People Power | Happiness | The Good Life
Making a Difference Makes You Happy
A series of studies find that activism brings pleasant emotions, greater life satisfaction, and more experiences of freedom, competence, and connection to others.
by Tim Kasser
posted May 05, 2010
A new study found that activism leads to feeling more alert, alive, and satisfied with life.
Democracy depends on the time, energy, and engagement of ordinary people. But it remains quite difficult to motivate average citizens even to vote, much less to engage in the more intensive forms of political activism needed to counteract powerful forces that work against rule by the people.
That's why Malte Klar and I set out to determine whether people's engagement in political activity might be associated with the motivator of personal well-being. In other words, despite the struggles inherent in political activism, does being politically active brings its own rewards in terms of happiness and life satisfaction? Such a relationship seemed plausible to us, given past studies illustrating the well-being benefits of volunteering and of having pro-social attitudes and values.
To test this possibility, Klar and I surveyed one group of 344 college students, and then a larger group of 718 adults (all United States residents, half of whom were recruited from an online activism registry, and the other half of whom were community members recruited to match the activists on several demographic variables). Subjects’ political activism was assessed via measures like their commitment to activism (e.g., “I take the time I need to engage in activism”) and their sense of identity as an activist (e.g., “Being an activist is central to who I am”). Subjects were also asked how often they planned to or had participated in activist behaviors—ranging from sending “a letter or email about a political issue to a public official” to higher-risk activities like engaging “in a political activity in which you knew you will be arrested.”
Statistical analyses showed that after controlling for demographic factors like age, race, political orientation, and education, study participants who scored higher in political activism also reported higher levels of personal well-being. Specifically, political activism scores were associated with feeling more pleasant emotions, reporting greater life satisfaction, and having more experiences of freedom, competence, and connection to others. Our application of past research on “psychological thriving” further showed that 28 percent of the politically active adults had reached this highest level of well-being, compared to 18 percent of the community sample.
10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy
Because these correlational findings cannot establish whether being politically active actually caused increases in well-being, Klar and I conducted a third study. We asked students to write letters to the head of their college’s dining services; some students were assigned to write about “hedonistic” aspects of the food, commenting on the food’s taste and how enjoyable it was to eat, while other students were assigned to write about ethical and political aspects of the food, such as whether its production supported fair trade and social justice. Afterwards, students reported on their current personal well-being. Even with this relatively weak and short-term political action, results showed that subjects assigned to write about political issues reported feeling significantly more alert, energized, and alive than did those who wrote about the hedonistic aspects of food.
There are of course many limits to the three studies Klar and I conducted, including their use of only U.S. citizens and their short-term nature. Our results also have an important caveat: Engagement in “high-risk” activist behaviors that can lead people to get arrested or physically injured bore no systematic associations with personal well-being. Nonetheless, the results clearly suggested that being politically active is associated with higher levels of personal well-being, and may even cause improvements in vitality.
Politicians and activists typically attempt to motivate ordinary citizens to participate in democracy on the basis of moral appeals or attempts to fix a problem. Our results suggest that it might also be worthwhile to highlight the internal rewards citizens can obtain from being politically engaged: A sense of satisfaction, the experience of pleasant emotions and of connection with others, and a feeling of aliveness.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Kasser, Ph.D., wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Tim is professor and chair of Psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. The paper this essay is based on was published in the journal Political Psychology under the title “Some benefits of being an activist: Measuring activism and its role in psychological well-being.”
Interested?
Having a Voice Makes People Happy by Frances Moore Lappé
Most human beings are not couch potatoes and whiners. We are doers and creators. In fact, humans need to 'make a dent.'
Happiness-in-Action Heroes
Real people show how to live the good life and share their secrets to happiness.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Making A Difference
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him; the unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions. All progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw
-----Forwarded Message-----
From: k8longstory@gmail.com
Sent: Apr 12, 2011 11:13 AM
To: katesmith2@earthlink.net
Subject: Making a Difference Makes You Happy
This link is sent to you from http://www.yesmagazine.org
You are receiving this mail because someone read a page at YES! Magazine
and thought it might interest you.
Making a Difference Makes You Happy
A series of studies find that activism brings pleasant emotions, greater life satisfaction, and more experiences of freedom, competence, and connection to others.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/making-a-difference-makes-you-happy
YES! Magazine Site Administrator
-----Forwarded Message-----
From: k8longstory@gmail.com
Sent: Apr 12, 2011 11:13 AM
To: katesmith2@earthlink.net
Subject: Making a Difference Makes You Happy
This link is sent to you from http://www.yesmagazine.org
You are receiving this mail because someone read a page at YES! Magazine
and thought it might interest you.
Making a Difference Makes You Happy
A series of studies find that activism brings pleasant emotions, greater life satisfaction, and more experiences of freedom, competence, and connection to others.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/making-a-difference-makes-you-happy
YES! Magazine Site Administrator
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Time for a Third Party? Peace and Freedom
Platform of the Peace and Freedom Party
The Peace and Freedom Party, founded in 1967, is committed to socialism, democracy, ecology, feminism and racial equality. We represent the working class, those without capital in a capitalist society. We organize toward a world where cooperation replaces competition, a world where all people are well fed, clothed and housed; where all women and men have equal status; where all individuals may freely endeavor to fulfill their own talents and desires; a world of freedom and peace where every community retains its cultural integrity and lives with all others in harmony. We offer this summary of our immediate and long-range goals:
Socialism
We support social ownership and democratic management of industry and natural resources. Under capitalism, the proceeds of labor go to the profits of the wealthy few. With socialism, production is planned to meet human needs.
To us, socialism is workers' democracy, including the principle that all officials are elected, recallable at any time, and none receives more than a worker's wage. Socialism can only be brought about when we, the working class, unite and act as a body in our own interests. Our goals cannot be achieved by electoral means alone. We participate in mass organization and direct action in neighborhoods, workplaces, unions and the armed forces everywhere.
While organizing for the future, we work in the present, challenging the system with the following immediate and transitional goals:
Labor and Full Employment
We demand a socially useful job at union pay levels or a guaranteed dignified income for everyone.
We support the establishment of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to alleviate poverty and homelessness.
We call for a 30-hour work week for 40 hours' pay and abolition of forced overtime.
We demand a legally mandated annual paid vacation of at least 4 weeks.
We demand expansion and enforcement of job health and safety laws. We call for the restoration of all labor rights previously won by women and their extension to men as well.
We demand paid parental leaves and time off work for childcare.
No prison labor for private profit. Living wage and full union rights for any prison labor.
Defend workers' rights to organize, form union caucuses, strike, and boycott.
No replacement of striking workers.
Federally-funded public works programs to rebuild the nation's infrastructure and restore the environment.
International solidarity of workers against international capitalist schemes such as NAFTA and WTO in defense of jobs, wages, working conditions and environmental laws.
International trade agreements must guarantee the protection of workers and democratic rights in all participating countries.
A rank and file socialist-oriented labor movement to mobilize working-class people to assume ownership and control of the economy.
Peace and International Justice
The drive for greater profits by multi-national corporations which direct U.S. foreign policy is a major cause of war. We stand for peace between nations and the right of all peoples to self-determination. We support an ongoing socialist transformation everywhere. We therefore call for:
The U.S. to renounce nuclear first strike, and take the initiative toward global disarmament by eliminating all of its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
No U.S. intervention anywhere. End all support and aid to repressive regimes and all military and police training aid everywhere. End efforts to destabilize foreign governments. End U.S.-directed economic warfare against other countries. Abolish the CIA, NSA, AID and other agencies for interference inother countries' internal affairs. Withdraw all U.S. troops and weapons from all other countries.
Stop all U.S. arms exports and trade.
Dissolve all military pacts.
Convert from military to peaceful production; reallocate the resulting "peace dividend" for social benefit.
Abolish the Selective Service System.
No weapons in space.
Equal Rights and Liberties
The capitalists use every difference in society, including sex, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, age, and physical abilities to divide workers in order to depress wages, maintain a surplus labor pool, and prevent working-class unity. We demand equal treatment of all people by employers, businesses and government. We stand for a world free from all forms of oppression.
Women
We demand full equality for women in all aspects of life. Sexism is a major instrument for teaching relations of domination and inequality and for keeping one-half of the workforce underpaid or unpaid. We work to end oppressive sex roles in society. We must ensure equal rights and responsibilities in child raising. Unions must do more to organize women and promote women's leadership. We demand:
Adoption of an equal rights amendment.
Equal pay for equal work, and for work of comparable worth.
Enforce non-discrimination in hiring and promotion with affirmative action where necessary.
Provision of free, high-quality, community-controlled child care.
Convenient provision of safe, free birth control information and materials to men and women of any age.
Free abortion on demand.
No forced abortions or sterilizations.
Safe prenatal care.
End violence against women.
Ending Racism and National Oppression
Accompanying the continuing economic crisis, we see a rise in racial discrimination, increased terrorism against racially and nationally oppressed people, and retrenchment in civil rights. Minority families are disproportionately victimized by cutbacks in health care, education, child care, welfare, food stamps and jobs. We demand:
End all forms of racial discrimination.
Enforce non-discrimination in hiring and promotion withaffirmative action where necessary.
Prosecute and punish police and prison officials who brutalize and murder.
Language Rights
Restore to the State Constitution co-equal status for Spanish as an official language of California in recognition of its cultural, historical, economic and demographic importance to the people of this state.
Abolish all English-only laws and policies, including those of private employers.
Undocumented Workers
Immigrant workers are hounded by government authorities, worked and housed in substandard conditions by unscrupulous bosses, and blamed by Republican and Democratic demagogues for society's problems.
We call for open borders.
We demand an end to deportations of immigrants.
We demand full political, social and economic rights for resident non-citizens.
Native Americans
We support self-determination of indigenous peoples and sovereignty for Native nations. We demand:
Honor treaty obligations with Native American nations and recognize California tribes.
Stop the theft of natural resources located on reservation lands.
Honor Native American water, hunting and fishing rights.
Free the prisoners of the FBI/BIA war against Native Americans, end all harassment.
Stop destruction of sacred burial sites.
Sexual Orientation
Equal treatment and benefits under the law for all families. Guarantee equal child custody, adoption, visitation privileges, and foster parenthood rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Equal treatment for all people in the military regardless of sexual orientation.
