment was to read a book called Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions. Written by John Kotter, formerly of the Harvard Business School, and advertised as a "low-threat tool” for changing organizations bound by tradition, the little book features members of the Penguin Leadership Council compelled to adjust to changing circumstances or die. The first of the Eight Step Process of Successful Change is to “Create a Sense of Urgency”; this sense of urgency, we’re told, must be reinforced continually because otherwise "they will say the danger was overstated and that any change is not needed.” Despite concrete evidence that the UMaine’s system so-called budgetary crisis was partly a product of strategic bookkeeping, faculty and staff have over the past two years been subjected to a series of expensive external consultants touting “creative disruption.” Meanwhile, faculty received an ongoing stream of ominous emails from the president’s office, one of the most dramatic being “Survival Is Optional.”

This onslaught of fear-mongering rhetoric has been underwritten by surprising, last-minute changes in contracts for untenured faculty; by the Provost’s Office creation of a Hunger Games-like competition for promotion, tenure, and sabbaticals; and by the President’s ongoing threats that some as-yet-to-defined axe will fall—“You aren’t going to like them,” President Kalikow kept saying. Her warnings were punctuated and reinforced by armed security guards escorting long-time employees from their offices, shows of unnecessary corporate violence that finally resulted in the highly-publicized (and videotaped) forced march of tenured, sobbing faculty into the Provost’s office.

Even worse, the administration encouraged faculty to turn against one other by suggesting that younger faculty could be “saved” if older faculty would retire. Some did, some didn’t. But this insidious practice encouraged faculty to turn on each other rather than on the administration, who claimed throughout that they, after all, were simply making USM “sustainable.”

Whether or not USM’s iceberg was indeed melting, this BOT, Chancellor, President, and Provost took a blow-torch to it.

To what end? According to Kotter’s book, the penguins formerly ensconced on their melting icebergs will become “nomadic,” moving from iceberg to iceberg, a practice that never lets up “until a new way of life becomes firmly established.” At this point, a “new system of rewards” will be offered, through which it is “ensured that changes would not be overcome by stubborn, hard-to-die traditions” (123). Translated to academic culture, this means that tenure-track positions will be replaced by lectureships and online classes; nationwide standards for tenure and promotion will give way to demonstrations of having promoted the new branding; and raises will be used to reward those who show willingness to forget academic values and to promote a “new normal.”

What the BOT and faculty underestimated in this plan, however, is the power of USM’s students to fight the model of education they are being offered, with its hordes of “nomadic” or contingent faculty and the death of academic values. They have put their bodies on the streets, and their considerable skills online to create a network of allies that some faculty, in their fear or self-interest, have been unable or unwilling to emulate.
And thus the guns. While USM students circulate information about the necessity for peaceful protest, instructing fellow students about what is legal and productive, the BOT and USM administration fall back on shows of potential violence. Having failed to subdue the students and faculty through threats to their livelihoods, they resort to implicit threats on life.

As faculty sit in college and university meetings, we do so after a prolonged period of emotional abuse and under the overt or covert threat of violence. Given the systematic sacrifice of our colleagues to this misguided attempt at re-branding USM, many of us are a little dissociated, unable to respond coherently or helpfully to the rapid changes in our job conditions. Some are positioning themselves for the “new system of rewards,” and others hope to hold on until they can afford to retire. I found out a few days ago that a colleague got a job offer from Northwestern--the best possible outcome for her, although a real loss for us and for our students. The administration promises another round of cuts to staff in conjunction with a presumably faculty-driven reorganization of programs in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.
So-- to my student who has been fighting for us and for an education of which he can be proud, let me admit that faculty at USM are not only traumatized but are, as a group, often less brave than the students who fight for them. Our usual mode of critical thinking and civil debate has been tethered to the tenure system and to its guarantee, through teaching and scholarship, to free speech. Whether or not free speech disappears with the iceberg of job security remains to be seen. In the meantime, I thank you for reminding us through your words and actions of the principles that made the American public university system great.

All the best,
Lucinda Cole"

AUSTERITY IS CRAP: Students, Faculty, Alumni, and Community Fight Back!

The Time For Obama To Pardon Snowden Is Now

Originally posted at PopularResistance.org



Now that President Obama is proposing that the NSA end its bulk collection of data, it is time that Obama take this narrative to the next logical conclusion and offer a full and unconditional pardon to Edward Snowden.

