Robert Jensen : Occupy ‘Demands’: Energy, Economics, Ecology

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

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Occupy demands:
Let’s radicalize our analysis of
empire, economics, ecology

Rallying around a common concern about economic injustice is a beginning; understanding the structures and institutions of illegitimate authority is the next step.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / November 4, 2011

[This is an expanded version of remarks delivered at an Occupy Austin teach-in, October 30, 2011.]

There’s one question that pundits and politicians keep posing to the Occupy gatherings around the country: What are your demands?

I have a suggestion for a response: We demand that you stop demanding a list of demands.

The demand for demands is an attempt to shoehorn the Occupy gatherings into conventional politics, to force the energy of these gatherings into a form that people in power recognize, so that they can roll out strategies to divert, co-opt, buy off, or — if those tactics fail — squash any challenge to business as usual.

Rather than listing demands, we critics of concentrated wealth and power in the United States can dig in and deepen our analysis of the systems that produce that unjust distribution of wealth and power. This is a time for action, but there also is a need for analysis. Rallying around a common concern about economic injustice is a beginning; understanding the structures and institutions of illegitimate authority is the next step.

We need to recognize that the crises we face are not the result simply of greedy corporate executives or corrupt politicians, but rather of failed systems. The problem is not the specific people who control most of the wealth of the country, or those in government who serve them, but the systems that create those roles. If we could get rid of the current gang of thieves and thugs but left the systems in place, we would find that the new boss is going to be the same as the old boss.

My contribution to this process of sharpening analysis comes in lists of three, with lots of alliteration. Whether you find my analysis of the key questions compelling, at least it will be easy to remember: empire, economics, ecology.

Empire: Immoral, illegal, ineffective

The United States is the current (though fading) imperial power in the world, and empires are bad things. We have to let go of self-indulgent notions of American exceptionalism — the idea that the United States is a unique engine of freedom and democracy in the world and therefore a responsible and benevolent empire. Empires throughout history have used coercion and violence to acquire a disproportionate share of the world’s resources, and the U.S. empire is no different.

Although the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are particularly grotesque examples of U.S. imperial destruction, none of this is new; the United States was founded by men with imperial visions who conquered the continent and then turned to the world.

Most chart the beginning of the external U.S. empire-building phase with the 1898 Spanish-American War and the conquest of the Philippines that continued for some years after. That project went forward in the early 20th century, most notably in Central America, where regular U.S. military incursions made countries safe for investment.

The empire emerged in full force after World War II, as the United States assumed the role of the dominant power in the world and intensified the project of subordinating the developing world to the U.S. system. Those efforts went forward under the banner of “anti-communism” until the early 1990s, but continued after the demise of the Soviet Union under various other guises, most notably the so-called “war on terrorism.”

Whether it was Latin America, southern Africa, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, the central goal of U.S. foreign policy has been consistent: to make sure that an independent course of development did not succeed anywhere. The “virus” of independent development could not be allowed to take root in any country out of a fear that it might infect the rest of the developing world.

The victims of this policy — the vast majority of them non-white — can be counted in the millions. In the Western Hemisphere, U.S. policy was carried out mostly through proxy armies, such as the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s, or support for dictatorships and military regimes that brutally repressed their own people, such as El Salvador. The result throughout the region was hundreds of thousands of dead — millions across Latin America over the course of the 20th century — and whole countries ruined.

Direct U.S. military intervention was another tool of U.S. policymakers, with the most grotesque example being the attack on Southeast Asia. After supporting the failed French effort to recolonize Vietnam after World War II, the United States invaded South Vietnam and also intervened in Laos and Cambodia, at a cost of 3-4 million Southeast Asians dead and a region destabilized.

To prevent the spread of the “virus” there, we dropped 6.5 million tons of bombs and 400,000 tons of napalm on the people of Southeast Asia. Saturation bombing of civilian areas, counterterrorism programs and political assassination, routine killings of civilians, and 11.2 million gallons of Agent Orange to destroy crops and ground cover — all were part of the U.S. terror war.

On 9/11, the vague terrorism justification became tangible for everyone. With the U.S. economy no longer the source of dominance, policymakers used the terrorist attacks to justify an expansion of military operations in Central Asia and the Middle East. Though non-military approaches to terrorism were more viable, the rationale for ever-larger defense spending was set.

A decade later, the failures of this imperial policy are clearer than ever. U.S. foreign and military policy has always been immoral, based not on principle but on power. That policy routinely has been illegal, violating the basic tenets of international law and the constitutional system.

Now, more than ever, we can see that this approach to world affairs is ineffective, no matter what criteria for effectiveness we use. An immoral and criminal policy has lost even its craven justification: It will not guarantee American dominance.

That failure is the light at the end of the tunnel. As the elite bipartisan commitment to U.S. dominance fails, we the people have a chance to demand that the United States shift to policies designed not to allow us to run the world but to help us become part of the world.

Economics: Inhuman, anti-Democratic, unsustainable

The economic system underlying empire-building today has a name: capitalism. Or, more precisely, a predatory corporate capitalism that is inconsistent with basic human values. This description sounds odd in the United States, where so many assume that capitalism is not simply the best among competing economic systems but the only sane and rational way to organize an economy in the contemporary world.

Although the financial crisis that began in 2008 has scared many people, it has not always led to questioning the nature of the system.

That means the first task is to define capitalism: that economic system in which (1) property, including capital assets, is owned and controlled by private persons; (2) most people must rent their labor power for money wages to survive, and (3) the prices of most goods and services are allocated by markets.

“Industrial capitalism,” made possible by sweeping technological changes and imperial concentrations of capital, was marked by the development of the factory system and greater labor specialization. The term “finance capitalism” is often used to mark a shift to a system in which the accumulation of profits in a financial system becomes dominant over the production processes.

Today in the United States, most people understand capitalism in the context of mass consumption — access to unprecedented levels of goods and services. In such a world, everything and everyone is a commodity in the market.

In the dominant ideology of market fundamentalism, it’s assumed that the most extensive use of markets possible, along with privatization of many publicly owned assets and the shrinking of public services, will unleash maximal competition and result in the greatest good — and all this is inherently just, no matter what the results.

If such a system creates a world in which most people live in poverty, that is taken not as evidence of a problem with market fundamentalism but evidence that fundamentalist principles have not been imposed with sufficient vigor; it is an article of faith that the “invisible hand” of the market always provides the preferred result, no matter how awful the consequences may be for real people.

How to critique capitalism in such a society? We can start by pointing out that capitalism is fundamentally inhuman, anti-democratic, and unsustainable.

Inhuman: The theory behind contemporary capitalism explains that because we are greedy, self-interested animals, a viable economic system must reward greedy, self-interested behavior. That’s certainly part of human nature, but we also just as obviously are capable of compassion and selflessness.

We can act competitively and aggressively, but we also have the capacity to act out of solidarity and cooperation. In short, human nature is wide-ranging. In situations where compassion and solidarity are the norm, we tend to act that way. In situations where competitiveness and aggression are rewarded, most people tend toward such behavior.

Why is it that we must accept an economic system that undermines the most decent aspects of our nature and strengthens the cruelest? Because, we’re told, that’s just the way people are. What evidence is there of that? Look around, we’re told, at how people behave. Everywhere we look, we see greed and the pursuit of self-interest.

So the proof that these greedy, self-interested aspects of our nature are dominant is that, when forced into a system that rewards greed and self-interested behavior, people often act that way. Doesn’t that seem just a bit circular? A bit perverse?

Anti-democratic: In the real world — not in the textbooks or fantasies of economics professors — capitalism has always been, and will always be, a wealth-concentrating system. If you concentrate wealth in a society, you concentrate power. I know of no historical example to the contrary.

For all the trappings of formal democracy in the contemporary United States, everyone understands that for the most part, the wealthy dictate the basic outlines of the public policies that are put into practice by elected officials.

This is cogently explained by political scientist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of political parties,” which identifies powerful investors rather than unorganized voters as the dominant force in campaigns and elections. Ferguson describes political parties in the United States as “blocs of major investors who coalesce to advance candidates representing their interests” and that “political parties dominated by large investors try to assemble the votes they need by making very limited appeals to particular segments of the potential electorate.”

There can be competition between these blocs, but “on all issues affecting the vital interests that major investors have in common, no party competition will take place.” Whatever we might call such a system, it’s not democracy in any meaningful sense of the term.