The right to gay marriage and partners' benefits.
Accurate sex education courses in public schools. Truthful information about sexuality in society and history.
People With Disabilities
People with disabilities are entitled to equal rights to education, housing, health care, recreation, and transportation. Attendant care and other services or adaptations must be provided to enable fuller participation in all aspects of society.
Retired Workers
Retired workers must be guaranteed a decent living at union wage levels. We demand:
Immediate improvements in economic benefits and social services.
Free, quality, multi-lingual and multi-cultural medical and home health care.
Accessible transportation.
An end to all forced retirement.
Stop the segregation and isolation of senior citizens.
Defense of the Environment
The same corporate forces and economic system that exploit and brutalize the world's working class people are destroying the world's biosphere. These social policies and ecollogical destruction often overlap. Socialism is necessary to end the ecological destruction caused by capitalism. Our goal is a society that is in harmony with nature as it is in harmony with its own people.
We therefore favor:
Planning for urban and regional environment based on principles of sound ecosystems management.
Create public open spaces in all communities.
Tighter regulation of pesticides, herbicides, industrial wastes and genetically modified foods to protect human food, air and water, employees in the workplace, and species habitat. No release of genetically engineered or transgenic organisms into the wild. No patenting of life forms.
A multi-source energy system, development of solar technology and other renewable, non-polluting energy sources. Eliminate nuclear power plants. End fossil fuel dependence.
Public ownership of public utilities.
Protect species habitat such as old-growth forests to preserve biodiversity.
Massive development of free public transportation.
International trade agreements must guarantee the protection of the environment in all participating countries.
End environmental racism, including the immediate cessation of nuclear testing and toxic waste dumping on reservation lands, the disproportionate creation of landfills in poor communities of color and eliminate the mass development of maquiladora plants.
Transportation
Massive development of public transportation systems that are reliable, frequent, free or at nominal fares and environmentally sound.
Expand safe routes for foot and bicycle traffic.
Agriculture
We want an agricultural system that ensures enough food and other farm products to meet human needs, guarantees a high standard of living to farmers and farm workers, protects humans and the ecosystem from environmental degredation and encourages organic farming. To that end, we call for:
An end to subsidies and tax breaks for corporations.
Food distribution by farm and consumer cooperatives.
Extension of all labor rights to farm workers, including wage and hour regulations.
An end to cruel methods of animal husbandry.
No use of recominant bovine growth hormone (RBGH) in meat or dairy cattle.
No genetically engineered organisms in food production.
A ban on "terminator" seeds.
No export of chemicals banned in the U.S. or import of agricultural products treated with them.
Science and Technology
We need scientific and technological research to benefit ordinary people, not the capitalists.
Education
Education is critical to individual survival and civilized human values, but U.S. capitalism is dismantling public education. Inadequate and unequal funding of schools perpetuates racism, crime and inequality. We demand:
Integrated, democratically-run schools with up-to-date plant and equipment and smaller classes.
Teach the history of workers' struggles and labor's creation of society's wealth and progress.
Multi-lingual and multi-cultural education at all levels.
A federal law requiring and funding equal average per-pupil expenditures by every public school district, with extra funds for students with special needs such as disability or economic deprivation.
Tuition-free higher education available to all.
Restore cutbacks in public education and public library services.
No school voucher schemes.
Arts and Culture
Provide uncensored government funding for ordinary people to create and enjoy art.
Housing and Rent Control
We recognize the right of everybody to quality, secure housing. We demand:
Production and rehabilitation of non-profit, community-controlled housing through public financing with immediate emphasis on housing the homeless.
Rent and eviction control laws and collective bargaining for tenants.
Resident-controlled community renovation programs to create, not destroy, low- and moderate-income housing.
Enforce local affordable housing quotas.
Freedom, Justice and Crime
We call for the defense and extension of the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech, press, assembly and association, and the right to keep and bear arms for individual and collective defense. The ultimate guarantee of those rights is the organized strength of the working class.
Capitalism and poverty breed crime and repression. Working class people are the primary victims both of street crime and of police reaction to it. The bosses use laws against victimless activities, "legal" and illegal expansion of police powers, military and paramilitary occupation of poor and minority communities, and diversion of resources to police and jails, to keep workers intimidated and dependent. We demand:
Stop state-sponsored spying on and violence against progressive organizations.
Democratically-controlled police review boards with powers of subpoena and discipline.
Abolish the death penalty.
Repeal the Three Strikes law.
Stop trials and imprisonment of juveniles as adults.
Treatment of prisoners as human beings; rehabilitation, not vengeance.
Decriminalize victimless activities including drug use and consensual sex. Legalize marijuana. End the "war on drugs," which is primarily directed against poor and working-class people.
Stop unwarranted searches and seizures of persons and property. Restore constitutional rights.
Prosecute crimes of the wealthy and powerful against workers and the environment.
Freedom for all political prisoners.
Voting and Elections
Proportional representation to promote legislative representation of the wide variety of political viewpoints.
Enact instant runoff voting (IRV) to eliminate runoff elections and provide for genuine majority support for those elected.
Election should be by direct vote of the people. Eliminate the Electoral College.
Enforce and extend voting rights for people of color, non-English speakers, and homeless people.
Resident non-citizens should have the right to vote, particularly in local and school elections.
Free and equal access to radio and television for all candidates.
Health Care
We believe that access to quality medical and dental care is a basic human right. We stand for a democratically-controlled, publicly-funded health care system. We support health practices that emphasize education, prevention and nutrition. We demand:
Free, high-quality health care for everyone.
Eliminate for-profit health care.
Free immunization programs.
No private patents on drugs developed through publicly-funded research.
Price controls on drugs and medical technology.
Safe pre-natal care, including women's choice of birth alternatives.
More medical facilities to provide services and education in low-income neighborhoods and rural areas.
More substance abuse treatment and needle-exchange programs.
More research into diseases and disorders caused by man-made substances.
More community health care facilities.
Support non-standard proven methods.
Special attention to preventing epidemics of communicable diseases, such as AIDS.
Taxes
Public services and infrastructure have deteriorated as government has increasingly shifted the tax burden from corporations to workers. Our long-range goal is a socialist society without conventional taxes, with public services to be funded from the proceeds of social production. We demand:
Repeal Proposition 13. Tax property for profit, not property for personal use. Remove property taxes on modest owner-occupied homes.
Repeal the sales tax.
Include aggregate of real property and stocks, bonds, etc. in a steeply-graduated property tax.
Restore the renters' tax credit.
Double registration fees on luxury vehicles.
Tax unearned income at a higher rate than earned income.
Eliminate or reverse income tax on low- and moderate-income families.
Re-enact California's unitary tax on multi-national corporations.
Tax the business activities of churches on the same basis as other organizations.
Take the cap off social security taxes, make the rates progressive so burden falls on the wealthy.
Mass Media
Ownership of television and radio stations, print media, and other forms of communication has been increasingly concentrated into the irresponsible hands of fewer corporations, and any checks and balances previously available to the people have been eliminated.
We call for public control of the public airwaves.
We demand restoration of a strengthened Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Provision.
We oppose the legislated extinction of the VHF spectrum, which should be used for public monitoring of legislative bodies and for other civic purposes.
We defend the Internet from censors and commercial interests.
We call for enforcement of antitrust laws on media conglomerates.
We support new media for grassroots communication to enhance freedom of self-expression and information distribution.
Religion
We demand strict separation of religious and government institutions and activities.
(The Platform of the Peace and Freedom Party was adopted March 23, 2003, reaffirmed August 1, 2004, and revised May 21, 2006.)
The Peace and Freedom Party, founded in 1967, is committed to socialism, democracy, ecology, feminism and racial equality. We represent the working class, those without capital in a capitalist society. We organize toward a world where cooperation replaces competition, a world where all people are well fed, clothed and housed; where all women and men have equal status; where all individuals may freely endeavor to fulfill their own talents and desires; a world of freedom and peace where every community retains its cultural integrity and lives with all others in harmony. We offer this summary of our immediate and long-range goals:
Socialism
We support social ownership and democratic management of industry and natural resources. Under capitalism, the proceeds of labor go to the profits of the wealthy few. With socialism, production is planned to meet human needs.
To us, socialism is workers' democracy, including the principle that all officials are elected, recallable at any time, and none receives more than a worker's wage. Socialism can only be brought about when we, the working class, unite and act as a body in our own interests. Our goals cannot be achieved by electoral means alone. We participate in mass organization and direct action in neighborhoods, workplaces, unions and the armed forces everywhere.
While organizing for the future, we work in the present, challenging the system with the following immediate and transitional goals:
Labor and Full Employment
We demand a socially useful job at union pay levels or a guaranteed dignified income for everyone.
We support the establishment of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to alleviate poverty and homelessness.
We call for a 30-hour work week for 40 hours' pay and abolition of forced overtime.
We demand a legally mandated annual paid vacation of at least 4 weeks.
We demand expansion and enforcement of job health and safety laws. We call for the restoration of all labor rights previously won by women and their extension to men as well.
We demand paid parental leaves and time off work for childcare.
No prison labor for private profit. Living wage and full union rights for any prison labor.
Defend workers' rights to organize, form union caucuses, strike, and boycott.
No replacement of striking workers.
Federally-funded public works programs to rebuild the nation's infrastructure and restore the environment.
International solidarity of workers against international capitalist schemes such as NAFTA and WTO in defense of jobs, wages, working conditions and environmental laws.
International trade agreements must guarantee the protection of workers and democratic rights in all participating countries.
A rank and file socialist-oriented labor movement to mobilize working-class people to assume ownership and control of the economy.
Peace and International Justice
The drive for greater profits by multi-national corporations which direct U.S. foreign policy is a major cause of war. We stand for peace between nations and the right of all peoples to self-determination. We support an ongoing socialist transformation everywhere. We therefore call for:
The U.S. to renounce nuclear first strike, and take the initiative toward global disarmament by eliminating all of its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
No U.S. intervention anywhere. End all support and aid to repressive regimes and all military and police training aid everywhere. End efforts to destabilize foreign governments. End U.S.-directed economic warfare against other countries. Abolish the CIA, NSA, AID and other agencies for interference inother countries' internal affairs. Withdraw all U.S. troops and weapons from all other countries.
