Demand the Impossible! Demand Accountability!

A lot of people are convinced that stephen harper and his gang will never be held accountable for their war crimes in Afghanistan. I have to say that the weight of evidence is on their side. It seems foolish to waste our time "demanding" that the laws be enforced against harper, and that our courts be given the opportunity to weigh the evidence as to whether or not this dead-eyed, helmet-headed, incompetent creep is guilty of crimes against humanity.

But isn't it also the case that our system can't or won't respond to our "demands" on any number of issues we feel are important?

• Isn't it the case that big oil totally controls the harpercons and that big oil and regional electoral issues also influences the Liberal Party leadership to put the Tar Sands before the survival of civilization? Why should we waste our time "demanding" that that project be shut down?
• Isn't it also the case that as a capitalist democracy, our political leaders are, as a group, dedicated to crushing unions and rendering the entire working class docile and desperate? Isn't it therefore useless to "demand" justice and fair play and pro-union legislation from these corporate puppets?
• Isn't it also the case that as junior partners in the US imperialist project, with our military and "intelligence" services entirely in thrall to their authoritarian psychopathic US counterparts, that it is useless to "demand" that we remove ourselves from the bullshit "War on Terror" and start respecting civil rights again?

I would argue that it is less impossible to "demand" that there be punishments for laws that are broken than that positive legislation be created by this crop of politicians.

I would argue that there are lawyers and justices who have a greater loyalty to the law than they do to any party or to the capitalist system and that it is to this source that we should turn to assault the anti-democratic, anti-earth, anti-human political system we hate.

We should, collectively, all of the groups advocating for change on the left, organize and fund a campaign to initiate lawsuits wherever and whenever we see corporate or corporate-political malfeasance. And we should catalogue all of these criminal acts and document how they occurred and how the system either failed to punish them or how legal victories were achieved.

In the first place, I'm sure there are hundreds of socially progressive lawyers who would be happy to get full-time work prosecuting this stuff. I'm sure there are judges whose sensibilities would be outraged when confronted with the avalanche of crimes that our system produces.

Every year, a record would be published of the corporate and political criminality that was committed and went unpunished.

I have always put quotation marks around the word "demand" in this post because it seems to me that we have an unconscious habit of saying "demand" when we mean "beg" or "plead" for a modicum of justice and respect from the authorities. You really can't "demand" anything when you have no way of attaching consequences for non-compliance.

If the left has sworn off even the mildest forms of violence (with some people even fainting and clutching their pearls at the thought of even yelling at political or corporate criminals) then perhaps strictly, purely legal avenues is respectable enough for them.