Watching the Iowa caucuses last night, the rising popularity of libertarianism really struck me. Although Ron Paul came in third place, he had near majority support among Republican voters under 30. If we are not proactive, libertarianism could be our future.

If you do not find that scary, check out the Tea Party plan to destroy the government and any sense of collective responsibility for societal problems.

Let’s hope the religious impulses on the Right will continue to temper the threat of radical individualism, even as they pose their own threat to democratic values.

Better yet, let’s hope the religious Left and the Occupy movement are able to turn things around and revive the values of fairness, accountability, and respect for human dignity.

photo by Jakub Fulin

A gale force wind always seems to precede dub poet d’bi.young when she enters a room. Her fierce presence and her unstoppable energy are perhaps the most noticeable things about her, but what lingers after the first impression is her overwhelming determination in her mission to spread the word about love, equality and social action.

The first time I met d’bi.young, I had taken a group of students in a college course entitled “Dangerous Acts: Dramatic Literature as a Tool of Social Change” to a production that she had written, performed, and produced with fellow artist Naila Keleta Mae. Both women are Jamaican-Canadians, and their work handled a range of issues including abuse, poverty, racism and social inequity. I had arranged for the artists to have a talk back session after the show with my students, a number of whom were Caribbean – Canadians themselves – and this turned out to be one of the most moving moments I can think of during my teaching career. My students, some of whom were prone to feeling indifferent and powerless in the face of some of the challenges they faced, became animated, engaged and passionate. The performance had managed to reflect back to my students something about their own lives, and this alone was enough for them to elevate their view of who they were and what they could accomplish in their lives. This was, in no small part, thanks to the warmth, the honesty and the strength of the drama, but also of the artists. A pair of students who saw the show that night went on to do their oral presentation on d’bi.young and her work, and they reported feeling that her work touched them in a special way, and made them realize their own power. When an artist manages to bring this passion to the classroom, the effect is tremendous. Since this experience, I have taught d’bi.young’s work in a number of different contexts, and I can say that my students always find that her voice speaks to them in a way that compels not just their intellect, but their hearts.

d’bi.young’s work is fiery. She stares down issues like racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, slavery, and the inequities visited upon the world by capitalism, but perhaps her most enduring theme is love. In the video below, d’bi.young elaborates upon her vision of a love that is honest, compassionate, and forgiving.

A take on the pepper spray meme. CC/JoeInSouthernCA

The recent pepper spraying “incident” at the University of California at Davis represents more than an opportunity to create a cleverly photoshopped, viral meme. The act is part and parcel of a larger collective mindset-a proclivity towards authoritarian overreaction now deeply internalized in daily life in the U.S.

To cite only a few examples, by means such as, “zero tolerance” policies in public school systems, to “no knock” warrants, to snooping on and control over employees private lives by corporate employers, to the war on the Bill of Rights that is the so-called war on drugs, to the brutal suppression of constitutionally granted rights to free assembly and free expression by militarized police forces, to the unconstitutional killing of both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals abroad by predator drone attacks-daily existence within the nation has become more repressive, less inclined to the acceptance of the moments of creativity and uncertainty inherent to freedom. In fits and starts, by law and deed, the U.S. has moved closer in the direction of a panopticon-prone, brutality-leveling, waking authoritarian nightmare than a democratic republic devoted to erring in the direction of the ideals of justice and liberty.

Occupy Oakland protesters at the Port of Oakland CC/Steve Rhodes

Tax policy may seem far from the passion of Occupy, but it is essential to this moral movement. We need to leverage this energy and engagement to start a national dialogue about the kind of society we want to live in, and how to get there. By reforming the capital gains tax, we will call upon the wealthiest Americans to pay more for essential economic stimulus and social programs.

At the same time that income equality is growing, states are slashing education and safety nets at unprecedented rates. This leaves the most vulnerable Americans without basic opportunities and protections. We need to channel more money to states to protect social services and reverse layoffs of public employees. We must invest in job training programs, particularly for high-growth sectors like health care workers and home weatherizers.

All of this requires money, and we need to ask the wealthiest Americans – who have benefited the most from the jobless recovery – to contribute more. Reforming taxes on capital gains, the profits from sales of stocks and other financial assets, will target the wealthiest without hurting the economy.