Stop all U.S. arms exports and trade.
Dissolve all military pacts.
Convert from military to peaceful production; reallocate the resulting "peace dividend" for social benefit.
Abolish the Selective Service System.
No weapons in space.
Equal Rights and Liberties
The capitalists use every difference in society, including sex, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, age, and physical abilities to divide workers in order to depress wages, maintain a surplus labor pool, and prevent working-class unity. We demand equal treatment of all people by employers, businesses and government. We stand for a world free from all forms of oppression.
Women
We demand full equality for women in all aspects of life. Sexism is a major instrument for teaching relations of domination and inequality and for keeping one-half of the workforce underpaid or unpaid. We work to end oppressive sex roles in society. We must ensure equal rights and responsibilities in child raising. Unions must do more to organize women and promote women's leadership. We demand:
Adoption of an equal rights amendment.
Equal pay for equal work, and for work of comparable worth.
Enforce non-discrimination in hiring and promotion with affirmative action where necessary.
Provision of free, high-quality, community-controlled child care.
Convenient provision of safe, free birth control information and materials to men and women of any age.
Free abortion on demand.
No forced abortions or sterilizations.
Safe prenatal care.
End violence against women.
Ending Racism and National Oppression
Accompanying the continuing economic crisis, we see a rise in racial discrimination, increased terrorism against racially and nationally oppressed people, and retrenchment in civil rights. Minority families are disproportionately victimized by cutbacks in health care, education, child care, welfare, food stamps and jobs. We demand:
End all forms of racial discrimination.
Enforce non-discrimination in hiring and promotion withaffirmative action where necessary.
Prosecute and punish police and prison officials who brutalize and murder.
Language Rights
Restore to the State Constitution co-equal status for Spanish as an official language of California in recognition of its cultural, historical, economic and demographic importance to the people of this state.
Abolish all English-only laws and policies, including those of private employers.
Undocumented Workers
Immigrant workers are hounded by government authorities, worked and housed in substandard conditions by unscrupulous bosses, and blamed by Republican and Democratic demagogues for society's problems.
We call for open borders.
We demand an end to deportations of immigrants.
We demand full political, social and economic rights for resident non-citizens.
Native Americans
We support self-determination of indigenous peoples and sovereignty for Native nations. We demand:
Honor treaty obligations with Native American nations and recognize California tribes.
Stop the theft of natural resources located on reservation lands.
Honor Native American water, hunting and fishing rights.
Free the prisoners of the FBI/BIA war against Native Americans, end all harassment.
Stop destruction of sacred burial sites.
Sexual Orientation
Equal treatment and benefits under the law for all families. Guarantee equal child custody, adoption, visitation privileges, and foster parenthood rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Equal treatment for all people in the military regardless of sexual orientation.
The right to gay marriage and partners' benefits.
Accurate sex education courses in public schools. Truthful information about sexuality in society and history.
People With Disabilities
People with disabilities are entitled to equal rights to education, housing, health care, recreation, and transportation. Attendant care and other services or adaptations must be provided to enable fuller participation in all aspects of society.
Retired Workers
Retired workers must be guaranteed a decent living at union wage levels. We demand:
Immediate improvements in economic benefits and social services.
Free, quality, multi-lingual and multi-cultural medical and home health care.
Accessible transportation.
An end to all forced retirement.
Stop the segregation and isolation of senior citizens.
Defense of the Environment
The same corporate forces and economic system that exploit and brutalize the world's working class people are destroying the world's biosphere. These social policies and ecollogical destruction often overlap. Socialism is necessary to end the ecological destruction caused by capitalism. Our goal is a society that is in harmony with nature as it is in harmony with its own people.
We therefore favor:
Planning for urban and regional environment based on principles of sound ecosystems management.
Create public open spaces in all communities.
Tighter regulation of pesticides, herbicides, industrial wastes and genetically modified foods to protect human food, air and water, employees in the workplace, and species habitat. No release of genetically engineered or transgenic organisms into the wild. No patenting of life forms.
A multi-source energy system, development of solar technology and other renewable, non-polluting energy sources. Eliminate nuclear power plants. End fossil fuel dependence.
Public ownership of public utilities.
Protect species habitat such as old-growth forests to preserve biodiversity.
Massive development of free public transportation.
International trade agreements must guarantee the protection of the environment in all participating countries.
End environmental racism, including the immediate cessation of nuclear testing and toxic waste dumping on reservation lands, the disproportionate creation of landfills in poor communities of color and eliminate the mass development of maquiladora plants.
Transportation
Massive development of public transportation systems that are reliable, frequent, free or at nominal fares and environmentally sound.
Expand safe routes for foot and bicycle traffic.
Agriculture
We want an agricultural system that ensures enough food and other farm products to meet human needs, guarantees a high standard of living to farmers and farm workers, protects humans and the ecosystem from environmental degredation and encourages organic farming. To that end, we call for:
An end to subsidies and tax breaks for corporations.
Food distribution by farm and consumer cooperatives.
Extension of all labor rights to farm workers, including wage and hour regulations.
An end to cruel methods of animal husbandry.
No use of recominant bovine growth hormone (RBGH) in meat or dairy cattle.
No genetically engineered organisms in food production.
A ban on "terminator" seeds.
No export of chemicals banned in the U.S. or import of agricultural products treated with them.
Science and Technology
We need scientific and technological research to benefit ordinary people, not the capitalists.
Education
Education is critical to individual survival and civilized human values, but U.S. capitalism is dismantling public education. Inadequate and unequal funding of schools perpetuates racism, crime and inequality. We demand:
Integrated, democratically-run schools with up-to-date plant and equipment and smaller classes.
Teach the history of workers' struggles and labor's creation of society's wealth and progress.
Multi-lingual and multi-cultural education at all levels.
A federal law requiring and funding equal average per-pupil expenditures by every public school district, with extra funds for students with special needs such as disability or economic deprivation.
Tuition-free higher education available to all.
Restore cutbacks in public education and public library services.
No school voucher schemes.
Arts and Culture
Provide uncensored government funding for ordinary people to create and enjoy art.
Housing and Rent Control
We recognize the right of everybody to quality, secure housing. We demand:
Production and rehabilitation of non-profit, community-controlled housing through public financing with immediate emphasis on housing the homeless.
Rent and eviction control laws and collective bargaining for tenants.
Resident-controlled community renovation programs to create, not destroy, low- and moderate-income housing.
Enforce local affordable housing quotas.
Freedom, Justice and Crime
We call for the defense and extension of the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech, press, assembly and association, and the right to keep and bear arms for individual and collective defense. The ultimate guarantee of those rights is the organized strength of the working class.
Capitalism and poverty breed crime and repression. Working class people are the primary victims both of street crime and of police reaction to it. The bosses use laws against victimless activities, "legal" and illegal expansion of police powers, military and paramilitary occupation of poor and minority communities, and diversion of resources to police and jails, to keep workers intimidated and dependent. We demand:
Stop state-sponsored spying on and violence against progressive organizations.
Democratically-controlled police review boards with powers of subpoena and discipline.
Abolish the death penalty.
Repeal the Three Strikes law.
Stop trials and imprisonment of juveniles as adults.
Treatment of prisoners as human beings; rehabilitation, not vengeance.
Decriminalize victimless activities including drug use and consensual sex. Legalize marijuana. End the "war on drugs," which is primarily directed against poor and working-class people.
Stop unwarranted searches and seizures of persons and property. Restore constitutional rights.
Prosecute crimes of the wealthy and powerful against workers and the environment.
Freedom for all political prisoners.
Voting and Elections
Proportional representation to promote legislative representation of the wide variety of political viewpoints.
Enact instant runoff voting (IRV) to eliminate runoff elections and provide for genuine majority support for those elected.
Election should be by direct vote of the people. Eliminate the Electoral College.
Enforce and extend voting rights for people of color, non-English speakers, and homeless people.
Resident non-citizens should have the right to vote, particularly in local and school elections.
Free and equal access to radio and television for all candidates.
Health Care
We believe that access to quality medical and dental care is a basic human right. We stand for a democratically-controlled, publicly-funded health care system. We support health practices that emphasize education, prevention and nutrition. We demand:
Free, high-quality health care for everyone.
Eliminate for-profit health care.
Free immunization programs.
No private patents on drugs developed through publicly-funded research.
Price controls on drugs and medical technology.
Safe pre-natal care, including women's choice of birth alternatives.
More medical facilities to provide services and education in low-income neighborhoods and rural areas.
More substance abuse treatment and needle-exchange programs.
More research into diseases and disorders caused by man-made substances.
More community health care facilities.
Support non-standard proven methods.
Special attention to preventing epidemics of communicable diseases, such as AIDS.
Taxes
Public services and infrastructure have deteriorated as government has increasingly shifted the tax burden from corporations to workers. Our long-range goal is a socialist society without conventional taxes, with public services to be funded from the proceeds of social production. We demand:
Repeal Proposition 13. Tax property for profit, not property for personal use. Remove property taxes on modest owner-occupied homes.
Repeal the sales tax.
Include aggregate of real property and stocks, bonds, etc. in a steeply-graduated property tax.
Restore the renters' tax credit.
Double registration fees on luxury vehicles.
Tax unearned income at a higher rate than earned income.
Eliminate or reverse income tax on low- and moderate-income families.
Re-enact California's unitary tax on multi-national corporations.
Tax the business activities of churches on the same basis as other organizations.
Take the cap off social security taxes, make the rates progressive so burden falls on the wealthy.
Mass Media
Ownership of television and radio stations, print media, and other forms of communication has been increasingly concentrated into the irresponsible hands of fewer corporations, and any checks and balances previously available to the people have been eliminated.
We call for public control of the public airwaves.
We demand restoration of a strengthened Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Provision.
We oppose the legislated extinction of the VHF spectrum, which should be used for public monitoring of legislative bodies and for other civic purposes.
We defend the Internet from censors and commercial interests.
We call for enforcement of antitrust laws on media conglomerates.
We support new media for grassroots communication to enhance freedom of self-expression and information distribution.
Religion
We demand strict separation of religious and government institutions and activities.
(The Platform of the Peace and Freedom Party was adopted March 23, 2003, reaffirmed August 1, 2004, and revised May 21, 2006.)