President Obama’s War on whistle blowers (he has charged eight individuals with Espionage, compared to only three under all previous presidents) needs to end.  His recent proposal, even though it was forced by the courts, and to a large degree Mark Zuckerberg and the other titans of the tech world who warned that the U.S. government spying programs would hurt business, is still an admission that Edward Snowden’s actions were justified.

As Michael Maiello, writing in Esquire puts it:

“This is the very essence of whistleblowing. Snowden brought information to   the public so that the public could reasonably demand changes from its leaders. Obama was seemingly happy to ignore the surveillance issue until forced, much as he was seemingly happy to hold an ambiguous view on same sex marriage until public opinion made vagaries impossible.”

The moral courage of Edward Snowden’s act of whistleblowing and Glenn Greenwald’s unimpeachable reporting have revealed what Chris Hedges has labeled a government drunk with power:

“drunk with the power to sweep up all your email correspondence, your tweets, your Web searches, your phone records, your file transfers, your live chats, your financial data, your medical data, your criminal and civil court records and your movements, those who are awash in billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars, those who have banks of sophisticated computer systems, along with biosensors, scanners, face recognition technologies and miniature drones, those who have obliterated your anonymity, your privacy and, yes, your liberty.”

That the White House and Congressional leaders have recently unveiled similar proposals to end the NSA bulk collection of phone records has less to do with a come to Jesus sober up moment and more to do with the fact that they were given an ultimatum by a court (and a 6 month deadline) to defend the constitutionality of collecting the data related to every phone call made by every US citizen.

Our constitutional scholar of a president could, of course, make no such case to continuing the phone collection program, and now seeks, he says, to win back the public’s trust.

One step towards winning back the public’s trust would be by granting Edward Snowden a full pardon. In addition to being a tactical move to counter the growing understanding that Big Brother is watching, it has the added advantage of being the right thing to do.



TAGS

Edward Snowden, NSA, Obama NSA, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Snowden leaks, Snowden pardon, The Intercept, Wikileaks, Resistance Report

Consumer Driven Destruction

Humanity could be facing the next great extinction event wrought by our only real enemies greed and avarice, yet most people would gleefully dance over the edge of the cliff than give up too many of their shiny toys made of raped Earth and the souls of sweat shop workers.

      The production “cycle” of your average piece of chain store merchandise involves an unsustainable level of resource and energy consumption before it can be mass marketed in as disposable form as possible. The end result of the this “cycle” is to end up in a land fill that covers the scares of our previous generations endeavors. On occasion these items are transformed into more products for another round or two, but the end result is always the same. Planed obsolescence fuels a capitalistic juggernaut that strip mines everything from metals to fish and blows the tops of unfathomably old mountains in order to get at the next commodity to strengthen the bottom line. As the bulk of society fattens it self on the resources of future generations, a segment of society leaches of wealth and capitol at a rate unseen in history. Inequality and poverty thrive even in the richest places in the world and the poorest live lives that are unimaginable to the majority of people in a country that is soothed into sleeping well at night by the light of the latest iToy. The cities and towns of America have become breeding grounds of apathy and ignorance and even those with good intentions lack the strength of numbers to achieve the scope with which their fellow man has damned them.

      First world nations enjoy an addiction to a life style that has spread inequality like a cancer and, as any other addiction, gives a sense of pleasure before the inevitable downfall. It's a life style that depends on an abundance of cheap labor and an infinite supply of resources to feed it, and as such, was doomed to the inevitable boom and bust cycle. Third world nations are exploited with a sophistication never dreamed of by the conquerors of old. The end of slavery with the coming of modernity simply replaced a direct evil with a subtle and insidious new one, that of debt. Wage slavery thrives in poor countries just as wage inequality thrives in rich ones and the poorest peoples of the world are nothing more than cogs in a very sophisticated machine. A machine that makes so much so easy and so fast that before you know it you've given up that wish can never be repaired, replaced, or replenished. 

       However all hope is not lost to us anymore than it's ever been and the power of capital has always been formed at the hands of the workers that drive the economy. No system of government, no matter how corrupt, can survive without the apathy or consent of those who keep the system running every day. The questions that face us are many. How much inequality do people put up with before reacting? How many busts can capitalism support before there are no booms? Will environmental changes bring about ruin in unpredictable ways or will humanity survive the trials ahead? Within the murky destiny of mankind lies a curtain truth. That apathy and ignorance in favor of creature comforts and a less frighting life will likely leave us with neither.