People can and do resist the system’s attempt to sideline them, and an occasional politician joins the fight, but such resistance takes extraordinary effort. Those who resist sometimes win victories, some of them inspiring, but to date concentrated wealth continues to dominate.

If we define democracy as a system that gives ordinary people a meaningful way to participate in the formation of public policy, rather than just a role in ratifying decisions made by the powerful, then it’s clear that capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive.

Unsustainable: Capitalism is a system based on an assumption of continuing, unlimited growth — on a finite planet. There are only two ways out of this problem. We can hold out hope that we might hop to a new planet soon, or we can embrace technological fundamentalism and believe that evermore complex technologies will allow us to transcend those physical limits here.

Both those positions are equally delusional. Delusions may bring temporary comfort, but they don’t solve problems; in fact, they tend to cause more problems, and in this world those problems keep piling up.

Critics now compare capitalism to cancer. The inhuman and antidemocratic features of capitalism mean that, like a cancer, the death system will eventually destroy the living host. Both the human communities and non-human living world that play host to capitalism eventually will be destroyed by capitalism.

Capitalism is not, of course, the only unsustainable system that humans have devised, but it is the most obviously unsustainable system, and it’s the one in which we are stuck. It’s the one that we are told is inevitable and natural, like the air we breathe. But the air that we are breathing is choking the most vulnerable in the world, choking us, choking the planet.

Ecology: Out of gas, derailed, over the waterfall

In addition to inequality within the human family, we face even greater threats in the human assault on the living world that come with industrial society. High-energy/high-technology societies pose a serious threat to the ability of the ecosphere to sustain human life as we know it.

Grasping that reality is a challenge, and coping with the implications is an even greater challenge. We likely have a chance to stave off the most catastrophic consequences if we act dramatically and quickly. If we continue to drag our feet, it’s “game over.”

While public awareness of the depth of the ecological crisis is growing, our knowledge of the basics of the problem is hardly new. Here is a “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” issued by 1,700 of the planet’s leading scientists:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.

That statement was issued in 1992, and since then we have fallen further behind in the struggle for sustainability. Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live — groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity — and the news is bad.

Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is fast running out of easily accessible oil, which means we face a huge reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds our lives. And, of course, there is the undeniable trajectory of climate disruption.

Add all that up, and ask a simple question: Where we are heading? Pick a metaphor. Are we a car running out of gas? A train about to derail? A raft going over the waterfall? Whatever the choice, it’s not a pretty picture. It’s crucial we realize that there are no technological fixes that will rescue us. We have to acknowledge that human attempts to dominate the non-human world have failed. We are destroying the planet and in the process destroying ourselves.

Facing a harsh future with a stubborn hope

The people who run this world are eager to contain the Occupy energy not because they believe the critics of concentrated wealth and power are wrong, but because somewhere deep down in their souls (or what is left of a soul), the powerful know we are right.

People in power are insulated by wealth and privilege, but they can see the systems falling apart. The United States’ military power can no longer guarantee world domination. The financial corporations can no longer pretend to provide order in the economy. The industrial system is incompatible with life.

We face new threats today, but we are not the first humans to live in dangerous times. In 1957 the Nobel writer Albert Camus described the world in ways that resonate:

Tomorrow the world may burst into fragments. In that threat hanging over our heads there is a lesson of truth. As we face such a future, hierarchies, titles, honors are reduced to what they are in reality: a passing puff of smoke. And the only certainty left to us is that of naked suffering, common to all, intermingling its roots with those of a stubborn hope.

A stubborn hope is more necessary than ever. As political, economic, and ecological systems spiral down, it’s likely we will see levels of human suffering that dwarf even the horrors of the 20th century. Even more challenging is the harsh realization that we don’t have at hand simple solutions — and maybe no solutions at all — to some of the most vexing problems.

We may be past the point of no return in ecological damage, and the question is not how to prevent crises but how to mitigate the worst effects. No one can predict the rate of collapse if we stay on this trajectory, and we don’t know if we can change the trajectory in time.

There is much we don’t know, but everything I see suggests that the world in which we will pursue political goals will change dramatically in the next decade or two, almost certainly for the worse. Organizing has to adapt not only to changes in societies but to these fundamental changes in the ecosphere.

In short: We are organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion. We have to acknowledge that human attempts to dominate the non-human world have failed. We are destroying the planet and in the process destroying ourselves. Here, just as in human relationships, we either abandon the dominance/subordination dynamic or we don’t survive.

In 1948, Camus urged people to “give up empty quarrels” and “pay attention to what unites rather that to what separates us” in the struggle to recover from the horrors of Europe’s barbarism. I take from Camus a sense of how to live the tension between facing honestly the horror and yet remaining engaged.

In that same talk, he spoke of “the forces of terror” (forces which exist on “our” side as much as on “theirs”) and the “forces of dialogue” (which also exist everywhere in the world). Where do we place our hopes?

“Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great unequal battle has begun,” he wrote. “I have nothing but reasonable illusions as to the outcome of that battle. But I believe it must be fought.”

The Occupy gatherings do not yet constitute a coherent movement with demands, but they are wellsprings of reasonable illusions. Rejecting the political babble around us in election campaigns and on mass media, these gatherings are an experiment in a different kind of public dialogue about our common life, one that can reject the forces of terror deployed by concentrated wealth and power.

With that understanding, the central task is to keep the experiment going, to remember the latent power in people who do not accept the legitimacy of a system. Singer/songwriter John Gorka, writing about what appears to be impossible, offers the perfect reminder:

They think they can tame you, name you and frame you,
aim you where you don’t belong.
They know where you’ve been but not where you’re going,
that is the source of the songs.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics — and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His books include All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Dr. Stephen R. Keister : I Cry for my Country

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer


I cry for my country:
The state of health care in America

“Laissez-faire, supply-and-demand, — one begins to be weary of all of that. Leave all to egotism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause; — it is the gospel of despair.” — Thomas Carlyle, 1843.

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / November 4, 2011

[Happy Birthday Steve Keister!!!

Our dear friend, Dr. Stephen R. Keister, turned 90 on Sunday, October 9. For the last three years Steve has written — with a unique and singular voice — dozens of columns about the sad state of our health care system. And in that time he has become the heart and soul of The Rag Blog. He claims this is his last column, but we promise not to hold him to that commitment! We hope he will continue to share his wisdom with us for many months to come.

In the meantime, look for Sarito Carol Neiman’s Rag Blog feature article on the life and times of Dr. Stephen R. Keister. Coming soon to a Rag Blog near you!

— Thorne Dreyer, for everyone at The Rag Blog.]

Having passed the age of 90 I wish that my final days could be days of happiness and good wishes for those about me; however, it appears that fate has ordained otherwise. It would be a great course of satisfaction to see an enlightened, progressive United States as a homeland for my grandchildren. Instead we find a nation that is descending into quasi-feudalism and subservience of the many to the few.

With that in mind, I approach my final column for The Rag Blog with a few observations about medical care in the United States.

Rarely do I watch television as I find it stultifying, by and large, save for a few generally open and informative presentations on MSNBC. I did, however, watch on ABC news report about a day of free medical care at the Los Angeles Coliseum where hundreds of the poor, underprivileged, uninsured stood in line — many of them all night — to gain admission to a day of free care provided by volunteers from the L.A. area.

This is my country! This is the nation that spends twice what any other civilized nation spends per capita on health care! This is what the corporate leaders and their political prostitutes have to offer for the coming years! This is what the Republican presidential candidates condone and would promote for the future health care of our country, and for which the current administration has crafted, for political purposes, a faux health care bill, dictated by the insurance consortium and the pharmaceutical industry.

We, in the United States, have the ultimate in health care rationing — and it’s rationing based on one’s ability to pay.

Nation of Change featured an article by Noam Levey titled, “U.S. Health Care Falls Further behind Peers, Report Finds.” The article, notes that “The U.S. health care system is lagging further and further behind other industrialized countries on major measures of quality, efficiency, and access to care, according to a new report from the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund, a leading health policy foundation.” The report in full is available here.

