Victory at Standing Rock

Hola Everybody,
Whew! Yesterday’s victory over the Dakota Access pipeline was a breath of fresh air. And yeah, people, we know that this is a temporary setback to corporates and that the struggle continues -- we don’t need you to remind us, sparky.

Fascism and Resistance

Fascism should be more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
 -- Giovanni Gentile

Let me just state at the beginning that … No! The struggle that got the U.S. federal government to decide not issue the permit necessary for continuing construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, is not an example of working within the system to create change. Our First Nation brothers and sister sacrificed and were ignored and beaten, tortured, and arrested for their stance. STFU with that bullshit.

It amazes me to no end to continue to hear (without challenge from all forms of media) the ridiculous assumption that we should continue to be subservient to and provide mind-boggling tax breaks for corporate elites (welfare for the rich). Even more confounding is the fact that a significant (mostly white) section of the United States electorate will vote against their economic interests. The Dakota Access Pipeline is a prime example of corporate welfare.

However, it shouldn’t be so confounding. We are there -- we are a quasi-fascist state. You might say I am being dramatic, or that I have lost my bearings and I would respond that you’ve had your head stuck in the sand too long. Take the blinders off for a moment and let’s look at the state of our affairs for a moment. Pretend this isn’t “America” and you tell me if I’m off… 

First, let me establish, and I think most sane people will agree, that corporations today wield an enormous amount of influence over our government. It’s evident in the way elections are run and how our economic and social policies are framed and created. During the election, outside of Bernie Sanders, who was completely blacked out of the mainstream media, no one was talking about a rigged economy or inequality. Poverty and the crisis of man-made catastrophic climate change, was not mentioned at all during the presidential debates. In fact, a climate change denier is now the president -elect. Bankruptcy laws were written by credit card companies, signed into law as is. 

Corporations influence our environmental policies for the most part as evidenced by resistance movements against fracking and oil pipelines. The US spends more on its military than the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined. This is a social welfare policy that results in billions of profits for corporations. The list goes on. Everywhere we look today, we see the handiwork of corporations, of the mindset of profits before people.

That is not democracy. We are not a democracy. We are not what we have been conditioned to believe all these years.

Franklin Delano’s Roosevelt’s administration came to power in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. While he couldn’t know he was going to fight a war in Europe, he did know and planned to fight a war in the US -- a war on what he called the “economic royalists.” FDR, a member of the economic elite, was also fearful of the rise of socialism as people who could not afford to eat were turning to other forms of governance for answers to their hunger. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in 1936, Roosevelt uttered the following words:

Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history. This is fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers; to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776 - an American way of life.

That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776, we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy - from the eighteenth-century royalists who held special privileges from the crown… 

And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Of course, when FDR yelled “freedom,” he meant freedom for white men. And when he spoke of the power of the people to decide their own destinies, he wasn’t really thinking about people of color. And when he stated the death of tyranny, he did so while ignoring centuries of state-sponsored tyranny against blacks and First Nation people. Still, he had his finger on the pulse of the intellectual revolt that was occurring throughout the land. More… 

Since that struggle, however, man’s inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution -- all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital -- all undreamed of by the Fathers -- the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small-businessmen and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

I encourage you to read the speech in full (here) because FDR’s speech is as relevant today as it was then. We have come full circle where the power of the corporations -- of FDR’s “economic royalists” -- has eclipsed the power of government “by and for the people.”

So when you hear ridiculous talk about giving tax breaks to the wealthy and how it is in our best interests to cede our hard-earned money and our power to those interests, raise your head from the sand and dare to speak truth to power.

If you don’t, who will? That’s why today, I hail our First Nation brothers and sisters for their bravery, foresight, and sacrifice in the face of the brutality and the power of the moneyed elite. Theirs is the example we must follow. Shit, if the election of Trump won’t get the masses of their asses, I don’t think anything will.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

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Winter in America

Hola mi Gente,

I am a contrarian by nature and sometimes there is a professional price to pay for that…

* * *

 

A New Morning

… I open my eyes
still
I am living
at the center
of a wound still fresh.
-- Octavio Paz, Dawn

Since 2009, 95% of income gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the top 1% of the earning population. This “New Economy,” namely the inequality people of color have experienced for centuries, whites experience as solitary and alienated individuals. Chris Rock’s observation that a white person would never trade skins with a black person has some merit, and truth be told various groups of white Americans might feel they belong, that there is a system that looks out for them. However, today more than ever, individually they suffer the stings of corporate indifference just like anyone else (almost).

