Step O: Have an Alternative

I guess a prerequisite to my laundry list of ways to change the world is to have an alternative to offer people when you insist on revolutionary change.

What will make the world a better place and will avoid the structural problems of our present socio-economic system.

I've blurted out here and there that we need to expand democracy and be fanatics about individual human freedoms and rights at the same time. So we should insist on the right to free speech and to protest, and draw lessons from the significance that neo-liberal capitalism cannot grant these rights and freedoms. But we should also expand democracy, specifically into our workplaces. The areas where we spend a great deal of our lives and where most of our rights and freedoms are subordinated to a boss, or bosses in a hierarchically structured system.

Now I've got to reply to Scott ...

Step 1: Identify & Communicate the Extent of the Problem

this is going to be the first in a soon-to-be-discontinued series of snippets of my ideas about peacefully achieving revolutionary change in Canada.

The first thing we have to do is to communicate to ordinary, a-political or non-revolutionary Canadians not only the extent of the problems we're facing, but the significance of its nature.

For example:

It's not like Paul Martin Jr. was a flawed democrat who cared about his constituents in Montreal, and who de-funded public health care and destroyed Haiti's government out of some misguided priorities. Paul Martin Jr. was a member of the political and economic elite. He ran a company Canada Steamship Lines, under the flag of a poor country in order to avoid Canadian taxes and labour legislation. He's a capitalist, with capitalist values, which are primarily about maximizing profit over everything else.

Capitalist politicians see the desires of their own class as being more important than anyone else's. Therefore, destroying public healthcare for the interests of the private insurance business, robbing workers' paycheques to gouge them for "Employment Insurance" premiums while giving tax-cuts to the wealthy and to business, subsidizing the oil industry regardless of hard-won Kyoto Accord requirements, ... all are par for the course.

Stephen Harper isn't a "conservative" who cares about the social values of his reactionary constituents. He's a paid shill for the oil and private insurance companies.

Bah. I'm too tired to develop this line.

What I'm trying to say is that voting Liberal or Conservative isn't about voting for "sensible social democracy" or "tax-cuts and law and order" or whatever people who vote this way imagine that they're doing.

It's voting for ecological suicide, class warfare, imperialism, ... and a whole host of other perversions.

What we have to do first is point out to people how these things aren't unpleasant outgrowths of our political system, they are essential foundations to it. In the way that I'm always going on about death-squads and their significance. The suppression of protesters at neo-liberal economic conferences isn't due to police over-exuberance and excessive "security." It's based on the fact that neo-liberal capitalism is built on a totalitarian mindset that believes that people (if they are workers, or simply non-capitalists) aren't worth shit.

How to defy the will of Parliament

So the House of Commons passed the bill that says that US war resisters should not be deported. But it came with the help of the Liberal Party of Canada, which must mean that nothing practical will come from this. Nothing to make the US government mad at the Canadian government anyway.

It still has to pass the Senate, and then be signed by the G-G. Meaning it's technically still legal for Harper to deport these people trying to avoid being dragooned into an illegal war.

Withering Economy

Mike Whitney on CounterPunch:

The troubles in the financial markets will be with us for some time. The massive expansion of credit has created numerous equity bubbles that are unwinding at an unpredictable pace. Author James Howard Kunstler calls the present process "the remorseless algebra of a deflationary death spiral". That's about as close to a perfect description as imaginable. There's bound to be considerable disagreement about the origins of the bubble and who is to blame. Was it the Fed's "low interest " policy following the dot.com bust in 2000, or the lack of government regulation in the securitzation process, or was it just the natural corollary of a political system which invariably bows and scrapes to Wall Street?

Listening to Obama's "Victory" Speech

A bunch of crap. Cult of personality indeed. They didn't clap for "a new and better America," ... they clapped for his announcement of his victory.

He spent loads of time talking about vague "change."

Trying to mend fences with ego-maniac Hillary Clinton. He's got good writers, but nobody outside America really cares.

This really is a historic moment though.

But it's like the story of this gigantic eggshell sitting in the middle of town. It's huge. Everyone talks about. But it's brittle-thin and there's nothing inside of it. But the trumpeters keep blaring about it.

"Chart a new course for America!" ... Uh, what does that mean exactly?

I'm With the Wingnuts on this One. And ...

Canadian Cynic agrees with Scott's Diatribes and Dr. Dawg that Mark Steyn's travails at the hands of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal are nothing to care about at all.