In its fall newsletter, Physicians for a National Health Policy (PNHP) reveals many more facts that surprised me and may surprise you. For instance:

  • 60.3 million Americans (19.8%) were uninsured for at least part of 2010, up from 58.5 million people in 2009, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. 48.6 million Americans (16 %) were uninsured at the time of the interview for the 2010 survey, up from 46.3 million people in 2009, with the majority, 35.7 million Americans (11.7% of all Americans), uninsured for more than one year, up from 32.8 million people the previous year, according to an analysis of data from the National Health Interview Survey.

  • Nine million working-age Americans — 57% of people who had health insurance through a job that was lost — became uninsured between 2008 and 2010, according to a survey by the Commonwealth Fund.

  • Health care premiums will rise 8.5% in 2010, according to a PricewatterhouseCoopers survey of 1,700 firms. Employers are offering workers more meager plans in response to rising costs; 17 % of employers surveyed most commonly offered high-deductible health plans to their workers this year, up from 13% in 2010 (Merrill Goozner, The Fiscal Times, 5/18/11).

  • The total cost of a health care plan for a family of four covered by a VA Preferred Provider Plan (PPO) in 2011 is estimated to be $19, 393, up 7.3% from 2010, according to Milliman Medical Index. Employer contributions account for 59%, $11,385, of the total, while employees pay 41% of the cost, $8,008. Employees will pay an average of $3,280 in out of pocket costs. (The Milliman Medical Index ).

  • U.S.Physicians spend nearly four times more on billing and related overhead each year ($82,975 vs $22,205) per physician than their Canadian counterparts, with U.S. medical practice staff spending over 20.6 hours per week on bureaucratic tasks, compared to just 2.5 hours per physician week under Canada/s single-payer program (Morra et al., “U.S.physicians practices vs Canadians,” Health Affairs, 8/11.)

  • The nation’s five largest for-profit health insurers netted $11.7 billion in profits for 2010, up 51% from 2008, because medical costs grew more slowly than forecast, as insured patients skimped on medical care to avoid costly co-pays and deductables during the severe recession. UnitedHealthcare was the leader in profitability, taking in over $4.6 billion in profits, followed by WellPoint ($2.9 billion) and Aetna ($1.8 billion).

  • CEOs at the nation’s five largest for-profit insurance companies garnered $55.4 million in compensation in 2010. The top paid was Cigna’s David Cordani ($15.2 million), followed by WellPoint’s Angela Braly ($13.5 million), United Healthcare’s Stephen Hemsley ($10.8 million), Aetna’s Mark Bertolini ($8.8 million), and Humana’s Michael McAllister ($6.1 million). (Executive Pay-Watch, AFL-CIO, 2011).

  • The pharmaceutical industry spent $6.1 billion in 2010 to influence American doctors, and another $4 billion on direct to consumer advertising, according to IMS Health.

And then there’s hospice care:

  • For-profit hospices are expanding rapidly and may be cherry-picking the most profitable patients, according to a recent study. The number of for-profit hospices increased from 725 in 2000 to 1,600 in 2007, while the number of nonprofit hospices remained stable at 1,205 in 2007. Overall, 52% of facilities are for profit, 35% are non-profit, and 13% are government owned.

  • Hospice care is funded by Medicare on a per-diem basis, with a fixed rate ($143 in 2010) paid to providers for each day a patient is in a facility. Because the first and last days of care are more expensive, to provide, longer care generates higher profit. The study found that patients in for-profit facilities averaged a 20-day stay, compared to 16 days in nonprofit centers. (Your author has a question. In view of the fact that hospice care is designed to provide compassionate, painless death with dignity, what is the method of four days longer survival in the for-profit hospice?)

  • Hospice care costs for nursing home patients jumped nearly 70% between 2005 and 2009, from $2.5 billion to $4.3 billion, while the number of hospice patients increased by only 40%, according to the Office of the Inspector General. Hospices with a large share of patients in nursing homes were typically for profit and appeared to seek out patients with certain characteristics associated with life expectancy and lower demand for care. The Medicare program paid for-profit hospices more for patients than it paid non-profit and government owned hospices in 2009. For profit hospices received about $12, 600 per patient while nonprofit and government entities received between $8,200 and $9,800 per beneficiary.

One bit of light is the California Medical Association’s resolution to legalize marijuana. A tiny bit of encouragement, but a very long way to go.

This old geezer can find nothing to relieve my depression regarding the future of health care in our fair country. The moral decay, the worship of wealth, and the lack of Christian charity appear to create a situation that worsens by the day.

I find no hope within either political party as both are whores to the corporate interests that dominate our society. The sole voices of hope that appear to reach the public in general come from the “99%” movement and Dylan Ratigan’s campaign for a constitutional amendment to do away with money in politics.

Unlike in Europe, where the populace has a basic understanding of the existing domestic situation, the average American appears to be entirely moved by nothing but the sloganeering of the political Right.

I cry for my country, and while asleep I hear in my dreams the mass gatherings of my youth singing, “Arise ye prisoners of starvation, arise thee wretched of the earth, for justice thunders condemnation, a better world’s in birth.”

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform and is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Dr. Stephen R. Keister on The Rag Blog]

Graphic from The New York Times.

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Judy Gumbo Albert : Past Seeds the Present at Oakland General Strike

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Judy Gumbo Albert: Past seeds the present.

General Strike in Oakland:
The past seeds the present

By Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / November 3, 2011

OAKLAND — I felt very much at home at Occupy Oakland’s General Strike yesterday after I heard a young rapper with butt-length dreds and saggy blue jeans remind the crowd that Oakland was the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. He pumped his fist in the air and yelled “Power to the People,” then, just like the Panthers did, admonished the cheering crowd to “watch out for provocateurs.”

I recognized a younger me in a group of women in red t-shirts who taught the crowd to stretch our arms in front of our bodies in a self-defense stance of “No!” Just as Wolfe Lowenthal taught karate in Lincoln Park that summer of 1968. Like Wolfe, the stance these women took was militant and gentle, unlike Wolfe, they complemented “No” with a new stance: “Yes!”

I saw Weathermen in the Black Bloc anarchists who broke away and trashed, and Summer of Love hippies in the beatitude of those who sat on straw mats meditating or practicing yoga. I smelled the ‘60s in the marijuana offered to me by a smiley young African-American teen who sat behind me.

Abbie Hoffman would have been delighted at the General Strike’s free store vibe where food, posters, clothes, and supplies were freely given with the attitude that everyone can share; we’re all in this together. To me, a 1960s radical and original Yippie, the slogan: “Occupy” is brilliant. It prompts you to take direct action, unlike asking those in power to “Stop the War.”

The male-dominated, media-seeking leadership of my day has been replaced by a gender neutral, democratic process of consensus that does not defer to celebrity. I’m delighted. Anyone can choose — or choose not — to speak to the crowd. Or to the media.

When someone speaks for attribution, they open with the caveat: I speak for myself, not for Occupy. Even Jean Quan, Mayor of Oakland, was not accorded the privilege of speaking — she arrived after the speaker’s list was full.

I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in the 1970s and came up with what I thought was a new concept. I got it from the Vietnamese. The best English translation was: “fecundated in a new context.” The verb may sound obscene, but fecundate translates as nourish or fertilize.

It’s been my experience that history is not a straight line. My generation of radicals should not and must not take credit for Occupy. What we did is plant seeds which have been fertilized and nourished by the massive social inequities of today. I felt those seeds flower at Occupy Oakland’s General Strike.

[Judy Gumbo Albert is an original Yippie, along with Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Nancy Kurshan, Paul Krassner, and Judy’s late husband Stew Albert. Judy has remarried, lives in Berkeley, California, and is currently writing her memoir, Yippie Girl. She can be found at www.yippiegirl.com. Read more articles by Judy Gumbo Albert on The Rag Blog.]

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Rag Radio : Singer/Songwriter and Community Activist Charlie Faye

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Austin singer/songwriter Charlie Faye with Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer at the KOOP studios in Austin, Texas, Friday, Oct. 28, 2011. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio.

Singer/songwriter and community activist Charlie Faye
on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here:

Thorne Dreyer‘s guest on Rag Radio this Friday, November 4, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (Central) on KOOP 91-7-FM in Austin will be Greenlandic Inuit explorer, social worker, and actor Ole Jørgen Hammeken, star of the award-winning film, Inuk, and the film’s executive producer, Marc Buriot. Stream it live here.