A white man today might identify with a white, male, Christian president, for example (though that has not been the reality for some time now), but what value does that identification have when you are on the unemployment line or when your wife cleans out your savings accounts and leaves you?

Every U.S. citizen is essentially a unit of labor. This labor is owned by corporations. Each individual may dispose of his or her labor as he or she wishes, but ultimately the employer owes the laborer nothing. In a very real way, this fact can potentially unite the historical experience of people of color and the new day dawning on the rest of our nation. This might be a new day, but it is not necessarily a good new day. Or, as Gil Scott-Heron said, it’s Winter in America. Awakening to the political fact that you are an economic slave can bring us together, but we are pitted against one another. Even poor or oppressed whites can look further down and find (false) refuge in the knowledge that the faces at the bottom of the well are mostly black and brown.

I am attempting to understand, by looking at inequality, the problems that confront the vast majority in America. I want to understand how we can free ourselves from the chains that bind us together in this dysfunctional and horrific dance of death and hatred. While these chains are more easily recognized in the experience of people of color, they are also the same chains that shackle us all.

Some of us are looking at social change in fear. Some view the reality of a black president as a threat somehow. Others see a Latina Supreme Court justice and fear that their freedoms will be taken away. Still others see the decreasing power of religious dogma and seethe with self-righteous indignation and hatred. It is an irrational fear with far-reaching potentially catastrophic consequences. It compels some of us to kill and maim.

Today, I am not looking to advance a particular dogma or socio-political agenda. I am not looking to socialist, Marxist, or capitalistic experiments as an answer to our social and economic problems. Rather, I want to look directly into the maws of capitalism to see if there’s a way to survive the onslaught.

I like to think that I -- all of us, actually -- stand at the intersection of knowledge and action. Rebellion is the primary movement of knowledge. Violence and oppression rob us of the ability to understand. Without understanding, there can be no growth, no evolution, no recognition of truth, and no tomorrow -- only an endless reverberation of gray todays.

If we refuse to look at and understand the restraints placed on all of us by history, economics, self-image, the media, politics, and the misuse of technology, we will never be free. The alternative to knowledge and action is ignorance and enslavement. The shackles I speak of threaten to enslave everyone in America and therefore, concern us all. When the logical consequence of a popular and mass ideology is murder and oppression, we are in a crisis that may enable us to become the first species to make themselves extinct.

My name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization... 

Politics: Make it Personal

Hola mi Gente...

Getting political today! This is what I was thinking all day yesterday as I toured Elmira Correctional Facility and spoke to the men incarcerated there...

I will be in prison all day today. At the very least, I can be a witness and, working together with the voices of the incarcerated, we can bring a light to this dark underbelly of “America.”

* * *

Politics

Contrary to what you may believe, politics is not something you sometimes watch on TV in-between the tons of garbage reality shows many consume so blindly. Politics impacts your  personal life more than any dumb twunt that gets the date or the chance to debase him or herself for our cynical pleasure. Therefore, if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to implement policies that harm you or those you love, take it personally.

Get Angry. 

The “Machinery of Justice” will not serve you here -- it is slow and unfeeling, and it is theirs -- all of it. Only those without access to power suffer at the hand of Justice; the creatures of the power elite slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want Justice, or even fairness, you will have to snatch it from them.

Make it personal.

Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time -- of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, makes the difference -- the only difference in their eyes -- between players and the “little people.” The power brokers don't give a damn about respect -- respect has no value for them. You have to make them fear and loathe you.

Players they will make their deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again, they will justify your liquidation, your displacement, your suffering, and the brutal banality of it all with the ultimate insult that it is the way of the world, it is politics, it is a tough life, it is “just business,” and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck that...

Make it personal.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…