We're in Deep Doo-Doo
The Nowhere Man
by William Rivers Pitt
Truthout, April 5, 2011
So, yeah, Obama is in. The President of the United States officially threw his hat into the 2012 election ring on Monday morning, and the nation reacted with a resounding, “Oh.”
What a mess.
It wasn’t even two and a half years ago. Can you believe it? Two and a half years ago, there was a detonation of optimism that echoed across the country once the returns were in on that November night. People took to the streets here in Boston, literally banging pots and pans together as they danced and shouted in celebration. The scene was repeated in city after city and town after town, and even the “mainstream” media gushed from election night to Inauguration Day about the spectacular moment in American history we were all witnessing together.
Hindsight, however, tells us today that much of that optimism was wildly misplaced. The long shadow of George W. Bush still hung low and dark over the land, as it does even now. That was part of it, of course, part of the sense of expiation and purgation so many felt once the deal went down; on that November night, the national nightmare of Mr. Bush’s presidency was writing its final pages, and then came January, and he was gone. Despite all the failures and disappointments that have since come, those were two very good days.
And there have been disappointments. A great, great many of them. The words we heard were beautiful back then, soaring and sure, and many believed. How could they not? Here was this new president who could sing the birds down from the trees, who was introduced to the country in 2004 by way of a convention keynote address that blew the roof off the joint. Some years later, along the jagged, wending path of a brutal primary campaign, candidate Obama was carried to the nomination by the power of his words, and yes, many believed, even in spite of themselves.
But then he won it all, and two and a half years later, many of his most ardent supporters now hear his words and taste ashes in their mouths. You campaign in poetry, someone once said, but you govern in prose. The poetry was magnificent. The prose, in far too many ways, has been dreck, and those who believed now find themselves more demoralized than they can easily describe.
He and his fellow Democrats all but folded on health care, leaving us with less than half a loaf. He backtracked on Guantanamo, and doubled down on Afghanistan. He promised to erase Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, and broke his oath shamelessly, to his party’s great lament in 2010. Wall Street stands unmolested at the center of his counsel, while Main Street withers on the vine. He is flipping missiles into Libya while flipping off the American people by racing to “compromise” with brigands and thieves on the matter of how many billions to cut. He has, to be sure, had his share of victories, but in so many critical ways, he has been the Nowhere Man, the absence of what was so seemingly present when he was elevated to his current station.
What galls the most, what infuriates and confounds, is the brazen clarity of the situation at hand. Mr. Obama has not been losing policy arguments to reasonable people. He has been losing policy arguments to people who are, in many instances, absolutely and unabashedly barking mad. He is losing policy arguments to people who sought elected office in government in order to denude and destroy that very government. Listen to them talk and the matter is plain: they got the job to destroy the job, and are so blinded by the fervor of their political catechism that they cannot be reasoned with under any circumstances. They are destroyers and usurpers, but Mr. Obama has time and again bared his neck to them, and we have all suffered with their sundry victories, and his sundry defeats.
They cannot be reasoned with, but can only be defeated, and after two and a half years, it is the President of the United States alone who appears to have not received the memo. Now he’s running for re-election – not that anyone suspected he would do otherwise – and the machinery of campaign war is grinding to life in Chicago and Washington DC. Last time around, Mr. Obama’s vast campaign war chest was filled with donations from millions of regular folks all across the country. The Obama campaign took money from the big boys, too; lots and lots of money. But what ultimately brought him to victory came from average Americans who could not afford to give but did. That, as much as anything else, was part of that sense of optimism felt by so many at the beginning.
Now?
Well, now is a different story. A great many of those who gave willingly the last time are two and a half years older today, two and a half years poorer, and two and a half years wiser. They will not be as quick to reach for their wallets and checkbooks when the piper calls them to campaign charity with his well-worn cadence. The Obama 2012 brain trust seems to know this, and are preparing a financial strategy far more dependent on big money than last time. They aim to raise a billion dollars this time. Thus, the political DNA of campaigner Obama and President Obama will even more closely resemble the CEOs and bankers that tore this nation to shreds and tatters.
The feeble fiction of the Democrats vs. Republicans paradigm has been falling to dust for a long time now, inexorably being replaced by a simple truth. There is but one paradigm in this reality, one core fact to be reckoned with: the struggle in America is between the Have’s and the Have Not’s, between towering wealth , towering greed and everyone else. It is about a class struggle that has been three centuries in the making, and even those who are today moderately comfortable will not be able to escape calamity. When it comes down, it will come down on all of us…all, of course, except the fortunate few who caused it all in the first place.
But who knows? Mr. Obama could choose to steer back into the wind, challenge his demented opposition with a will, and prevail in a way that inspires those who have waited all this time for the man they gave to and voted for to show up. The odds of re-election favor him in any case; it is hard to defeat an incumbent, and when considering the ludicrous carnival of nonsense that is the presumed Republican field, Mr. Obama’s chances only improve. In many battlefield states, demographics favor the president in ways the GOP is not prepared to deal with. The 2012 election campaign promises, above all else and with absolute certainty, to be one of the most deranged political affairs to be seen since time out of mind.
It is tempting to comfort oneself with the notion that there are worse things in the world than a second Obama term, and there is a fat, cynical dollop of truth in that. After all, given the array of challenges this administration has faced since taking office, it is daunting to imagine the sorry condition we would be in under a President McCain. Now imagine watching Vice President Michele Bachmann, tapped by the Republican nominee in two years to shore up the Tea Party vote, taking the oath a heartbeat shy of the biggest chair in the country. Think it can’t happen that way? Want to bet on it?
I don’t.
Two and a half years ago, it was all about hope and change. Remember that? I am, personally, waiting with bated breath for the next battery of slogans to be deployed by the Obama campaign. No, seriously, I am. Nowhere Man 2012: Because Everyone Else Is Worse. That’ll send them racing to the polls.
Yup. Here we go.
Again.
This entry was posted on Friday, April 8th, 2011 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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4 Responses to “The Nowhere Man: William Rivers Pitt’s Lament about the Disappearing Leadership of Barack Obama”
mczilla Says:
April 9th, 2011 at 10:41 am
“many believed. How could they not?”
Well, anyone who lived through the disappointment of the Clinton years as an adult should have at least been a little more circumspect. But the emotion of the moment almost always seems to trump reason in the clutch. No doubt Obama will steer back into the wind, but it will only be rhetorically, and he’ll return to the present course should he manage to be re-elected. And if he is actually so sure of Obama’s second term, why does Pitt offer the bet on Bachmann?
At least Nader is not being pilloried again for having the nerve to run.
Andrew Bard Schmookler Says:
April 9th, 2011 at 10:56 am
At least Nader is not being pilloried again for having the nerve to run.
Is Nader saying he’s going to run again? I’ll tell you, if Nader does run, and if his impact gives us another president from THIS Republican Party, I will be eager to pillory him.
Richard H. Randall Says:
April 9th, 2011 at 11:54 am
President Obama is a creature of the wealthy class and Wall Street. He doesn’t work for us, we the people.
I have been pondering the question of what concretely to do. I intend to be involved in a candidate’s run if and only if itis not Obama.
Perhaps this is too cynacal, but he is in a position of win-win. If he won, it would be his last 4 years, and so, he would likely continue to feather his nest with the lobbiests and GOP: if he lost, his friends might possibly hire him: probably he could get a job teaching, as he is so young.
Truly what a dissapointment.
Joan Kelly Says:
April 9th, 2011 at 2:59 pm
“I’ll tell you, if Nader does run, and if his impact gives us another president from THIS Republican Party, I will be eager to pillory him.” – ABS -
Evil grin – - – me, too, Andy.
“President Obama is a creature of the wealthy class and Wall Street. He doesn’t work for us, we the people.” – Richard H. Randall -
I disagree with you, Richard. He, for sure, didn’t come from wealth and as far as I can tell he cares deeply for the common welfare. I feel it’s more his attempt to compromise to end up on the right side for the “lesser among us” that has led to his more unpopular decisions.
The CEOs of GE, ExxonMobil, etc. are telling him they can’t increase employment if he increase their taxes, Petraeus is telling him he has to “Win” in Afghanistan, etc, ad vomitum. The voice of his Mom is telling him he has to prevent genocide in Libya. We have to remember this is still a “black” man in a “white” society. If you’ve read Dreams Of My Father, you’ll understand some of the dichotomies.
I write to him at whitehouse.gov frequently Frankly, I don’t think it does any good to bitch about anything unless you rage at the source. I feel he deserves to hear from us
by William Rivers Pitt
Truthout, April 5, 2011
So, yeah, Obama is in. The President of the United States officially threw his hat into the 2012 election ring on Monday morning, and the nation reacted with a resounding, “Oh.”
What a mess.
It wasn’t even two and a half years ago. Can you believe it? Two and a half years ago, there was a detonation of optimism that echoed across the country once the returns were in on that November night. People took to the streets here in Boston, literally banging pots and pans together as they danced and shouted in celebration. The scene was repeated in city after city and town after town, and even the “mainstream” media gushed from election night to Inauguration Day about the spectacular moment in American history we were all witnessing together.
Hindsight, however, tells us today that much of that optimism was wildly misplaced. The long shadow of George W. Bush still hung low and dark over the land, as it does even now. That was part of it, of course, part of the sense of expiation and purgation so many felt once the deal went down; on that November night, the national nightmare of Mr. Bush’s presidency was writing its final pages, and then came January, and he was gone. Despite all the failures and disappointments that have since come, those were two very good days.
And there have been disappointments. A great, great many of them. The words we heard were beautiful back then, soaring and sure, and many believed. How could they not? Here was this new president who could sing the birds down from the trees, who was introduced to the country in 2004 by way of a convention keynote address that blew the roof off the joint. Some years later, along the jagged, wending path of a brutal primary campaign, candidate Obama was carried to the nomination by the power of his words, and yes, many believed, even in spite of themselves.
But then he won it all, and two and a half years later, many of his most ardent supporters now hear his words and taste ashes in their mouths. You campaign in poetry, someone once said, but you govern in prose. The poetry was magnificent. The prose, in far too many ways, has been dreck, and those who believed now find themselves more demoralized than they can easily describe.