Charlie Faye, Austin-based singer/songwriter and community activist, was Thorne Dreyer’s guest on Rag Radio, Friday, October 28.

On January 1, 2010, Charlie Faye, embarked on a modern bohemian adventure. In 10 months, Charlie made her home in 10 different towns: Tucson, Los Angeles, Portland, Boulder, CO, Shreveport, LA, Burlington, VT, Milwaukee, Nashville, Asheville, NC, and New York City. Traveling alone, Charlie put together a new band in each town and wrote and recorded a new song with local musicians each month. Her 10-town-made Travels with Charlie record represents a real cross-section of our national roots-based, Americana music scene.

Charlie Faye also has become one of Austin’s most recognized music community organizers. A front-page story in the Austin American-Statesman outlined her efforts to save Wilson Street, a musicians’ enclave of cottages in South Austin. Charlie discusses with us the sense of community among musicians in Austin (a major factor in her decision to move to Austin in 2007), the importance of affordable housing for the Austin artistic community, and the unique role that the Wilson Street cottages have played.

(After the show was broadcast, Charlie forwarded to us, via Facebook, a 30-day “Notice of Lease Termination and Notice to Vacate” the properties at 2606 and 2610 Wilson Street; the lots are scheduled for redevelopment.)

Charlie’s history also includes touring as a sideman with Dan Zanes and Greg Garing, as well as playing alongside Natalie Merchant, Bettysoo, Will Sexton, and many others. On the show, we discuss her accomplishments and her adventures, and she performs live.

Rag Radio — hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer — is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. KOOP is an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Rag Radio, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is the show’s engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Coming up on Rag Radio:

  • Nov. 4, 2011: Greenlandic Inuit Explorer and Actor Ole Jørgen Hammeken and Inuk Executive Producer Marc Buriot.
  • Nov. 11, 2011: Author and Sustainability Advocate Ellen LaConte.
  • Nov. 18, 2011: Singer/Songwriter, Author, Actor & Artist Bobby Bridger.
  • Nov. 25, 2011: UT-Austin Government Professor David Edwards.

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Bill Meacham : Simone de Beauvoir: A Philosophy of Liberation

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Simone de Beauvoir. Image from Cultural and Critical Theory Library.

Simone de Beauvoir:
A philosophy of liberation

Exercising our own freedom requires that others be free.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / November 3, 2011

I was pleased recently to find the full text of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity freely available on line. De Beauvoir was one of a cadre of post-World-War-II French existentialists that also included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others. Her work provides a fascinating window into a unique point of view on what it is to be human and how that pertains to the struggle for political and spiritual liberty.

The starting point to understanding de Beauvoir is human freedom. Philosophers have had quite a debate about whether human beings have free will.[1] The French existentialists not only assume we do but make it the center point of their view of human nature.

They do this because of what is revealed by their methodology. The existentialists describe the human condition from a radically first-person point of view, the point of view of a free agent; and in doing so they try to avoid all preconceptions and presuppositions. De Beauvoir says “… let man put his will ‘in parentheses’ and he will thereby be brought to the consciousness of his true condition.”[2]

By “in parentheses” she means that we set aside all theories from psychology, history, sociology, biology, and similar sciences and we also set aside, as much as we can, all our taken-for-granted assumptions about who we are. Instead we describe our life purely as we experience it. Immersed in the first-person point of view and trying to avoid terminology from other disciplines, the existentialists employ cryptically evocative terms intended to lead us to new realizations about ourselves and our lives.

From this point of view there are three categories of stuff we find in our world.[3] The first is “I myself,” the self or person as each of us experiences himself or herself; the second is the world of non-human things; and the third is other people.

Each of us — each self, each person — has two fundamental characteristics. One is that we can be conscious of ourselves; we have self-awareness and can mentally step back from our engagement in life and examine, not just what we are engaged with but ourselves as engaged beings as well. The human is “… a being who … questions himself in his being, a being who is at a distance from himself ….”

This ability is the root of the famous nothingness that both de Beauvoir and Sartre claim to be foundational: “… the nothingness which is at the heart of man is also the consciousness that he has of himself.” When you are observing yourself, the you that is doing the observing is not the you that is being observed. In all the elements of experience that you are observing, you the observer are not present. That’s the nothingness.

And this nothingness is free to choose, free to act, undetermined by any of what it is conscious of. The existentialists do not engage in the standard arguments about hard determinism, incompatibilism, and so forth that have populated the historical debate about free will. They just recognize that our activity — as observed in this impartial, presuppositionless way — just happens, springing forth from the same nothingness that underlies our experience. Just as you the observer cannot be observed, neither can you the agent be observed.

You could say that human freedom is a premise of her whole argument, not a result of any logical deduction, but certainly not unexamined either. She does not use the term, but she is asserting agent causality; the human being, she says, is “a cause of itself.” She uses the term “existence” for this kind of being, the kind of being that can transcend itself to become more than what it already has been.

The second category is everything that is not human, that does not have self-awareness and freedom. She calls this “facticity” or “brute fact.” This includes all physical objects, such as tables and chairs, rocks and trees, as well as animals and plants that may be conscious of their world but are not conscious of themselves. The factical is just there; it does not act and cannot transcend itself.

But the factical depends on the human for its being. The nothingness that we each fundamentally are “discloses being.” This does not make any sense from an objective, scientific point of view, but from the existential point of view it does, because by “being” she means what is just there as an element in our experience.

Consider a beautiful sunset. Without our experience of the beauty, would there be beauty? Without our experience of the colors would there even be color? From a scientific point of view we can say that there would be light waves of a certain frequency and intensity. But there is only color and beauty if someone is there to experience them.

If we understand this distinction between existence — what we are — and being — what only exists (for us) as disclosed to us in our experience –, then we can begin to make some sense of enigmatic passages such as these:

My freedom must not seek to trap being but to disclose it. The disclosure is the transition from being to existence. The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence across the always inadequate density of being.

The trick of tyrants is to enclose a man in the immanence of his facticity and to try to forget that man is always, as Heidegger puts it, ‘infinitely more than what he would be if he were reduced to being what he is’ ….

The third category is other people, disclosed through what Heidegger called Mitsein, or being-with. We recognize that others are like us, that each of them is an existence, a freedom, that can transcend itself just as we can. But they are also objects, factical things, that can get in our way or that can be useful to us. And, as they regard us, we become factical and thing-like for them.

The ambiguity that de Beauvoir refers to in the title of her work is just this: that each of us is both an existence, a freedom, “a pure internality against which no external power can take hold” and simultaneously a facticity, “a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things.” (Existentialists, unlike, say, analytic philosophers, can be quite dramatic.) And the ethical question is how to comport ourselves while being true to both aspects of our existence.

She rejects any notion of an absolute goodness or moral imperative that exists on its own. There are no goals or ends to which we are obliged to devote ourselves outside of what we ourselves choose as our projects. “It is desire which creates the desirable, and the project which sets up the end. It is human existence which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which it will be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged.”

Once you have a project — to accomplish something at work, or to raise healthy children, or to create a work of art, or to pursue a hobby — then values spring up in relation to it. There are activities that will promote or hinder your accomplishment of it. But what justifies the project itself?

It is a common complaint about existentialism that it provides no basis for ethics. “[I]f man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes?” But, de Beauvoir responds, there is one goal that comes with being human: the exercise of freedom itself. “[H]uman freedom is the ultimate, the unique end to which man should destine himself,” she says. Freedom is the “universal, absolute end.”

In this she is quite Aristotelian, although she does not acknowledge it. The goal or end of being human, says Aristotle, is to do well what humans uniquely do. When you are exercising your function — which, for de Beauvoir, is to exercise freedom — then you are fulfilled and experience happiness.

Happiness as such is not a goal for the existentialists, but the exercise of the uniquely human function is: “If man wishes to save his existence, as only he himself can do, his original spontaneity must be raised to the height of moral freedom by taking itself as an end through the disclosure of a particular content.” By “disclosure of a particular content” she means the projects that we freely choose. You can’t just choose freedom in the abstract; it is always freedom to pursue a particular goal.

The point is to choose our projects knowingly rather than blindly or habitually, and to choose projects that will enable us to expand our powers and to exercise our creativity in ever more satisfying ways so that we may “feel the joy of existing.”