Congress is taking up dangerous legislation which appears to be designed to pave the way for war by taking the unprecedented step of effectively preventing any kind of U.S. diplomatic contact with Iran. The Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011 (H.R. 1905), sponsored by the right-wing chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, contains a provision (Section 601, subsection (c)) which would put into law a restriction whereby

“No person employed with the United States Government may contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that. . . is an agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the Government of Iran;”

Never in the history of this country has Congress ever restricted the right of the White House or State Department to meet with representatives of a foreign state, even in wartime. If this measure passes, it will establish a dangerous precedent whereby Congress would likely follow with similar legislation effectively forbidding any contact with Palestinians, Cubans and others.

Artist Ray Voide -- a former Marine who has been with Occupy DC, living in the park for 11 days -- displays his portrait of the park.

In the aftermath of the eviction of the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zucotti Park in New York, the OWS protesters at Occupy DC in McPherson Square on K Street in Washington DC remain committed even more resolutely than before.

Rose, a protester who lived at OWS-NYC for a month before moving to Occupy DC three weeks ago, is confident that that evicted Occupations will re-occupy, and that they will continue efforts to model the building of self-sufficient horizontal communities. She finds Occupy DC more suited to that community building because the space is larger, the occupiers fewer, with more grass and less wind. She said a greenhouse is planned and dental care is now available three days a week.

Another more recent occupier, artist Ray Voide who has lived in the DC area for more than 20 years, has been camped at McPherson Square for 11 days. As a former U. S. Marine he says that if any occupation has the right to exist, it is the one here in Washington DC. To break up Occupy DC would send a message to all Americans that their rights don’t mean anything, he added. He believes that the protesters have already accomplished a lot by getting people to talk about issues of inequality and the role oversized corporations play in politics — putting those issues in the public eye and letting people come to their own conclusions.

What life experiences brought people to join the Occupy Oakland general strike on November 2? And what do they hope Occupy Oakland will accomplish? A sampling of sights and sounds form the day reveals that participants came from a wide range of backgrounds and had different goals for the movement. Brenda Reed of Richmond joined Occupy Oakland because her home was put into foreclosure by Chase bank. She hopes Occupy Oakland will lead to financial reform and an equitable restructuring of our current system. Margaret B., a retired teacher from Richmond, wants Occupy Oakland to help raise consciousness and bring about the overthrow of capitalism. Kyle Kilgore of Berkeley is disabled and wants to see affordable healthcare. He explained that everything he is protesting “falls under the umbrella” of “economic justice.” More broadly, it seems that Kilgore named what ties together those who participated in the general strike: their different perspectives coalesce around a demand for economic justice.

The Houston Chronicle reports that the ubiquitous hacktivist (dis)organization Anonymous is celebrating Halloween by threatening to expose the members of Zetas, one of the most powerful drug cartels in Mexico.

My little county, Rio Arriba, in northern New Mexico, has long been overrun by drugs because of this cartel. The guys on the left are not drug kingpins. They are ranchers. And they are seriously put out with the cartels.

Rio Arriba County suffers the highest heroin and polydrug overdose death rates in the US. A few months ago, a beautiful local mountain lake was befouled when a plane flying low to avoid being detected by radar crashed into it, spewing cocaine, fuel, and bodyparts into the water. Nobody knows who was in the plane.

Our rural Hispanic and Native American youth are being systematically plied with drugs by Mexican and Californian gangs to entice them to become mules. We have watched our teen drinking rate creep upward. Children as young as 12 are now addicted to heroin.

I couldn’t be happier that Anonymous has taken on the cartel. However, I wonder if bloggers everywhere will suddenly find themselves targets in a new kind of war. I know how quickly those kinds of wars can sneak up on you.

CROSS-POSTED AT Native American Netroots

Creative Commons / Adrian Kinloch

This past weekend, Occupy Wall Street demonstrations were held in over 951 cities in 82 countries as people around the globe joined in an international day of solidarity against the greed and corruption of the 1%.

The media, trying to discredit all the demonstrators, say we don’t know what we are for, only what we are against. So I believe there is much to be gained were we to embrace the following 20 second sound bite for “what we are for.”

• We want to replace a society based on selfishness and materialism with a society based on caring for each other and caring for the planet.

• We want a new bottom line so that institutions, corporations, government policies, and even personal behavior are judged rational or productive or efficient not only by how much money or power gets generated, but also by how much love and kindness, generosity and caring, environmental and ethical behavior, and how much we are able to respond to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement the grandeur and mystery of all Being.