Does The U.S. Want War With Russia?

Two weeks ago, when Liz Wahl quit her post as an RT host live on air claiming that she could not be part of a network that was “funded by the Russian Government” and was set on “whitewashing the crimes of Putin.”

Ms. Wahl then immediately went on a tour of all the 3 mainstream corporate outlets where she seemed to be auditioning for a role on a news show where she could whitewash the blowback inducing homicidal bull in a cultural religious and geopolitical china shop of U.S. foreign policy that I like to call Manifest Destiny’s Child.

Even Chris Hayes jumped on the bandwagon, celebrating Wahl as “incredibly badass”, but before you join the Liz Wahl fan club, take a moment to read the excellent follow up report from Max Blumenthal and Rania Khalek, which outlines how Wahl’s attempt at a Networkesque type of movement was coordinated by the Neo-Conservative think tank foreign policy initiative. Blumenthal and Khalek report:

“Behind the coverage of Wahl’s dramatic protest, a cadre of neoconservatives was celebrating a public relations coup. Desperate to revive the Cold War, head off further cuts to the defense budget and restore the legitimacy they lost in the ruins of Iraq, the tightknit group of neoconservative writers and stewards had opened up a new PR front through Wahl’s resignation. And they succeeded with no shortage of help from an ossified media establishment struggling to maintain credibility in an increasingly anarchic online news environment. With isolated skeptics branded as useful idiots for Putin, the scene has been kept clean of neoconservative fingerprints, obscuring their interest in Wahl’s resignation and the broader push to deepen tensions with Russia.”

Despite the depth of the Blumenthal/Khalek piece that lays bare the machinations of, among other things, the very sadistic dangers and Apocalyptic flirtations of the military industrial complex married to a Straussian Noble Lie wherein the real life Dr. Strangelove’s who launched a Global War on Terror, CORRECTION, Global War on brown people in lands that have not declared war on us and pose no threat to us CORRECTION Global War on everything everywhere including US Citizens because in the USA journalism is the new terrorism, and our charming peace prize winning President maintains a kill list and claims more autonomy in using it than a mafia don … DESPITE all this most people here in the United States can be split into 2 camps when it comes to Russia.

In the majority camp you have people who think the U.S. support for Ukraine and saber rattling with Russia is just another chapter in the story book tale of the U.S. as a superpower spreading good, protecting freedom lovers the world over from tyrants and monsters like Putin, and in the minority camp you have people who think Ukraine is a 12 seed in the Eastern Bracket of their March madness office pool. An even smaller group, recognize that while Putin may not be a knight in shining armor, that this story is in fact a bit more nuanced than the plot of a fairy tale.

For those of us able to look at the world without tint of nationalistic goggles the mainstream corporate media Liz Wahl so desperately wants a job working for demands that we wear, one thing is crystal clear: The world still has two major nuclear powers, the United States and Russia. For decades, it has been the United States who has been the aggressor in this relationship. As Diana Johnstone, writing at Counterpunch puts it:

“Is Russia urging Quebec to secede from Canada so that the province can join a military alliance led by Moscow? Evidently not. That would be comparable, and yet mild compared to the recent U.S. gambit led by Victoria Nuland aimed at bringing Ukraine into the Western orbit. (…) Russia professes no hostile ideology, and only seeks normal relations with the West. What more can it do? It is up to Americans to come to their senses.”

Asking Americans to come to their senses is easier said than done.

For a country whose birth was founded on an occupation and then a genocide, whose wealth was built on the backs of slaves, and whose expansion was justified through a perverse notion of manifest destiny, denial has become a dominant part of our collective identity.

Does the U.S. want war with Russia?

Judging by our actions the next front of our perpetual war never seems like an if, but a when.



tags:

Russia, Ukraine Crisis, Ukraine Barack Obama, Russia Ukraine Video, War with Russia, War in Ukraine, Acronym TV, Resistance Report, Dennis Trainor Jr

For White People Who Don't Understand Racism (Part 2)

And how stupid you sound when you say that racism doesn't exist...