And in order to do this, we must allow others their freedom as well. And not only allow it, but actively promote it. Exercising our own freedom requires that others be free. The goal is to “become conscious of the real requirements of [our] own freedom, which can will itself only by destining itself to an open future, by seeking to extend itself by means of the freedom of others. … [T]he freedom of other men must be respected and they must be helped to free themselves. Such a law imposes limits upon action and at the same time immediately gives it a content.”

She does not demonstrate that this concern for the freedom of others is required, in the sense of deriving it logically. We could say that she merely asserts it, but that would be missing the point of the existentialist program. She examines her own experience of being in the world and finds it disclosed to her, part of her existence itself: “I concern others and they concern me,” she says. “There we have an irreducible truth. The me-others relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship.” “[T]he existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom.”

Philosophically, we can get at the injunction to have concern for others in many ways. With Kant we could derive it from principles of pure reason. With the Utilitarians we could derive it from the mandate to maximize happiness or pleasure. Perhaps closer to de Beauvoir’s view, we could say that rational self-interest requires it.

But de Beauvoir finds it in an essential part of human existence: the impulse to be generous. “There is vitality only by means of free generosity,” she says. “Contrary to the formal strictness of Kantianism for whom the more abstract the act is the more virtuous it is, generosity seems to us to be better grounded and therefore more valid the less distinction there is between the other and ourself and the more we fulfill ourself in taking the other as an end. That is what happens if I am engaged in relation to others.”

Antonio Núñez Jiménez, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, and Che Guevara in Cuba, 1960. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

So if you are radically free to choose at any moment, how do you figure out what to do? What projects would be suitable for a free existent such as yourself? Art, scientific inquiry, technological innovation and philosophy are all good candidates in so far as they are open-ended, aiming at “an indefinite disclosure of being.”

Science is at its best when it keeps opening the possibilities for new discoveries; technological innovation, when it frees us from drudgery and enables more creativity. And certainly art is high on the list. Not only does the best art flow from the creativity of the artist, but it inspires the audience — the viewer, listener, reader or participant — to find new potentialities, new avenues for self-expression, as well. “Art reveals the transitory as an absolute; and as the transitory existence is perpetuated through the centuries, art too, through the centuries, must perpetuate this never-to-be-finished revelation.”

But the paradigmatic case of an authentic project is the struggle for liberation, politically, socially, and economically, a topic that recurs throughout her work. She published The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1947, and the struggle to liberate France from the Nazis was undoubtedly fresh in her mind. And she was on the editorial board of the left-leaning literary journal Les Temps modernes. A good portion of the third chapter of her book concerns the intricacies and nuances of political action.

The connection between existentialism and politics is obvious. We are all inherently free; hence the slave is always free to rebel against the master. The negro, the woman, the colonized native, the worker in a capitalist enterprise: all are free to rise up against their oppressors.

“[T]he oppressed,” says de Beauvoir, “can fulfill his freedom as a man only in revolt, since the essential characteristic of the situation against which he is rebelling is precisely its prohibiting him from any positive development; it is only in social and political struggle that his transcendence passes beyond to the infinite.” She would, I am confident, quite approve of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

We would be ill advised to swallow the existentialist program whole hog. The radical first-person point of view is, after all, just one person’s opinion. It is up to each of us to examine our own experience of life to see how much of de Beauvoir’s description resonates with us as true. (The ability to do that is another expression of our freedom, she would say.)

If you did so you would notice that you are, in addition to your radical freedom and nothingness, an animal body, an organism. You would find yourself, not floating in empty space, but situated, embedded in the world. You would understand that at the very least you need to choose strategies for being in your world that enhance your ability to survive and stay free.

You would find your world shot through and through with other people, some of whom indeed seem to limit and constrain you, but others of whom thrill to your existence as you thrill to theirs, and with whom you find mutual comfort and joy, or at least pleasant conversation. You would see that, far from being something alien, some heavy density that limits your soaring freedom, your environment in fact supports and sustains you, and it makes sense to support and sustain it in turn.

And you would find, with de Beauvoir, that a strategy of being generous, of being cooperative, of being — she does not use the word, but I will — compassionate, is a strategy that enhances your life.

Right now you are breathing a new breath. Right now is a new moment. What will you do with it?

Notes

[1] My own view is that we certainly do have free will. See my “Do Humans Have Free Will?” at http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/FreeWill.html and “Beyond the Causal Veil” at http://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=424 .
[2] De Beauvoir, Simone, The Ethics of Ambiguity. All quotations are from this work, which is on line and has no page numbers, so I won’t footnote each one. By “man” she means human beings generally, male or female. She wrote before the feminist movement – which took inspiration, in part, from her own The Second Sex— brought to our attention the inherent unfairness and bias of such language.
[3] I’m describing an ontology, but I can’t say three categories of “being” or of “existence,” as both these terms have special meanings for de Beauvoir. And I can’t say categories of “things” because some of them are not things.

References

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Ethics of Ambiguity. On-line publication, URL = http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/ambiguity/index.htm as of 6 October 2011. Another version, not as well proof-read, is here: http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/existentialism/debeauvoir/ambiguity.html as of 6 October 2011.
The Information Philosopher. “Agent-Causality.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/agent-causality.html as of 27 October 2011.
Wikipedia. “Free will.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will as of 27 October 2011.

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin’s 60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at bmeacham.com, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

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Danny Goldberg : Don’t Diss the Drum Circles

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Drummer at Occupy Wall Street in Philadelphia. Image from PhillyNow.

Don’t diss the drum circles:
Why hippie culture is still
important to our protests

By Danny Goldberg / AlterNet / November 2, 2011

Progressives and mainstream Democratic pundits disagree with each other about many issues at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street protests, but with few exceptions they are joined in their contempt for drum circles, free hugs, and other behavior in Zuccotti Park that smacks of hippie culture.

In a post for the Daily Beast Michelle Goldberg lamented, “Drum circles and clusters of earnest incense-burning meditators ensure that stereotypes about the hippie left remain alive.”

At Esquire, Charles Pierce worried that few could “see past all the dreadlocks and hear… over the drum circles.” Michael Smerconish asked on the MSNBC show Hardball if middle Americans “in their Barcalounger” could relate to drum circles. The New Republic’s Alex Klein chimed in, “In the course of my Friday afternoon occupation, I saw two drum circles, four dogs, two saxophones, three babies… Wall Street survived.”

And the host of MSNBC’s Up, Chris Hayes (editor at large of The Nation), recently reassured his guests Naomi Klein and Van Jones that although he supported the political agenda of the protest he wasn’t going to “beat the drum” or “give you a free hug,” to knowing laughter.

Yet it is precisely the mystical utopian energy that most professional progressives so smugly dismiss that has aroused a salient, mass political consciousness on economic issues — something that had eluded even the most lucid progressives in the Obama era.

Since the mythology of the 1960s hangs over so much of the analysis of the Wall Street protests, it’s worth reviewing what actually happened then. Media legend lumps Sixties radicals and hippies together, but from the very beginning most leaders on the left looked at the hippie culture as, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a saboteur of pragmatic progressive politics.

Hippies saw most radicals as delusional and often dangerously angry control freaks. Bad vibes.

Not that there is anything magic about the word “hippie.” Over the years it has been distorted by parody, propaganda, self-hatred, and, from its earliest stirrings, commercialism. In some contemporary contexts it is used merely to refer to people living in the past and/or those who are very stoned.

The hippie idea, as used here, does not refer to colloquialisms like “far out” or products sold by dope dealers. At their core, the counterculture types who briefly called themselves hippies were a spiritual movement. In part they offered an alternative to organized religions that too often seemed preoccupied with rules and conformity, especially on sexual matters. (One reason Eastern religious traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism resonated with hippies was because they carried no American or family baggage.)

But most powerfully, the hippie idea was an uprising against the secular religion of America in the 1950s, morbid “Mad Men” materialism, and Ayn Rand’s social Darwinism.

The hippies were heirs to a long line of bohemians that includes William Blake, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Hesse, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley, utopian movements like the Rosicrucians and the Theosophists, and most directly the Beatniks.

Hippies emerged from a society that had produced birth-control pills, a counterproductive war in Vietnam, the liberation and idealism of the civil rights movement, feminism, gay rights, FM radio, mass-produced LSD, a strong economy, and a huge quantity of baby-boom teenagers. These elements allowed the hippies to have a mainstream impact that dwarfed that of the Beats and earlier avant-garde cultures.