He and his fellow Democrats all but folded on health care, leaving us with less than half a loaf. He backtracked on Guantanamo, and doubled down on Afghanistan. He promised to erase Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, and broke his oath shamelessly, to his party’s great lament in 2010. Wall Street stands unmolested at the center of his counsel, while Main Street withers on the vine. He is flipping missiles into Libya while flipping off the American people by racing to “compromise” with brigands and thieves on the matter of how many billions to cut. He has, to be sure, had his share of victories, but in so many critical ways, he has been the Nowhere Man, the absence of what was so seemingly present when he was elevated to his current station.
What galls the most, what infuriates and confounds, is the brazen clarity of the situation at hand. Mr. Obama has not been losing policy arguments to reasonable people. He has been losing policy arguments to people who are, in many instances, absolutely and unabashedly barking mad. He is losing policy arguments to people who sought elected office in government in order to denude and destroy that very government. Listen to them talk and the matter is plain: they got the job to destroy the job, and are so blinded by the fervor of their political catechism that they cannot be reasoned with under any circumstances. They are destroyers and usurpers, but Mr. Obama has time and again bared his neck to them, and we have all suffered with their sundry victories, and his sundry defeats.
They cannot be reasoned with, but can only be defeated, and after two and a half years, it is the President of the United States alone who appears to have not received the memo. Now he’s running for re-election – not that anyone suspected he would do otherwise – and the machinery of campaign war is grinding to life in Chicago and Washington DC. Last time around, Mr. Obama’s vast campaign war chest was filled with donations from millions of regular folks all across the country. The Obama campaign took money from the big boys, too; lots and lots of money. But what ultimately brought him to victory came from average Americans who could not afford to give but did. That, as much as anything else, was part of that sense of optimism felt by so many at the beginning.
Now?
Well, now is a different story. A great many of those who gave willingly the last time are two and a half years older today, two and a half years poorer, and two and a half years wiser. They will not be as quick to reach for their wallets and checkbooks when the piper calls them to campaign charity with his well-worn cadence. The Obama 2012 brain trust seems to know this, and are preparing a financial strategy far more dependent on big money than last time. They aim to raise a billion dollars this time. Thus, the political DNA of campaigner Obama and President Obama will even more closely resemble the CEOs and bankers that tore this nation to shreds and tatters.
The feeble fiction of the Democrats vs. Republicans paradigm has been falling to dust for a long time now, inexorably being replaced by a simple truth. There is but one paradigm in this reality, one core fact to be reckoned with: the struggle in America is between the Have’s and the Have Not’s, between towering wealth , towering greed and everyone else. It is about a class struggle that has been three centuries in the making, and even those who are today moderately comfortable will not be able to escape calamity. When it comes down, it will come down on all of us…all, of course, except the fortunate few who caused it all in the first place.
But who knows? Mr. Obama could choose to steer back into the wind, challenge his demented opposition with a will, and prevail in a way that inspires those who have waited all this time for the man they gave to and voted for to show up. The odds of re-election favor him in any case; it is hard to defeat an incumbent, and when considering the ludicrous carnival of nonsense that is the presumed Republican field, Mr. Obama’s chances only improve. In many battlefield states, demographics favor the president in ways the GOP is not prepared to deal with. The 2012 election campaign promises, above all else and with absolute certainty, to be one of the most deranged political affairs to be seen since time out of mind.
It is tempting to comfort oneself with the notion that there are worse things in the world than a second Obama term, and there is a fat, cynical dollop of truth in that. After all, given the array of challenges this administration has faced since taking office, it is daunting to imagine the sorry condition we would be in under a President McCain. Now imagine watching Vice President Michele Bachmann, tapped by the Republican nominee in two years to shore up the Tea Party vote, taking the oath a heartbeat shy of the biggest chair in the country. Think it can’t happen that way? Want to bet on it?
I don’t.
Two and a half years ago, it was all about hope and change. Remember that? I am, personally, waiting with bated breath for the next battery of slogans to be deployed by the Obama campaign. No, seriously, I am. Nowhere Man 2012: Because Everyone Else Is Worse. That’ll send them racing to the polls.
Yup. Here we go.
Again.
This entry was posted on Friday, April 8th, 2011 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Print This Post
Email This Post
4 Responses to “The Nowhere Man: William Rivers Pitt’s Lament about the Disappearing Leadership of Barack Obama”
mczilla Says:
April 9th, 2011 at 10:41 am
“many believed. How could they not?”
Well, anyone who lived through the disappointment of the Clinton years as an adult should have at least been a little more circumspect. But the emotion of the moment almost always seems to trump reason in the clutch. No doubt Obama will steer back into the wind, but it will only be rhetorically, and he’ll return to the present course should he manage to be re-elected. And if he is actually so sure of Obama’s second term, why does Pitt offer the bet on Bachmann?
At least Nader is not being pilloried again for having the nerve to run.
Andrew Bard Schmookler Says:
April 9th, 2011 at 10:56 am
At least Nader is not being pilloried again for having the nerve to run.
Is Nader saying he’s going to run again? I’ll tell you, if Nader does run, and if his impact gives us another president from THIS Republican Party, I will be eager to pillory him.
Richard H. Randall Says:
April 9th, 2011 at 11:54 am
President Obama is a creature of the wealthy class and Wall Street. He doesn’t work for us, we the people.
I have been pondering the question of what concretely to do. I intend to be involved in a candidate’s run if and only if itis not Obama.
Perhaps this is too cynacal, but he is in a position of win-win. If he won, it would be his last 4 years, and so, he would likely continue to feather his nest with the lobbiests and GOP: if he lost, his friends might possibly hire him: probably he could get a job teaching, as he is so young.
Truly what a dissapointment.
Joan Kelly Says:
April 9th, 2011 at 2:59 pm
“I’ll tell you, if Nader does run, and if his impact gives us another president from THIS Republican Party, I will be eager to pillory him.” – ABS -
Evil grin – - – me, too, Andy.
“President Obama is a creature of the wealthy class and Wall Street. He doesn’t work for us, we the people.” – Richard H. Randall -
I disagree with you, Richard. He, for sure, didn’t come from wealth and as far as I can tell he cares deeply for the common welfare. I feel it’s more his attempt to compromise to end up on the right side for the “lesser among us” that has led to his more unpopular decisions.
The CEOs of GE, ExxonMobil, etc. are telling him they can’t increase employment if he increase their taxes, Petraeus is telling him he has to “Win” in Afghanistan, etc, ad vomitum. The voice of his Mom is telling him he has to prevent genocide in Libya. We have to remember this is still a “black” man in a “white” society. If you’ve read Dreams Of My Father, you’ll understand some of the dichotomies.
I write to him at whitehouse.gov frequently Frankly, I don’t think it does any good to bitch about anything unless you rage at the source. I feel he deserves to hear from us
Monday, March 28, 2011
PLAN B: Our Civilization IMPERILED
Time for Plan B: Our Civilization Is on the Edge of a Systemic Breakdown
Lester Brown talks about whether our civilization can survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states.
March 26, 2011 |
http://www.alternet.org/story/150385/time_for_plan_b%3A_our_civilization_is_on_the_edge_of_a_systemic_breakdown_?akid=6742.265841._VX8Qx&rd=1&t=5
"How many failing states before we have a failing global civilization?" asks environmental pioneer Lester Brown in Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, premiering March 30 on PBS as part of its continuing Journey to Planet Earth series. It's a Gordian knot of a question with no simple answer and nothing but complex, demanding solutions, fearsomely put forth as the fate of humanity totters in the balance.
Based on Brown's book of the same name, Plan B is likely the scariest horror film that was ever disguised as a documentary, despite its calm narration from superstar Matt Damon. That's because the acclaimed environmentalist has deeply studied the variety of environmental and geopolitical tipping points we are fast approaching, and found that we're headed for a seriously dark dystopia if we don't turn civilization as we know it around, and fast. A catastrophic confluence of food and water shortages, overpopulation and pollution, collapsed governments and communities and more natural disasters than Roland Emmerich can dream up await us on the other side of Plan A, which Brown calls "business of usual."
"Environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the planet is going to be around for some time to come," Brown told AlterNet by phone from his Washington D.C. office at the Earth Policy Institute, which he founded at the turn of the century after decades of public and private service in the name of sustainability. "The question is will civilization as we know it be around for some time to come? Can it survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states? These are the real threats to our security now, but we're not responding to them."
In a sense, we are without knowing it. Japan's bungled response to a mounting nuclear crisis, thanks to one of Earth’s most destabilizing earthquakes and tsunamis, has in a cosmological eyeblink reset the entire world's nuclear ambition. Uprisings in hotspots like Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and more, compounded by America's continuing quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, are squarely knitting together civilization's crappy experiments like preemptive war, biofuels and light-speed financial stratagems into one titanic mess that is demanding new theories of cleanup.
It's no longer intellectually feasible to consider any of these events as separate, because they, like the warming climate, are interconnected nightmares that are keeping us more awake than ever, whether we like it or not. And no matter how we spin them, Plan B argues, we're eventually all going to have to work together to survive what is without a doubt an existential crisis of historical proportions. Only the depth and vigor of our mutual efforts and understanding separate us and every other failed civilization in the planet's incomprehensibly expansive history.
But after 77 years spent on Earth, most of them trying to educate its inhabitants on the dangers of taking its astronomically singular bounty for granted, the soft-spoken Brown remains a cautious optimist. That's a comforting sign for those of us at our wits' end and wondering when the rest of civilization will get its ass in gear to forestall what passes for a collective execution.
"Change comes very quickly and unexpectedly sometimes," Brown said. "The question is whether we can turn things around quickly enough. But I don't think we have a lot of time. Time is our scarcest resource."
I picked Brown's deeply experienced brain on geopolitical and environmental change, Japan's nuclear crisis, China's powerhouse green economy, food and water scarcity, technological bandaids like desalination and lab-grown meat and much more. Taken together with Plan B's accessible yet apocalyptic programming, it points the way forward for a civilization on the edge of a systemic breakdown.
Lester Brown talks about whether our civilization can survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states.
March 26, 2011 |
http://www.alternet.org/story/150385/time_for_plan_b%3A_our_civilization_is_on_the_edge_of_a_systemic_breakdown_?akid=6742.265841._VX8Qx&rd=1&t=5
"How many failing states before we have a failing global civilization?" asks environmental pioneer Lester Brown in Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, premiering March 30 on PBS as part of its continuing Journey to Planet Earth series. It's a Gordian knot of a question with no simple answer and nothing but complex, demanding solutions, fearsomely put forth as the fate of humanity totters in the balance.