• To take the first steps, we want to ban all money from elections except that supplied by government on an equal basis to all major candidates, require free and equal time for the candidates and prohibit buying other time or space, and require corporations to get a new corporate charter once every five years which they can only get if they can prove a satisfactory history of environmental and social responsibility to a jury of ordinary citizens. We call this the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the US Constitution (ESRA).

• We want to replace the mistaken notion that homeland security can be achieve through a strategy of world domination by our corporations suppoted by the US military and intelligence services with a strategy of generosity and caring for others in the world that will start by launching a Global Marshall Plan that dedicates 1-2% of our GMP ever year for the next twenty to once and for all eliminate global poverty homelessnes, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate health care — knowing that this, not an expanded militarr, is what will give us security.

• And we want a NEW New Deal that provides a job for everyone who wants to work, jobs that rebuild our environment and our infrastructre, and jobs that allow us to take better care of educating our youth and caring for the aged. That’s what we are for! And you can read more about them at www.spiritualprogressives.org

Ok, it was two minutes instead of 20 seconds, but we deserve that amount of time.

by Matthew Remski

Of the countless intersubjective graces unfolding in Zuccotti Park and around the Occupy world, the “human microphone” is recapturing something as old as human learning. This is something sacred: a repurposing of voice, ear, and content that may serve no less than the remembering of a more coherent human consciousness.

Watch Slavoj Zizek to see how it works. Every Occupy Wall Street orator, prohibited by permit laws from amplification (and lights when night falls), stands on a box and delivers his sentences one at a time, each followed by a pause, during which the surrounding ring of listeners, perhaps 20 deep, repeats the sentence verbatim. The repeaters, unburdened by the anxiety of creation, actually improve the clarity of the orator’s rhythm and intonation as they fall into a shared pulse. Orators learn quickly that the sentences with the highest torque are simple and well-metered – from the heartbeat of Zizek’s “They tell you we are dreamers” to the rolling of “The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over.” Michael Moore had to quickly drop his just-a-regular-guy banter, which in human-microphone-land makes him weak and self-deprecating. And Cornel West pulled the oration of Southern Baptism out of another decade and firmly jammed it into the hipster ears. Everyone speaks of spirit, and love. These are no longer ideas through this media but thrusts of embodiment that ripple through the group neurology.

Some orators attract so many listeners that multiple relay rings form spontaneously. This can slow down the oration up to fourfold, as each orbit of 20-deep repeats the sentence, and each ring forms a distinct choir: more men in this one, more women in that, a clear tenor back there, and a rowdier group who always wants to clap and cheer more than the rest. The centrifuge of sentiment and meaning extends to the horizon of the physical gathering, and then meets the threshold of the digisphere, where the Twitter birds listen and then fly. In Zuccotti Park, meaning starts with a heartbeat, and then it accelerates as it flies outward. But its plodding beginning forms a natural control upon the ego-inflation so easily amplified by electricity and then distorted beyond all embodied measure.

Flickr / David_Shankbone

by Donna Schaper

Older people want to know what is next. Turns out they’re the impatient ones. Younger people don’t want to go there – they trust the process.

Everyone’s got a point. Old folks worry that without a plan, without a program, this glorious fragile beginning will remain just that. When Mayor Bloomberg gets annoyed, he’ll shut it down, we worry. If there’s a confrontation with the cops because folks get grumpy, they will shut it down. Or if the weather gets really, really bad, THAT will shut it down.

Younger people know that their tactics have sparked a movement. They figured out how to have public conversations without microphones. They’ve organized Zuccotti Park better than any of my children ever organized their rooms. They have a growing kitchen of good food, well distributed. They have also managed the sanitation problem and the recycling problem with creativity and élan. They meet ridicule with smiles and increasingly creative signs. They created a slogan – “We’re the 99%” – that is inspiring millions of older folks.

They’re the ones who created the center of gravity, and the world – the media, the unions, the politicians, the clergy – has come into THEIR orbit, not the other way around. They’ve changed the conversation of the rest of us – New York Times columnists, a Presidential news conference, countless personal interactions across the country. We haven’t changed theirs. So they worry a whole lot less. You can hear them saying, “Relax, Mom and Dad – it’s going to be all right.”