In the mid-Sixties rock and roll’s mass appeal fused with certain elements of hip culture, especially in San Francisco bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company (as well as Seattle’s Jimi Hendrix). That mood was absorbed and expanded by much of the popular music world, including the already popular Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles.

John Lennon’s songs “Instant Karma,” “Give Peace A Chance,” “Across The Universe,” “Revolution” (“But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out”), and “Imagine” are probably as close to a hippie manifesto as existed, and the Woodstock festival as close to a mass manifestation of the idea as would survive the hype.

It is easy to cherry-pick a few idiotic phrases from stoners in the 1970 documentary Woodstock, but what made the event and its legacy meaningful to its fans — aside from the music — was the example of people in the hip community taking care of each other, as shown in the Wavy Gravy documentary Saint Misbehavin’.

No two hippies had the same notion of what the movement was all about, but there were some values they all shared. As Time put it in 1967, “Hippies preach altruism and mysticism, honesty, joy and nonviolence.”

Like any spiritual movement (or religion) hippies attracted pretenders, ranging from undercover cops to predators such as Charles Manson, who used their external trappings for very different agendas.

By October of 1967, following the so-called “Summer of Love” (during which more than a hundred thousand long-haired teenagers overloaded and permanently changed the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco), exploitation of the word “hippie” had become sufficiently prevalent that a group of counterculture pioneers in the Bay Area held a “Death of the Hippie” mock funeral. A flier announcing the ceremony warned young seekers against the existential perils of hype.

Media created the hippie with your hungry consent. Careers are to be had for the enterprising hippie. The media casts nets, create bags for the identity-hungry to climb in. Your face on TV. Your style immortalized without soul in the captions of the [San Francisco] Chronicle. NBC says you exist, ergo I am. Narcissism, plebian vanity.

The pure of heart were exhorted to “Exorcize Haight-Ashbury. Do not be bought by a picture or phrase. Do not be captured in words. You are free, we are free. Believe only in your own incarnate spirit.” Woodstock shows that by 1969 even the long-haired masses had taken to calling themselves “freaks.”

Poet Allen Ginsberg at the Human Be-In, San Francisco, 1967.

A year ago, shortly before the 2010 mid-year election, a left-wing blogger on a conference call with President Obama’s adviser David Axelrod, complained that dismissive comments by the administration about its left-wing base amounted to “hippie punching.”

The phrase was used to emphasize the contempt that the administration had shown for the progressive base, but it was also a reminder of the disdain that most of the Left has for the word “hippie,” as if to complain, “You think that we are as irrelevant as hippies!” Like those who ostentatiously distanced themselves from the Wall Street drum circles, the bloggers wanted to distinguish the modern Left from actual hippies (or who they thought hippies were).

The anti-hippie ethos on the left runs deep. Many 1960s radicals claimed that the hippies had squandered a chance to mainstream left-wing political ideas. In Black Panther leader Bobby Seale’s book Seize the Time he quotes white radical Jerry Rubin as saying that he and others had formed the “Yippies” because hippies had not “necessarily become political yet. They mostly prefer to be stoned.” In the real world, the Yippies never got a mass following, but the Grateful Dead did.

Early in 1967 writers for the Haight-Asbury psychedelic paper the Oracle, along with local poets, musicians, and mystics, organized the first Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. They were chastised by a group of Berkeley radicals, including Rubin, for rejecting their proposal that the gathering should have “demands,” a suggestion that the amused hippie conveners saw as a contradiction of the whole idea.

(There are echoes of this argument in criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street protesters as insufficiently specific in their demands — as if the interests of 99 percent are not a clear enough litmus test for any proposed laws or regulations.)

Bill Zimmerman, an antiwar activist of the Vietnam era, summarized the radical attitude toward hippies in his excellent memoir Troublemaker:

Not believing they could alter the juggernaut of American capitalism through politics, the hippies tried culture instead — starting with [Timothy] Leary’s slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out”… While we [“the political people in the antiwar movement”] all accepted a subsistence lifestyle without expensive clothes, cars or other luxuries, they were about enjoyment, friendship, shared experiences, and whatever transcendence could be achieved through mind-altering drugs, music, and sex.

This both exaggerates the political viability of the non-hippie radicals of the day and underestimates the social conscience and commitment of many of those who chose to develop communes and new age spiritual communities.

One example is the SEVA Foundation, founded by Wavy Gravy and Ram Dass in the early 1970s. Over the course of 30 years, the nonprofit organization has raised enough money from rock benefits to pay for over three million eye operations in Third-World countries to rescue people from blindness. And of course the modern environmental movement owes as much to a mystical belief in the sanctity of the earth as it does to science.

Some on the left maintained that hippies scared off socially conservative liberals who otherwise would have been more sympathetic to the antiwar movement. In There but for Fortune, a wonderful documentary about radical singer-songwriter Phil Ochs, the artist can be heard complaining that freakish looking protesters undermined the credibility of antiwar demonstrations with middle Americans.

In a piece for The Nation in 1967, Ochs’s friend Jack Newfield complained, “Bananas, incense, and pointing love rays to the Pentagon have nothing to do with redeeming America.”

Republican leaders including Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Ronald Reagan eagerly used cartoon versions of hippies as part of their successful attempt to break up the New Deal coalition. “A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah,” quipped then California Governor Reagan in 1969.

Jefferson R. Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive theorizes that America’s rightward trend began when Nixon lured working-class whites into Republican arms by contrasting the hippie myth of Woodstock with country singer Merle Haggard’s anti-hippie anthem “Okie from Muskogee.”

One was southern, gritty, masculine, working class, white, and soaked in the reality of putting food on the table; the other was northern, eastern, radical, effete, leisurely, affluent, multi-cultural, and full of pipe dreams.

One was real, the other surreal; one worked, the other played; one did the labor, the other did the criticism; one drank whiskey, the other smoked dope; one built, the other destroyed; one was for survival, the other was for revolution; one died in wars, the other protested wars; and one was for Richard Nixon, the other for George McGovern.

Cowie’s book is terrific, but this is nonsense. The lion’s share of the decline in Democratic votes for president occurred between 1964 (61 percent) and 1968 (43 percent), when Hubert Humphrey was the nominee. Most of those formerly Democratic votes went to the racist Alabama Governor George Wallace, who garnered 13 percent of the vote on a third-party ticket — an explicit reaction against civil rights legislation.

The demonstrations outside of the Democratic Convention in 1968 in which many Americans sympathized with cops more than protesters had nothing to do with hippies; they were orchestrated by radical non-hippies like Rubin. (Hippie icon Allen Ginsberg argued in vain against the Chicago protests, because he presciently feared violence).

Four years later, there were no hippies involved with the McGovern campaign’s mistakes, like the ill-advised selection of Thomas Eagleton as the vice-presidential nominee and the breakdown of the relationship between the campaign and organized labor. Those mistakes were made by well-intentioned but inept liberal political consultants, many of whom would self-righteously characterize themselves as “pragmatists” in future years.

It is possible that some non-racist, older, white Democrats switched sides because they were offended by aspects of hippie culture, but it seems likely that more of their children and grandchildren rejected conservative orthodoxy because of their attraction to that very culture. The Allman Brothers and other southern rock bands developed a following that dwarfed that of Haggard, and ended up being a source of funding for Jimmy Carter’s primary campaign in 1976.

Modern heirs to the hippie idea include millions of “New Age” believers, inspired by the likes of Baba Ram Dass, Joseph Campbell, Deepak Chopra, and in some cases Oprah Winfrey, whose non-hierarchal spirituality exists outside the confines of traditional churches and synagogues. Although very few neo-hippie groups have explicit political agendas, many in the progressive public interest world benefit from their largess.

What possible relevance does any of this have to American politics in 2011? For one thing, many of those young people who like to beat on drums and who devised some of the subtle infrastructure of Occupy Wall Street are clearly tuned into an energy that exists outside of the parameters of political science.

Spiritual movements do not adhere to “party lines,” which is one reason why conventional political activists find them so maddening. Martin Scorsese’s recent documentary on the life of George Harrison reminded us not only of the Beatles’ passionate embrace of Hinduism and the funds he raised for Bangladesh but also of his perverse anger at paying his taxes.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t take a poll or a focus group to know that people who identify with the hippie idea are unlikely to vote Republican. (Ron Paul’s people are trying. They give out fliers at Occupy Wall Street while, as of this writing, Democrats still fear to do so.)