Based on Brown's book of the same name, Plan B is likely the scariest horror film that was ever disguised as a documentary, despite its calm narration from superstar Matt Damon. That's because the acclaimed environmentalist has deeply studied the variety of environmental and geopolitical tipping points we are fast approaching, and found that we're headed for a seriously dark dystopia if we don't turn civilization as we know it around, and fast. A catastrophic confluence of food and water shortages, overpopulation and pollution, collapsed governments and communities and more natural disasters than Roland Emmerich can dream up await us on the other side of Plan A, which Brown calls "business of usual."
"Environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the planet is going to be around for some time to come," Brown told AlterNet by phone from his Washington D.C. office at the Earth Policy Institute, which he founded at the turn of the century after decades of public and private service in the name of sustainability. "The question is will civilization as we know it be around for some time to come? Can it survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states? These are the real threats to our security now, but we're not responding to them."
In a sense, we are without knowing it. Japan's bungled response to a mounting nuclear crisis, thanks to one of Earth’s most destabilizing earthquakes and tsunamis, has in a cosmological eyeblink reset the entire world's nuclear ambition. Uprisings in hotspots like Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and more, compounded by America's continuing quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, are squarely knitting together civilization's crappy experiments like preemptive war, biofuels and light-speed financial stratagems into one titanic mess that is demanding new theories of cleanup.
It's no longer intellectually feasible to consider any of these events as separate, because they, like the warming climate, are interconnected nightmares that are keeping us more awake than ever, whether we like it or not. And no matter how we spin them, Plan B argues, we're eventually all going to have to work together to survive what is without a doubt an existential crisis of historical proportions. Only the depth and vigor of our mutual efforts and understanding separate us and every other failed civilization in the planet's incomprehensibly expansive history.
But after 77 years spent on Earth, most of them trying to educate its inhabitants on the dangers of taking its astronomically singular bounty for granted, the soft-spoken Brown remains a cautious optimist. That's a comforting sign for those of us at our wits' end and wondering when the rest of civilization will get its ass in gear to forestall what passes for a collective execution.
"Change comes very quickly and unexpectedly sometimes," Brown said. "The question is whether we can turn things around quickly enough. But I don't think we have a lot of time. Time is our scarcest resource."
I picked Brown's deeply experienced brain on geopolitical and environmental change, Japan's nuclear crisis, China's powerhouse green economy, food and water scarcity, technological bandaids like desalination and lab-grown meat and much more. Taken together with Plan B's accessible yet apocalyptic programming, it points the way forward for a civilization on the edge of a systemic breakdown.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Washington Post: Political Hypocracy and Corruption
WE NEED TO WRITE UP A SIMMILAR ARTICLE ON SB COE "BILL CIRONE AND HIS CRONIES"---The "RETIREMENT" of CASTON, SARVIS, McClish et al; the accolades and cover-up of criminals; the funding of croney consultants and the obscene benefit packages....
The Sad, Hypocritical Retirement of Evan Bayh
by Ezra Klein
Washington Post blog, March 15, 2011
Evan Bayh wasn’t a particularly distinguished senator. You’ll not find much major legislation with his name on it, or a particularly coherent philosophy laced through his votes. He was a popular Democrat in a red state, and most of his efforts seemed to be devoted to keeping it that way. In practice, that meant talking a lot about the deficit, taking occasional potshots as liberals and avoiding any overly courageous legislative stands. “An ordinary politician,” I wrote when he retired.
But he was a very interesting near-retiree. When he decided not to seek reelection in 2010, he published a precise and devastating broadside against the institution in which he and his father had served. Instead of merely condemning the bitter partisanship of the place, he proposed to close the loopholes that had enabled polarization to metastasize in paralysis. “Filibusters should require 35 senators to … make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory,” he wrote. And “the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60.” Strong stuff. He then went after money in politics, calling for “legislation to enhance disclosure requirements, require corporate donors to appear in the political ads they finance and prohibit government contractors or bailout beneficiaries from spending money on political campaigns,” not to mention “public matching funds for smaller contributions. Bayh had no record of leadership on any of these topics. But, in part for that reason, it was particularly potent to hear him speaking out on them.
An acknowledged moderate who’d taken on these crusades wouldn’t have just been a good senator. He’d have been a great one. This new incarnation of Evan Bayh, I wrote, should stay in the Senate, where he could do some good. But he didn’t want to stay in the Senate, he told me in subsequent interviews. He waxed rhapsodic over his time teaching at Indiana University’s Graduate School of Business. “It was real, it was tangible, and it was making a difference every day,” he said. He wanted that feeling again. He wanted to come home at night, he told me, and say, “Dear, do you know what we got done today? I’ve got this really bright kid in my class, and do you know what he asked me, and here’s what I told him, and I think I saw a little epiphany moment go off in his mind.” For a United States senator to explain his retirement by saying, “I want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” was the single most persuasive and devastating critique I’d ever seen of the Senate as an institution.
But Bayh did not return to Indiana to teach. He did not, as he said he was thinking of doing, join a foundation. Rather, he went to the massive law firm McGuire Woods. And who does McGuire Woods work for? “Principal clients served from our Washington office include national energy companies, foreign countries, international manufacturing companies, trade associations and local and national businesses,” reads the company’s Web site. He followed that up by signing on as a senior adviser to Apollo Management Group, a giant public-equity firm. And, finally, this week, he joined Fox News as a contributor. It’s as if he’s systematically ticking off every poison he identified in the body politic and rushing to dump more of it into the water supply.
The “corrosive system of campaign financing” that Bayh considered such a threat? He’s being paid by both McGuire Woods and Apollo Global Management to act as a corroding agent on their behalf. The “strident partisanship” and “unyielding ideology” he complained was ruining the Senate? At Fox News, he’ll be right there on set while it gets cooked up. His warning that “what is required from members of Congress and the public alike is a new spirit of devotion to the national welfare beyond party or self-interest” sounds, in retrospect, like a joke. Evan Bayh doing performance art as Evan Bayh. Exactly which of these new positions would Bayh say is against his self-interest, or in promotion of the general welfare?
I should say, for the record, that I got in touch with McGuire Woods to give Bayh an opportunity to comment, or offer an alternative interpretation of his career decisions. I didn’t hear from them, but I got a call back from a PR person at Fox News. “I’m going to decline the interview for Mr. Bayh,” the flack said. And I guess I’m not surprised: It’s one thing to take the positions Bayh took without much of a record on them. It’s a whole other to try to sustain them when his paychecks are being signed by people who profit from the very forces he lamented.
In our last interview, Bayh complained of the poor opinion the public had of him and his colleagues. “They look at us like we’re worse than used-car salesmen.” Yes. They do. And this is why.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 26th, 2011 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
“The Sad, Hypocritical Retirement of Evan Bayh: Ezra Klein”
Prof. Duane Whittier Says:
March 26th, 2011 at 6:28 pm
A most insightful article here. Well worth reading. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
sharon kerley Says:
March 27th, 2011 at 2:56 am
It is so sad when we really find out that we are not the country we thought we were. Who does really run our country, it becomes more and more evident that there are people behind the scene who run the show. The book that really showed the truth was Confessions of an economic hit man.
I had always thought that we were the best, we sent food, missionaries, clothes etc. Then I find out that what we really were doing is gettin other countries tied up with interrest payments which went or goes to European Bankers. Do we even have an honest upright person to be our next president????The Haiti situation, and also the New Orleans situation only gives u s a glimpse of the magnitude of it all. There is a lot more.
k8longstory Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
March 27th, 2011 at 8:17 am
“Truth Will Out, Justice Prevails, and Love Conquers All in an Eternal Conflict against Humorless Arrogance, Illusory Prestige, Brute Force and Primeval Stupidity.” Santa Barbara is the Perfect Storm of Injustice; “WE, the People” are calling for PRACTICAL WISDOM, COMPASSIONATE COMMUNITY and RESTORATIVE JUSTICE—and we’re demanding a Federal Grand Jury to EXPOSE corruption, incarcerate the Education-Politico-Industrial Complex (EPIC)—Good Ol’ Boys SBCOE Bill Cirone and His Cronies. It is up to US to RESTORE JUSTICE and DEMOCRACY to our schools and communities.; social change is messy but inevitable….
« Secret Fears of the Super-Rich: Graeme Wood in the Atlantic (Part Two)The War on Elizabeth Warren: Krugman’s Powerful Indictment
The Sad, Hypocritical Retirement of Evan Bayh
by Ezra Klein
Washington Post blog, March 15, 2011
Evan Bayh wasn’t a particularly distinguished senator. You’ll not find much major legislation with his name on it, or a particularly coherent philosophy laced through his votes. He was a popular Democrat in a red state, and most of his efforts seemed to be devoted to keeping it that way. In practice, that meant talking a lot about the deficit, taking occasional potshots as liberals and avoiding any overly courageous legislative stands. “An ordinary politician,” I wrote when he retired.
But he was a very interesting near-retiree. When he decided not to seek reelection in 2010, he published a precise and devastating broadside against the institution in which he and his father had served. Instead of merely condemning the bitter partisanship of the place, he proposed to close the loopholes that had enabled polarization to metastasize in paralysis. “Filibusters should require 35 senators to … make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory,” he wrote. And “the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60.” Strong stuff. He then went after money in politics, calling for “legislation to enhance disclosure requirements, require corporate donors to appear in the political ads they finance and prohibit government contractors or bailout beneficiaries from spending money on political campaigns,” not to mention “public matching funds for smaller contributions. Bayh had no record of leadership on any of these topics. But, in part for that reason, it was particularly potent to hear him speaking out on them.
An acknowledged moderate who’d taken on these crusades wouldn’t have just been a good senator. He’d have been a great one. This new incarnation of Evan Bayh, I wrote, should stay in the Senate, where he could do some good. But he didn’t want to stay in the Senate, he told me in subsequent interviews. He waxed rhapsodic over his time teaching at Indiana University’s Graduate School of Business. “It was real, it was tangible, and it was making a difference every day,” he said. He wanted that feeling again. He wanted to come home at night, he told me, and say, “Dear, do you know what we got done today? I’ve got this really bright kid in my class, and do you know what he asked me, and here’s what I told him, and I think I saw a little epiphany moment go off in his mind.” For a United States senator to explain his retirement by saying, “I want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” was the single most persuasive and devastating critique I’d ever seen of the Senate as an institution.