Although I shouldn’t be surprised, I have to say that I do find myself angered and appalled by a reaction that has recently emerged in opposition to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, a reaction by working people who claim to speak for “the 53%.”

by Stephen Zunes

During the Bush administration, I wrote more than a dozen annotated critiques of presidential speeches. I have refrained from doing so under President Barack Obama, however, because – despite a number of disappointments with his administration’s policies — I found his speeches to be relatively reasonable. Although his September 21 address before the UN General Assembly contained a number of positive elements, in many ways it also contained many of the same kind of duplicitous and misleading statements one would have expected from his predecessor. Below are some excerpts, followed by my comments.

On Palestinian Statehood and Middle East Peace:

Obama at the U.N.

One year ago, I stood at this podium and I called for an independent Palestine. I believed then, and I believe now, that the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own. But what I also said is that a genuine peace can only be realized between the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves. One year later, despite extensive efforts by America and others, the parties have not bridged their differences… It’s well known to all of us here. Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances for their security. Palestinians deserve to know the territorial basis of their state.

Obama’s stated support for the establishment of a Palestinian state based roughly on Israel’s pre-1967 borders is far more explicit than that of any previous president, subjecting him to harsh criticism from both Republicans as well as a number of Congressional Democrats. However, given that the Palestine Authority has already “provided assurances” for Israel’s security by agreeing to, as part of a final peace settlement,an internationally supervised disarming of any and all irregular militias, a demilitarization of their state, and the banning of hostile forces from their territories, only to be met by Netanyahu’s continued refusal to withdraw from the occupied territories, it raises questions as to why Obama implied that both sides needed to “bridge their differences.”

Carwill/Flickr

Now in its eleventh day, there has only just begun to be reports and discussion about the occupation of Wall Street in mainstream media. The reasons are related not to the organizational efforts of the occupiers or their lack of conviction or numbers, but to the relationship between our channels of information, our business and corporate sector and our politically empowered. This begs the question of if instead of Wall Street, the occupiers were gathered in Tehran or Sana, would the news of their demands and challenge of the status quo be included in our mainstream news headlines? The answer is yes. Although the American media did not create the protests or uprisings that comprised The Arab Spring, their attention to the social unrest in the Middle East undoubtedly stoked the determination and numbers of those participating in the protests that irrevocably changed the social and political landscape of the region. It is therefore the responsibility of critical and compassionate thinkers to spread the words and actions of the occupiers – most of whom are college age or in their early twenties and thus the future of the American economy and social fabric.

Make July 4 INTER-DEPENDENCE DAY! Do July 4 with a community of people who are not into the reactionary nationalist rah-rah, but into seriously thinking about and celebrating what is good in America! If you happen to be in the Bay Area July 4, come to the Tikkun, NSP, Beyt Tikkun picnic! If not, you can read and utilize in any way you can our guide to ideas to share at a picnic or July 4th celebration of your own, no matter how small! Just go to: http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/an-interdependence-day-celebration-for-july-4.

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2 p.m. Strawberry Creek, Berkeley 1260 Allston Way, Between Bancroft Way and Addison Street at West Street – Southwest Berkeley

The Supreme Court’s June 27 narrow 5-4 decision called McComish v. Bennett continues the Roberts Court’s retreat on fairness in elections, striking down trigger provisions that allowed publicly financed candidates in Arizona to receive additional funds for their campaigns when their spending was outstripped by their privately financed opponents.

Brenda Wright, Director of Demos’ Democracy Program, commented, “The Court’s ruling distorts the First Amendment into a caricature that would be unrecognizable to its creators. The very purpose of the First Amendment is to encourage public debate and dialogue in the political sphere. The Roberts Court has turned this tradition on its head by ruling that the First Amendment should shield privately financed candidates against any response by their opponents.”

This is why state actions are not sufficient–anything re-empowering ordinary citizens by a state legislature will be declared unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court’s decision also shows that merely overturning Citizens’ United will not stop the Supreme Court–only a Constitutional Amendment which explicitly mandates public funding of elections, forbids any other form of money in elections, requires equal and free time for major candidates in major media, and imposes environmental and social responsibility requirements on corporations would actually make a difference. Everything less is futile.

While the media continually underplays the crimes committed by the United States government both in its daily acts of murder against innocents in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and in its flagrant disregard for the well-being of the people of the US by ignoring the pain they suffer as a result of inadequate jobs and health care, polluted air and water, homelessness, etc., nothing is ever missed when a political leader does some lewd sexual act. The current media circus around Rep. Weiner is just another way the media focuses on the trivial and ignores the significant crimes and problems of our time. But since this is happening, we present three very different perspectives on the current reality.