Conservatives have effectively peddled the notion that all politics are corrupt. The resulting apathy, and opposition to government, conveniently leaves big business more in charge than ever. The price that Democrats and progressives pay for belittling or ignoring contemporary devotees of the hippie idea, who share the opinion that politics are corrupt, is to reinforce the impulse to “drop out” in a cohort that would otherwise be, for the most part, natural allies.

Spiritual values can expand the reach of political action, especially at a time when progressives struggle to connect to mass consciousness. Their causes have been mired in phrases like “single-payer” and “cap-and-trade.” For all of their virtues, policy wonks didn’t come up with “We are the 99 percent.” People with drum circles did.

The Right understands the subtle connections between ideology and practical politics. Few Republican leaders distance themselves from right-wing Christians or demagogues like Glenn Beck. And Ayn Rand’s doctrine of selfishness, despite elements that conservative politicians would be afraid to avow, is celebrated by right-wing oligarchs and wannabes.

Alan Greenspan, the long-time head of the Federal Reserve, was a personal disciple of Rand, and Congressman Paul Ryan, who drafted the Republican budget that would’ve eliminated Medicare, cites Rand as his intellectual hero.

Any bohemian movement will attract goofballs. Drum circles may inspire and unify a crowd in one situation, but simply drown out conversation in another. It is one thing for a polite protester to offer “free hugs,” and quite another for a sweaty inebriate to impose them. The way to deal with this is to rebuke individual jerks, not to dismiss a vibrant section of mass culture.

As Martin Luther King pursued his strategy of nonviolent protest, the NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, who oversaw most of the legal strategy for the civil rights movement, mocked him by asking, “How many laws have you changed?” King replied, “I don’t know, but we’ve changed a lot of hearts.”

Obviously, the civil rights movement needed both spiritual and legal efforts to achieve its goals. So do modern progressives. As Nick Lowe asked in the song made famous by Elvis Costello, “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?”

[Danny Goldberg is the author of the books How the Left Lost Teen Spirit and Bumping Into Geniuses. This article was first published at Dissent Magazine and was distributed by AlterNet.]

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Wayne Grytting : Gandhi Meets Monty Python

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

We are all Guy Fawkes. Occupiers in Zuccotti Park in New York turn protest into theater. Photo by Andrew Burton / AP.

Gandhi meets Monty Python:
The comedic turn in nonviolent tactics

By Wayne Grytting / Waging Nonviolence / November 1, 2011

On October 3rd, protesters at Occupy Wall Street failed to march. Instead they clumsily lurched. With white painted faces, glazed looks and dollar bills hanging out of some mouths, protesters chanted “I smell money, I smell money…” It was Corporate Zombie Day.

Scenes like this and the sight of Guy Fawkes masks, clown suits, drumming circles, and surrealistic posters all over the country have left many commentators scratching their heads. Is this protest or carnival? Maybe we should tell them. There’s been a sea change in the protest industry.

“A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future,” proclaims Adbusters, the initiators of Occupy Wall Street. A key part of this rechanneling of tactics has been a move away from both angry protests or passive waiting-to-be-clubbed-by-police-batons to age-old carnival-style antics.

A festive atmosphere has reigned supreme in all of the successful pro-democracy uprisings of the past two decades. In Poland, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Tunisia, and Egypt, music and humor were everywhere. Why?

Musically, Eastern European rallies were powered by punk rock bands while in the Arab Spring, “hip-hop has become the rhythm of the resistance,” writes author Robin Wright. Tahrir Square, says journalist Sarah Carr, “was essentially a comedy explosion.”

Tunisia was “a pioneer in revolution and now it’s at the forefront in comic expression,” proclaims the voice of Captain Khuzba, the masked cartoon hero who fought Tunisia’s secret police armed with a loaf of French bread. In Serbia’s pro-democracy movement in 2000, Srdja Popovic, a leader of Otpor (“Resistance”) reports, “Everything we did had a dosage of humor.”

Otpor is the organization credited with forging the nonviolent tactics used in the Arab Spring and earlier pro-democracy movements in Georgia and Ukraine. Founded in 1998 following a period of failed demonstrations by a small ragged group of twenty-somethings, it had within two years built a movement that overthrew Serbia’s dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

Otpor learned early that humor could be a gigantic ice breaker, cutting through citizen’s fear and apathy and “turning oppression upside down.” They fine-tuned the art of comedic resistance, added modern marketing techniques and the strategic framework provided by Gene Sharp.

The starting point for Sharp in From Dictatorship to Democracy is a recognition that “The common error of past improvised political defiance campaigns is the reliance on only one or two methods, such as strikes and mass demonstrations.” His remedy was a heavy dosage of “low-risk, confidence-building actions.” Street theater and under-the-radar comic protests.

Following this path, Mykhailo Svystovych, of Ukraine’s youth movement group Pora (“It’s Time”) recalls: “We didn’t do rallies with speakers, we did theatrical events.” The massive rallies we viewed on TV — this was the final chapter prepared by years of small guerrilla incursions.

Who were Otpor’s heroes? In interviews they list names we might expect: Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and an unexpected source: Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Stop the presses. What? How did those clowns sneak into the club? What is it about Monty Python-style humor that lends itself to deposing tyrannies? Let’s look closely at the exact laughter creating tactics developed in these movements so you can judge for yourself — and maybe add to your own resume.

Fortunately, excellent stories have been collected by authors Tina Rosenberg (“Revolution U”), Patrick Kearny (A Carnival of Revolution), Matthew Collin (The Time of the Rebels) and video producer Steven York (A Force More Powerful).

Wall Street zombie. Image from IBTimes.

1. Flying under the radar

Dictators typically outlaw protest marches and give their security forces carte blanche to bash heads. In South Africa, blacks “solved” the problem by assembling large gatherings at funerals, the one kind of gathering the Apartheid government was not ready to ban. How could the deceased help it if she or he had tens of thousands of friends who wanted to mourn and follow the hearse through town?

In Serbia, Otpor developed a tactic of “flash” protests, introducing a game called “Arrest the Traffic Lights.” People would mob street intersections and simply jump up and down while the walk lights were green. When the light changed they’d carefully obey the law and disperse only to resume their protest when the light said “go” again.

In Chile in 1983 labor unions made plans for their first test of Pinochet after 10 years of violent repression. Copper miners about to go on strike observed the large number of soldiers assembling by their mines and swiftly changed tactics. Instead of a strike, they called for a national day of slow movement.

All over Chile, people simply drove, walked or worked in slow motion to express their solidarity. Later they banged on pots and pans at exactly 8 p.m. How do you arrest slow walkers or pot bangers? It’s a massive clown routine worthy of a Marcel Marceau. How could you not smile at your fellow slow motion actors? After that the ice was broken and an irresistible wave of protests began.

2. Obedience parody

If protests against a government are being discouraged, and you feel a need to walk with a large group, you can always choose to march in “support” of the government. So Otpor paraded “for” Milosevic’s socialist party, but did so with a small herd of sheep with signs around their necks announcing “We support the Socialist Party.”

In the Ukraine, student members of Pora (“It’s Time”) fought against the usurped election of their local tyrant named Yanukovych. He had a prison record so Pora members dressed up in prison uniforms and campaigned for him in the main streets of Kiev, Ukraine’s capitol.

In Egypt, activists helped government officials by setting up Facebook pages for them and Twitter accounts so they could spread their messages. One official’s favorite activities were listed for him as: “Kicking ass, taking names, and wearing decorations with more colors than you can find in a pack of Skittles.”

In Poland in 1987, a group of “socialist surrealists” called the Orange Alternative (combining Communist red with the Catholic yellow) produced parodies of official events. On one April Fool’s Day they marched to the central square in Wroclaw to express their love of the government through a voluntary work day.

Armed with mops and toothbrushes — which was very inefficient, I might add — they proceeded to clean up the square while singing socialist labor songs and dressing up like ideal workers from old Stalinist movies of the 1930s. Police again confronted the problem — what can you arrest them for? Cleaning up the square is a crime? Acting as fools gained protesters immunity from repression and a strengthened community of smiling co-conspirators.