But Bayh did not return to Indiana to teach. He did not, as he said he was thinking of doing, join a foundation. Rather, he went to the massive law firm McGuire Woods. And who does McGuire Woods work for? “Principal clients served from our Washington office include national energy companies, foreign countries, international manufacturing companies, trade associations and local and national businesses,” reads the company’s Web site. He followed that up by signing on as a senior adviser to Apollo Management Group, a giant public-equity firm. And, finally, this week, he joined Fox News as a contributor. It’s as if he’s systematically ticking off every poison he identified in the body politic and rushing to dump more of it into the water supply.
The “corrosive system of campaign financing” that Bayh considered such a threat? He’s being paid by both McGuire Woods and Apollo Global Management to act as a corroding agent on their behalf. The “strident partisanship” and “unyielding ideology” he complained was ruining the Senate? At Fox News, he’ll be right there on set while it gets cooked up. His warning that “what is required from members of Congress and the public alike is a new spirit of devotion to the national welfare beyond party or self-interest” sounds, in retrospect, like a joke. Evan Bayh doing performance art as Evan Bayh. Exactly which of these new positions would Bayh say is against his self-interest, or in promotion of the general welfare?
I should say, for the record, that I got in touch with McGuire Woods to give Bayh an opportunity to comment, or offer an alternative interpretation of his career decisions. I didn’t hear from them, but I got a call back from a PR person at Fox News. “I’m going to decline the interview for Mr. Bayh,” the flack said. And I guess I’m not surprised: It’s one thing to take the positions Bayh took without much of a record on them. It’s a whole other to try to sustain them when his paychecks are being signed by people who profit from the very forces he lamented.
In our last interview, Bayh complained of the poor opinion the public had of him and his colleagues. “They look at us like we’re worse than used-car salesmen.” Yes. They do. And this is why.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 26th, 2011 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
“The Sad, Hypocritical Retirement of Evan Bayh: Ezra Klein”
Prof. Duane Whittier Says:
March 26th, 2011 at 6:28 pm
A most insightful article here. Well worth reading. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
sharon kerley Says:
March 27th, 2011 at 2:56 am
It is so sad when we really find out that we are not the country we thought we were. Who does really run our country, it becomes more and more evident that there are people behind the scene who run the show. The book that really showed the truth was Confessions of an economic hit man.
I had always thought that we were the best, we sent food, missionaries, clothes etc. Then I find out that what we really were doing is gettin other countries tied up with interrest payments which went or goes to European Bankers. Do we even have an honest upright person to be our next president????The Haiti situation, and also the New Orleans situation only gives u s a glimpse of the magnitude of it all. There is a lot more.
k8longstory Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
March 27th, 2011 at 8:17 am
“Truth Will Out, Justice Prevails, and Love Conquers All in an Eternal Conflict against Humorless Arrogance, Illusory Prestige, Brute Force and Primeval Stupidity.” Santa Barbara is the Perfect Storm of Injustice; “WE, the People” are calling for PRACTICAL WISDOM, COMPASSIONATE COMMUNITY and RESTORATIVE JUSTICE—and we’re demanding a Federal Grand Jury to EXPOSE corruption, incarcerate the Education-Politico-Industrial Complex (EPIC)—Good Ol’ Boys SBCOE Bill Cirone and His Cronies. It is up to US to RESTORE JUSTICE and DEMOCRACY to our schools and communities.; social change is messy but inevitable….
« Secret Fears of the Super-Rich: Graeme Wood in the Atlantic (Part Two)The War on Elizabeth Warren: Krugman’s Powerful Indictment
Monday, March 21, 2011
The Age of Activism
Published on Thursday, March 17, 2011 by Foreign Policy In Focus
The Age of Activism
by John Feffer
The world is convulsed in protest. In recent months, people have filled the streets in the Middle East, the Balkans, Africa, and many parts of the United States. Their targets are local: autocratic leaders, corrupt politicians, and dismal economies. They're not performing acts of global solidarity. Nor has there been an outbreak of some protest virus. These demonstrations are responding to specific conditions. Tunisia isn't Bahrain. Croatia isn't Burkina Faso. Madison, Wisconsin isn't Frankfort, Kentucky.
Yet, I am an inveterate lumper – and only a half-hearted splitter – so I feel compelled to connect the dots between these disparate events in an attempt to delineate our era, to name our moment. In four magisterial works, the historian Eric Hobsbawm divided 200 years of modern history into the Age of Empire (1789-1848), the Age of Revolution (1848-1875), the Age of Capital (1875-1914), and the Age of Extremes (1914-1991). The period after 1992 so far remains nameless.
Let me rashly and prematurely propose a name for our era: the Age of Activism. Here’s a preliminary sketch for a history of the age in which we are currently immersed, as well as a diagnosis of where this activism is heading.
In the early 1990s, the decay of Cold War structures that kept the Age of Extremes in place gave rise to new possibilities for national transformations in Eastern Europe, South Africa, and Latin America as well as activism on a regional and global level. A Europe-wide movement came together to support a united, peaceful, and Green continent. Activists launched similar efforts in Asia, North Africa, and Latin America. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies began to construct a "new world order" based on the expansion of multilateral and bilateral military alliances, the free flow of capital, and the management of the new global economy by a trio of organizations (World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization).
The fall of the Berlin Wall, in other words, was to lead to the fall of all the smaller walls that prevented the free flow of goods, investments, and armaments. But this free flow of trade threatened to increase both global inequality and the divide between rich and poor within countries. To fight this vision of world order, a new anti-globalization movement emerged, breaking into the headlines at the World Trade Organization meeting in the legendary Battle of Seattle of 1999. Throwing sand into the gears of free trade and throwing into question the very foundations of global governance, the movement seemed to gather irreversible momentum in 2001. The first World Social Forum brought activists of all stripes to Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2001. In April, protesters blocked the Free Trade Area of the Americas at the third Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. The preparations to gather in Barcelona in June scared the World Bank into canceling its meeting. The next month, thousands descended on Genoa to protest the G8 meeting.
Everything was building toward September 30, 2001. Activists were planning a giant demonstration with 150,000 people protesting the IMF and World Bank annual meetings. "The IMF and World Bank had rented miles of chain link fence and were planning to fence off dozens of city blocks," recalls John Cavanagh, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies. "It was going to be the biggest global justice demonstration to date."
And then came 9/11. And suddenly talk of war eclipsed talk of economics. Activists turned their attention to reining in U.S. foreign and military policy. On February 13, 2003, the largest protests in world history took place around the world in an attempt to forestall the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The effort failed, but it was an important step in the development of global civil society. Governments had failed to outlaw war in the infamous Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928. Citizens now stepped in, attempting to put this renunciation of aggressive war into practice.
After eight years of failed policies, the neoconservatives no longer run the show. Responding to pressure from the peace movement, the Obama administration has put a timetable on what had once been wars without end in Afghanistan and Iraq (though the drone war continues unabated in Pakistan and elsewhere). The effort to create large multilateral trade agreements through the World Trade Organization has foundered (thought bilateral treaties have taken their place). It might then be said that activists have scored victories, albeit qualified ones, in the first major engagements of the Age of Activism.
One vector of activism has targeted global institutions (WTO) and senseless bloodshed (the Iraq War). A second vector that included the revolutions of the first decade of the 21st century – Rose (Georgia), Orange (Ukraine), Cedar (Lebanon), Tulip (Kyrgyzstan), Green (Iran) – has focused on national political elites. The current convulsions in the Middle East and elsewhere on the globe are mostly found at the confluence of these two vectors.
To explain this confluence, let's first look at three conventional explanations for the current wave of discontent. According to one school of thought, the protests can ultimately be traced back to economic crisis. Rising food prices caused considerable discontent in Egypt. Limited economic opportunities created enormous frustration in Tunisia. Austerity measures in Greece brought out hundreds of thousands of protestors in a 24-hour strike on February 23. "With youth unemployment hitting 35 percent, young people in Greece see a bleak, jobless future," writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Kia Mistilis in The Battle For Greece. "Greeks say a mass exodus is looming, similar to the period following World War II." Economic downturns were also partially responsible for the rise of Solidarity in Poland in 1980 and the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 in China. Sociologists call this failure of governments to deliver the promised goods a "legitimation crisis."
A second explanation focuses on impunity. Protesters are incensed at the corruption of their ruling elites. In Croatia, where protests have nearly paralyzed the country over the last two weeks, "protesters have focused on the lavish lifestyles of many of Croatia’s politicians," writes FPIF contributor Sabrina Perić in Days of Rage in Croatia. "The discovery last week that former Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader received a commission of 3.5 million Croatian kuna in negotiations with the Austrian Hypo Bank has served to consolidate the loose alliances amongst protesters created via newspaper websites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, talk on the streets, and phone calls between family members." In China, meanwhile, apartment owners are rising up against the management in their buildings in an effort to create democracy on the ground floor. "This is the same class that occupied Tahrir Square and pushed out Hosni Mubarak, the first generation to have the Internet and the first to think about buying a home, however small," writes Doug Saunders in The Globe and Mail.
Finally, a third theory attributes the spread of discontent to the multiplier effect of new technologies. Photocopiers helped spread dissident ideas in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. Faxes were a key part of the Chinese democracy efforts in 1989. And now Twitter and Facebook serve to connect the likeminded – those who want to ogle silly kitty pictures as well as those who want to bring down governments.
But here's another way to look at the current wave of activism that goes beyond economics, transparency, and technology. The fundamental issue is the nature of the state.
In the Age of Activism, protesters aren’t venting rage just at authoritarian governments, like those of Egypt and Tunisia. They’ve gone into the streets against democratic governments in Croatia and Greece and Wisconsin. They protested the Islamic republic of Iran. They’re organizing, if only indirectly, against China's communist government. The modern state has proven woefully ill-suited for dealing with the challenges of the international economy, the worsening environment, or the aspirations of rising classes. The state is letting us down. And we're beginning to sense that a mere rotation of elites, through election or selection, isn't good enough.