This is the first article I want to share:

Everything Said About Anthony Weiner Is Bull

by Michael Bader

There’s only one legitimate reason to be upset with Anthony Weiner, and that’s because his behavior and its discovery has taken away a bold and effective voice in the Democratic party. Everything else you think and feel about him is bullshit.

By bullshit, I mean it has nothing to do with him, and also little to do with broad generalizations made nowadays about the sex and powerful men. The first is too personal and private for anyone to ever know. And the second is so abstract as to be useless in understanding any individual situation. What it does have to do with is you and me, with all of us, who are repeatedly enticed to either buy-in to or create fictive stories about sexual scandals that are little more than projections of our own forbidden or feared desires.

Pres. Obama’s much publicized speech on the Middle East at the State Department on May 19th caused a stir by advocating an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement based upon the pre-June 1967 borders (the so-called Green Line), with modifications in the form of “land swaps” negotiated between the parties. This has been the general framework that moderate and pro-peace Israelis and Palestinians have promoted since at least 1995, when it was realized that most West Bank settlers live in thickly-populated “settlement blocs” contiguous with the Green Line. Unfortunately, too many people (most importantly, Prime Minister Netanyahu) seized upon Obama’s statement about the pre-June ’67 lines, disregarding his call for trading territory.

That Netanyahu and so many others found this controversial, illustrates how far we’ve come from a peace agreement almost arrived at in 2008. It also indicates that the US needs to be more assertive in helping the parties finally achieve peace.

Jeremy Ben-Ami

I awoke on Friday morning, May 20, to watch Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, on Democracy Now, and I’m glad I did. He performed well under difficult circumstances, being double-teamed by anti-Israel author Norman Finkelstein and Palestinian-American human rights lawyer Noura Erakat, who argued that international law and justice demand that Israel simply withdraw to the pre-’67 lines, without requiring an exchange of territories.

The program led me to some insights. For one thing, although he does not advocate Israel’s destruction (as many assume), Norman Finkelstein seems emotionally consumed by hostility toward Israel. (He’s suffered as a result–e.g., not obtaining tenure at a university–but he is a caustic polemicist and not a fair-minded scholar.) He–along with the very articulate and impressive Ms. Erakat–epitomizes doctrinaire and rigid thinking in insisting that Israel totally withdraw to the pre-June ’67 lines.

Do the horrific images from Japan – not to mention reports that safety records at the nuclear plant have been faked for years – make you a little frightened when you drive past your absolutely, completely, technologically guaranteed neighborhood nuclear reactor? Perhaps you are certain such a thing could never happen in the U.S. – where corporations and government inspection teams are known for their professionalism and moral responsibility. Then again, you might remember the BP oil spill, just last year, where a good deal of the problem was that BP had cut corners on some safety costs and the government inspection teams were both figuratively and literally in bed with BP staff.

Alongside nuclear leaks and oil spills there’s the looming deficit, terrorism, and the rise in chronic childhood diseases (twenty-two out of 70 million U.S. children have chronic illnesses tied to some degree to environmental pollution). If the current state of the world doesn’t scare you, it’s probably just that you haven’t been paying attention. And you’re not alone. An awful lot of us are scared as well.

So here’s the thing: what do people do when they are scared? Well, some just hide in the corner. Sadly, however, many become aggressive, rigid and very dogmatic.
Could there be a connection between our pervasive fear and the way we talk – or rather don’t talk but scream, hurl insults, and express dismissive contempt at each other? After the shooting of U.S. Representative Giffords in Tucson many called for civility, but I suspect that civility is the opposite of an overwhelming and unacknowledged fear.

Let’s look at this in a little more detail.

I had a curious conversation with a conservative lately in which he claimed the US Constitution as a conservative document, while I objected that in the 1780s conservatives opposed it, since conservatives then were believers in monarchy and tradition. Yes, he conceded, but today it’s a conservative document. I suggested that this is what happens time and again, that the gains made by progressives of one era against the vehement opposition of conservatives, become the core items that conservatives defend in a later era. So perhaps it would behoove him as a conservative to get ahead of the curve by helping the progressives today!

He wasn’t buying it, of course. And it makes some sense that he wasn’t, because in many ways these labels of progressive and conservative are about contrary emotional responses to the world. We need both responses.