Dr. Dawg's reflections are particularly poignant for me:

Surely everybody on the planet must be talking about the Mark Steyn Trial of the Century. And Human Rights Commissions, the Spanish Inquisition redux, coming soon to your own door. (Worse!) This hed just about says it all, doesn't it?

Well, as they say, welcome to the real world, kiddies. No, the Steyn auto-da-fe is not being widely reported, except by the usual suspects. The irons are not being heated, the gallows rope is not being tested, the whips are not soaking in brine, the cold, dank cells are not being outfitted with new batches of mouldy straw.

The thing is, I experienced the same sort of let-down when I traveled to Ottawa to raise awareness of three CANADIAN CITIZENS who were TORTURED in Syria and Egypt, seemingly at the REQUEST of the CANADIAN GOVERNMENT. At the end of it all, despite a large media presence, most people didn't know about it and the CBC's big story was about the woman fired for giving a "timbit" to a customer's baby.

Just because the majority don't know, and [probably?] don't care, doesn't make it unimportant. I'm with the wingnuts in opposing anti-hate legislation. A position shared with Glenn Greenwald:

People like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are some of the most pernicious commentators around. But equally pernicious, at least, are those who advocate laws that would proscribe and punish political expression, and those who exploit those laws to try use the power of the State to impose penalties on those expressing "offensive" or "insulting" or "wrong" political ideas. The mere existence of the "investigation," interrogation, and proceeding itself is a grotesque affront to every basic liberty.

...

Empowering the State to proscribe and punish speech is not only the most dangerous step a society can take -- though it is that -- it's also the most senseless. It never achieves its intended effect of suppressing or eliminating a particular view. If anything, it has the opposite effect, by driving it underground, thus preventing debate and exposure. Worse, it converts its advocates into martyrs -- as one sees from the hero-worship now surrounding people like Levant and Steyn, who now become self-glorifying symbols of individual liberty rather than what they are: hateful purveyors of a bitter, destructive, authoritarian ideology.

Opening Scene of "Transformers"

I'm a good, progressive intellectual man. I'm deep. I'm not into all this mainstream Hollywood blockbuster bullshit man.

Okay, ... well, I've made it pretty clear that I like to get high and watch good CGI. And it's true, that I saw scenes from "Transformers" when I was at the Hamilton drive-in theatre watching a triple-feature that featured "The Simpson's Movie," Michael Moore's "Sicko," and, unfortunately, the last Bruce Willis "Die Hard" movie. (That one was fucking ridiculous, with the F-17 [whatever] fighter jet being unable to nail a tractor-trailer driving alone on a highway overpass and etc.), I could see over on another screen that they were showing the "Transformers" movie. I have to admit that I was pretty impressed with the CGI modeling. Those giant gleaming machines really seemed to be integrated into the scenery. So, I got hold of the movie for home viewing and watched it. Yes, I expected it to be simplistic, escapist nonsense, and it was. The CGI was also quite impressive.

What's motivating me to write this entry though is my response to the opening scenes. They take place at a US military base in Qatar. One of the "evil" robots shows up there and steals info about US military weaponry and then destroys the base. But before that all happens, we're shown scenes of good-natured US soldiers, including one of the movie's heroes, who are happily going about their vague duties with innocent, American exuberance, or (from the commanding officer) intelligence or professionalism. The future hero appears to have a friendship with an Arab boy, showing, I suppose, that not all Arabs are crazed killers and haters of American freedoms.

Unspoken of course is just why there should be an American military base in Qatar. Why we (or, more accurately, US audiences) should simply accept that these bases are there and that there's probably a good reason for it. The Americans are the "good guys" after all. There are evil terrorists there, who hate Israel, America, and freedom and capitalism in general.

In reality, there are US military bases in the Middle East and around the world to project American power against any forces that would challenge American control over their natural resources. In reality, these bases aren't there to protect the locals against inexplicably evil terrorists. They're there to serve American interests, and these interests require military protection because these interests are usually opposed to the welfare of the local inhabitants.

But I remember as a child viewing depictions of US military power, and the US government, as this powerful force for good in the world. I'm sure that there are youngsters today watching movies like "Transformers" and ingesting this benign if hazy notion of what this military power is all about. It's not about powerful, professional, heroic good-guys, possessed of awesome power, and governed over by noble men of integrity like the innocent president asking for his Hostess Ding-Dong, or his driven Secretary of Defense (played by Jon Voight). It's something else entirely.