Neoliberalism – the creation of a borderless global economy – was one response to the failure of the state to rise to these challenges. Another response was neoconservatism – a last-gasp effort of the United States to retain global power by force. The anti-globalization and anti-war movements have tackled each in turn. The current wave of activism, on the other hand, challenges the state as a vehicle for the enrichment of elites at the expense of the common good – at the local, national, and global levels.
The Age of Activism isn't, of course, all about progressives. There have been tea party activists, radical Islamists, European racists, and ugly populists of all hues. They also use the Internet, dislike economic austerity, and rage against corrupt elites. In Pakistan, supporters of the country’s blasphemy laws have already claimed two victims, Governor Salman Taseer and Christian politician Shahbaz Bhatti. "More troubling than the murders is the soft support for – if not outright approval of – the law among the Pakistani public," writes FPIF contributor M. Junaid Levesque-Alam in How to Prevent Pakistani Anarchy. "Lawyers, once hailed by Western media as heroes of Pakistani liberalism, raucously supported the alleged murderer of Taseer."
We can imagine more democratic forms of governance at the global level. Activists are championing sustainability at the local level through community economics. But the real struggle in the Age of Activism is over that middle term, the state. In our era, a laissez-faire state cannot provide justice for the disenfranchised or tackle the major threats of climate change and nuclear proliferation. And our welfare states struggle to deal with the scarcity imposed by ecological and economic limits. We must conjure a different kind of state, which intervenes just enough to subordinate the military and the corporation on behalf of the common good. It must adhere to the principle of subsidiarity by which it performs only those tasks that can't be done effectively at a more local level. And it must be thoroughly transparent to reduce corruption to minimal levels. This is what activists are fighting for in Egypt, in Croatia, in the peace movement, and the anti-globalization movement.
We must fight hard in our Age of Activism to construct this new political entity: the activist state. This is, literally, a do-or-die situation. If we fail, we will slip, inexorably, into an Age of Apocalypse.
© 2011 Foreign Policy in Focus
John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories, 2003) among other books.
The Age of Activism
by John Feffer
The world is convulsed in protest. In recent months, people have filled the streets in the Middle East, the Balkans, Africa, and many parts of the United States. Their targets are local: autocratic leaders, corrupt politicians, and dismal economies. They're not performing acts of global solidarity. Nor has there been an outbreak of some protest virus. These demonstrations are responding to specific conditions. Tunisia isn't Bahrain. Croatia isn't Burkina Faso. Madison, Wisconsin isn't Frankfort, Kentucky.
Yet, I am an inveterate lumper – and only a half-hearted splitter – so I feel compelled to connect the dots between these disparate events in an attempt to delineate our era, to name our moment. In four magisterial works, the historian Eric Hobsbawm divided 200 years of modern history into the Age of Empire (1789-1848), the Age of Revolution (1848-1875), the Age of Capital (1875-1914), and the Age of Extremes (1914-1991). The period after 1992 so far remains nameless.
Let me rashly and prematurely propose a name for our era: the Age of Activism. Here’s a preliminary sketch for a history of the age in which we are currently immersed, as well as a diagnosis of where this activism is heading.
In the early 1990s, the decay of Cold War structures that kept the Age of Extremes in place gave rise to new possibilities for national transformations in Eastern Europe, South Africa, and Latin America as well as activism on a regional and global level. A Europe-wide movement came together to support a united, peaceful, and Green continent. Activists launched similar efforts in Asia, North Africa, and Latin America. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies began to construct a "new world order" based on the expansion of multilateral and bilateral military alliances, the free flow of capital, and the management of the new global economy by a trio of organizations (World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization).
The fall of the Berlin Wall, in other words, was to lead to the fall of all the smaller walls that prevented the free flow of goods, investments, and armaments. But this free flow of trade threatened to increase both global inequality and the divide between rich and poor within countries. To fight this vision of world order, a new anti-globalization movement emerged, breaking into the headlines at the World Trade Organization meeting in the legendary Battle of Seattle of 1999. Throwing sand into the gears of free trade and throwing into question the very foundations of global governance, the movement seemed to gather irreversible momentum in 2001. The first World Social Forum brought activists of all stripes to Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2001. In April, protesters blocked the Free Trade Area of the Americas at the third Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. The preparations to gather in Barcelona in June scared the World Bank into canceling its meeting. The next month, thousands descended on Genoa to protest the G8 meeting.
Everything was building toward September 30, 2001. Activists were planning a giant demonstration with 150,000 people protesting the IMF and World Bank annual meetings. "The IMF and World Bank had rented miles of chain link fence and were planning to fence off dozens of city blocks," recalls John Cavanagh, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies. "It was going to be the biggest global justice demonstration to date."
And then came 9/11. And suddenly talk of war eclipsed talk of economics. Activists turned their attention to reining in U.S. foreign and military policy. On February 13, 2003, the largest protests in world history took place around the world in an attempt to forestall the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The effort failed, but it was an important step in the development of global civil society. Governments had failed to outlaw war in the infamous Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928. Citizens now stepped in, attempting to put this renunciation of aggressive war into practice.
After eight years of failed policies, the neoconservatives no longer run the show. Responding to pressure from the peace movement, the Obama administration has put a timetable on what had once been wars without end in Afghanistan and Iraq (though the drone war continues unabated in Pakistan and elsewhere). The effort to create large multilateral trade agreements through the World Trade Organization has foundered (thought bilateral treaties have taken their place). It might then be said that activists have scored victories, albeit qualified ones, in the first major engagements of the Age of Activism.
One vector of activism has targeted global institutions (WTO) and senseless bloodshed (the Iraq War). A second vector that included the revolutions of the first decade of the 21st century – Rose (Georgia), Orange (Ukraine), Cedar (Lebanon), Tulip (Kyrgyzstan), Green (Iran) – has focused on national political elites. The current convulsions in the Middle East and elsewhere on the globe are mostly found at the confluence of these two vectors.
To explain this confluence, let's first look at three conventional explanations for the current wave of discontent. According to one school of thought, the protests can ultimately be traced back to economic crisis. Rising food prices caused considerable discontent in Egypt. Limited economic opportunities created enormous frustration in Tunisia. Austerity measures in Greece brought out hundreds of thousands of protestors in a 24-hour strike on February 23. "With youth unemployment hitting 35 percent, young people in Greece see a bleak, jobless future," writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Kia Mistilis in The Battle For Greece. "Greeks say a mass exodus is looming, similar to the period following World War II." Economic downturns were also partially responsible for the rise of Solidarity in Poland in 1980 and the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 in China. Sociologists call this failure of governments to deliver the promised goods a "legitimation crisis."
A second explanation focuses on impunity. Protesters are incensed at the corruption of their ruling elites. In Croatia, where protests have nearly paralyzed the country over the last two weeks, "protesters have focused on the lavish lifestyles of many of Croatia’s politicians," writes FPIF contributor Sabrina Perić in Days of Rage in Croatia. "The discovery last week that former Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader received a commission of 3.5 million Croatian kuna in negotiations with the Austrian Hypo Bank has served to consolidate the loose alliances amongst protesters created via newspaper websites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, talk on the streets, and phone calls between family members." In China, meanwhile, apartment owners are rising up against the management in their buildings in an effort to create democracy on the ground floor. "This is the same class that occupied Tahrir Square and pushed out Hosni Mubarak, the first generation to have the Internet and the first to think about buying a home, however small," writes Doug Saunders in The Globe and Mail.
Finally, a third theory attributes the spread of discontent to the multiplier effect of new technologies. Photocopiers helped spread dissident ideas in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. Faxes were a key part of the Chinese democracy efforts in 1989. And now Twitter and Facebook serve to connect the likeminded – those who want to ogle silly kitty pictures as well as those who want to bring down governments.
But here's another way to look at the current wave of activism that goes beyond economics, transparency, and technology. The fundamental issue is the nature of the state.
In the Age of Activism, protesters aren’t venting rage just at authoritarian governments, like those of Egypt and Tunisia. They’ve gone into the streets against democratic governments in Croatia and Greece and Wisconsin. They protested the Islamic republic of Iran. They’re organizing, if only indirectly, against China's communist government. The modern state has proven woefully ill-suited for dealing with the challenges of the international economy, the worsening environment, or the aspirations of rising classes. The state is letting us down. And we're beginning to sense that a mere rotation of elites, through election or selection, isn't good enough.
Neoliberalism – the creation of a borderless global economy – was one response to the failure of the state to rise to these challenges. Another response was neoconservatism – a last-gasp effort of the United States to retain global power by force. The anti-globalization and anti-war movements have tackled each in turn. The current wave of activism, on the other hand, challenges the state as a vehicle for the enrichment of elites at the expense of the common good – at the local, national, and global levels.
The Age of Activism isn't, of course, all about progressives. There have been tea party activists, radical Islamists, European racists, and ugly populists of all hues. They also use the Internet, dislike economic austerity, and rage against corrupt elites. In Pakistan, supporters of the country’s blasphemy laws have already claimed two victims, Governor Salman Taseer and Christian politician Shahbaz Bhatti. "More troubling than the murders is the soft support for – if not outright approval of – the law among the Pakistani public," writes FPIF contributor M. Junaid Levesque-Alam in How to Prevent Pakistani Anarchy. "Lawyers, once hailed by Western media as heroes of Pakistani liberalism, raucously supported the alleged murderer of Taseer."
We can imagine more democratic forms of governance at the global level. Activists are championing sustainability at the local level through community economics. But the real struggle in the Age of Activism is over that middle term, the state. In our era, a laissez-faire state cannot provide justice for the disenfranchised or tackle the major threats of climate change and nuclear proliferation. And our welfare states struggle to deal with the scarcity imposed by ecological and economic limits. We must conjure a different kind of state, which intervenes just enough to subordinate the military and the corporation on behalf of the common good. It must adhere to the principle of subsidiarity by which it performs only those tasks that can't be done effectively at a more local level. And it must be thoroughly transparent to reduce corruption to minimal levels. This is what activists are fighting for in Egypt, in Croatia, in the peace movement, and the anti-globalization movement.
We must fight hard in our Age of Activism to construct this new political entity: the activist state. This is, literally, a do-or-die situation. If we fail, we will slip, inexorably, into an Age of Apocalypse.
© 2011 Foreign Policy in Focus
John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories, 2003) among other books.
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