For all the White people who don't understand racism

Comedian Aamer Rahman explains further:

No Logo: Or Why Shit Sucks Now

The Book No Logo was published in 1999.
Pay attention.

What Comes After Capitalism?

Originally Posted at PopularResistance.org


What comes after Capitalism? Identifying the correct answer to that question, one I do not pretend to know, in addition to facing the fact that the question is a life or death one- on a global scale, is a basic requirement for the life, liberty, and happiness of the human race.

The financial system is nearing another crash, like the sub-prime mortgage crash of 2007 and 2008, writes Steve Rushton at Occupy.com in his report summarizing a recently published European Green Party paper, The Price of Doing Too Little Too Late.

Rushton outlines how investors, pension funds and banks are so heavily invested in companies that earn money by destroying the planet that when the actual wake-up call comes, when the alarm clock goes off and the climate change deniers and their corporate blood sucking psychopaths who pay for the propaganda that enables climate change deniers to pretend that there is still a debate to be had over the Apocalyptic course that human induced climate change has us on– when those people and those beliefs that together want to extract fossil fuel reserves when we KNOW that if the human race is to survive we must leave at least half of current fossil fuel reserves in the ground if not three quarters- when, all the Sean Hannity’s, and Sarah Palin’s and Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma – he who, parenthetically it should be noted, likes to quote quotes Genesis 8:22 (While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease”)  and added, "God's still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we human beings would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous" – when Tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow all these aiding and abetting murders meet the fate of all our yesterdays that have lighted fools the way to dusty death and we wake collectively from our slumber brought on by the gears and the levers that operate the odious machine and we become so sick that we can not take part, even passively take part, and we come together like old flattop grooving up slowly to indicate to the people who own this capitalist machine that unless we are free, this machine will be prevented from working at all and we transition on a massive global shift towards more sustainable energy practices occurs, that funds with heavy carbon exposure- and that number is 95% of all global investment according to the study- will face a shock, that in fact, the carbon bubble will burst and bring own the global financial system.

Ok, that may have been a run on sentence.

To sum up: The economy will crash again, according to Rushton, because we are so addicted to constant growth, and quarterly capitalism that the global financial elite will march us to the edge of the 2 degree climate cliff just to squeeze some more profit from the products and systems that are killing us.

So add one more obstacle to slow the glacial pace (and I mean that in the pre-climate change era of the word) of a coordinated global effort to get the human race untied from the train tracks before the locomotive that is a 2 degree rise in global temperature: our inability to ditch the written and unwritten rules of capitalism.

Put that in your feedback loop and smoke it.




Tags

Capitalism, Anti-Capitalism, After Capitalism, Fossil fuel reserves, Climate change, Global warming, Resistance Report, Acronym TV,

What if being gay was the norm, and being straight was "queer?"

Psychopaths Run America, Wall Street, The World

Life from the POV of a rock

So imagine you were a rock, and you saw things in terms of geologic scale.
Humans would be a flash in the pan.

Protesting Illegal in Australia?

Originally Posted at PopularResistance.org



Last week, the Legislative Council of Victoria passed the Summary Offence Act 2013, which outlaws the right to protest in Victoria, by a vote of 20-18.

Several activists involved in the Tunnel Picket protests were arrested during in Parliament as the voting was taking place. One of those activists, Sean Bedlam, is the subject of our interview today.

From September onwards the police in Victoria will have the power to ‘move on’ groups of people at their will, including those involved in peaceful protests and pickets. Those who refuse to comply with these orders can be issued with fines of $750, exclusion orders, and jail terms of up to 2 years.

Sean Bedlam (interviewed here) is a comedian, artist and activist based in Melbourne. An active member of Occupy Melbourne and other social justice campaigns, Sean states:

“Activists in Australia are reaching out to people all over the world, particularly in America, because Australia is a client state of the United States (while at the same time) we are reaching out to the Indigenous people of Australia, the first nations, and that has become a burning central issue. Now, the powers that be know that if we are making contact with the powers that be around the world and if we are making contact with indigenous Australians, you’ve got an incredibly powerful network, and they don’t want the network to form.”

tags
Civil disobedience, protest, arrested, protestors arrested, Dennis Trainor Jr, Sean Bedlam, Australian law, Australia outlaws protest, Acronym TV, Resistance Report

2014 Brings Most Green Independent Party Candidates since 2004

15 Green Independents running for Legislature