Members of Otpor stage a silent protest in Belgrade against Serbian regime and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Photo by Sasa Stankovic / EPA / The Guardian.

3. Therapeutic pies in the face

If moving slowly together can help create community, imagine what collectively throwing a pie in the face of a dictator can be like. Otpor, in their most famous actions, brought out a barrel with Milosevic’s picture on it and let people hit it with a stick for only one dinar. Those who were unemployed because of Milosevic could hit it twice for free. The police only looked ridiculous when they stepped in to, in the words of Otpor, “arrest” the barrel. Pictures of the “arrest” would soon be posted in the Internet.

In Georgia in 2003, the group Kmara (“Enough”) created large banners where passers-by could take photos of themselves flushing their president, Eduard Shevardnadze, down the toilet. In Ukraine, by 2004 the action had moved to the Internet where citizen’s could throw eggs at their soon to be deposed leader Yankukovych, who had famously overreacted to a real egg throwing incident.

What is hitting a picture of a dictator but a version of the dunk tank? These actions go back to centuries-old carnival traditions of ridiculing the high and mighty. They crop up in movement after movement because they meet very basic needs. Throwing a pie at authority can be a low-risk participatory event with an appreciative community cheering one on. It’s not lazily watching Jon Stewart on TV — it’s physical action against authority, a physical break with patterns of passivity and isolation, a nonviolent rechanneling of simmering anger.

4. Idiocy rising to the top

Much of the humor of movements requires faith, a conviction that if you just set the table, the other side’s idiocy will provide all the humor necessary. For example, Otpor had their offices raided and computers hauled away. Knowing they had an informer “assisting” their activities, they put out the word they would be bringing in a load of new computer equipment. At the “secret” time trucks pulled up with heavy looking boxes. While laboring to lift these loads, the police intervened, only to discover all the boxes were empty. The story, with photos, went viral.

When Serbia’s government leveled charges that Otpor was a foreign-paid terrorist organization, Otpor took flatbed trucks and megaphones to the streets to denounce and expose the “terrorists” in their midst. They brought 17 and 18-year-old “terrorist” students in front of the public and grilled them about their activities.

Similarly, in Egypt, when the government officials denounced the protesters for serving “foreign agendas,” young people showed up at Tahrir Square with plain blank notebooks, complaining they’d left their foreign agendas at home.

Orange Alternative: Photo from the exhibition Pomaranczowa Alternatywa Happeningiem w Komunizm at the Galeria Miedzynarodowego Centrum Kultury. Image from Daily Serving.

5. Absurdity squared

Community organizing guru Saul Alinsky’s famous Rules for Radicals #3 states: “Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.” Or any forms of rationality they might ever recognize.

We enter here into pure Monty Python territory. Otpor, for example, would hold fake soccer games in the streets complete with uniformed referees and an imaginary soccer ball. Or they would hold parades in ridiculous fancy dress with no protest slogans, or gaily deliver cookies and flowers to police stations.

My favorite example is from the Orange Alternative in Poland. After the group carefully spray-painted graffiti around Wroclaw, the police would come by and paint it over with white paint. This would leave unsightly white splotches on building walls. Instead of posting yet more graffiti, the activists took red paint and turned the splotches into elves. (Think of Hegel’s dialectic here — but on LSD). As more and more red elves appeared, this morphed into a demonstration where thousands dressed up in red and marched chanting “Elves are real!”

American activists will recognize most of the elements of the festive model. Certainly the street theater of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) or “Billionaires for Bush” anticipates much of the spirit of the pro-democracy movements. But what stands out in the new movements is the integration of the class clowns with the nerds, of spontaneity with nonviolent discipline.

Traditionally people attracted to festive protests, group hugs, and consensus decision-making have been too laid back to organize effectively. The successful pro-democracy groups have managed to combine these elements with a caffeinated backbone of organizers who make the trains run on time and know when to shift gears.

Otpor leader Srdja Popovic, succinctly makes the point: “You can have 100,000 people in the streets and one single idiot who’s throwing stones, and he’s going to be the star of the day and this is how media operates.” The remarkable level of nonviolence maintained by these movements points to a concerted behind-the-scenes enforcement of a “no-idiocy” policy that leaves Seattle WTO veterans green with envy.

Pro-democracy movements established clear boundaries within which a “diversity of tactics” could flourish. Former Otpor leaders now run the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in Belgrade, which offers extensive training opportunities for inquiring minds.

Monty Python-style humor is rooted in centuries-old carnival traditions which, as Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin has so brilliantly taught us, emphasize that all of us are fools and clowns just waiting to slip on banana peels. It has a humility that cuts through any vestiges of elitism or know-it-all political correctness.

Carnival represents the joyful life that stands as the total opposite of the zombie-like death of corporate rule. It’s what I believe allowed Otpor and other pro-democracy groups of twenty-somethings to bridge age and cultural gaps and build powerful movements.

Occupy Wall Street is a bold “experiment in truth,” which my stock analysts tell me should lead to a bull market in protests. Let’s keep a smile on it.

[Wayne Grytting is the author of American Newspeak: The Mangling of Meaning for Power and Profit and a former teacher in Seattle. He writes a blog — Penetrating the Fog — on the uses of humor to open closed minds. This article was first published at Waging Nonviolence.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer


southyrolean / flickr

M. Python: And now for something completely different.

Wall Street zombie. Image from IBTimes.

Gandhi meets Monty Python:
The comedic turn in nonviolent tactics

By Wayne Grytting / Waging Nonviolence / November 1, 2011

On October 3rd, protesters at Occupy Wall Street failed to march. Instead they clumsily lurched. With white painted faces, glazed looks and dollar bills hanging out of some mouths, protesters chanted “I smell money, I smell money…” It was Corporate Zombie Day.

Scenes like this and the sight of Guy Fawkes masks, clown suits, drumming circles, and surrealistic posters all over the country have left many commentators scratching their heads. Is this protest or carnival? Maybe we should tell them. There’s been a sea change in the protest industry.

“A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future,” proclaims Adbusters, the initiators of Occupy Wall Street. A key part of this rechanneling of tactics has been a move away from both angry protests or passive waiting-to-be-clubbed-by-police-batons to age-old carnival-style antics.

A festive atmosphere has reigned supreme in all of the successful pro-democracy uprisings of the past two decades. In Poland, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Tunisia, and Egypt, music and humor were everywhere. Why?

Musically, Eastern European rallies were powered by punk rock bands while in the Arab Spring, “hip-hop has become the rhythm of the resistance,” writes author Robin Wright. Tahrir Square, says journalist Sarah Carr, “was essentially a comedy explosion.” Tunisia was “a pioneer in revolution and now it’s at the forefront in comic expression,” proclaims the voice of Captain Khuzba, the masked cartoon hero who fought Tunisia’s secret police armed with a loaf of French bread. In Serbia’s pro-democracy movement in 2000, Srdja Popovic, a leader of Otpor (“Resistance”) reports, “Everything we did had a dosage of humor.”

Otpor is the organization credited with forging the nonviolent tactics used in the Arab Spring and earlier pro-democracy movements in Georgia and Ukraine. Founded in 1998 following a period of failed demonstrations by a small ragged group of twenty-somethings, it had within two years built a movement that overthrew Serbia’s dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

Otpor learned early that humor could be a gigantic ice breaker, cutting through citizen’s fear and apathy and “turning oppression upside down.” They fine-tuned the art of comedic resistance, added modern marketing techniques and the strategic framework provided by Gene Sharp.

The starting point for Sharp in From Dictatorship to Democracy is a recognition that “The common error of past improvised political defiance campaigns is the reliance on only one or two methods, such as strikes and mass demonstrations.” His remedy was a heavy dosage of “low-risk, confidence-building actions.” Street theater and under-the-radar comic protests.

Following this path, Mykhailo Svystovych, of Ukraine’s youth movement group Pora (“It’s Time”) recalls: “We didn’t do rallies with speakers, we did theatrical events.” The massive rallies we viewed on TV — this was the final chapter prepared by years of small guerrilla incursions.

Who were Otpor’s heroes? In interviews they list names we might expect: Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and an unexpected source: Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Stop the presses. What? How did those clowns sneak into the club? What is it about Monty Python-style humor that lends itself to deposing tyrannies? Let’s look closely at the exact laughter creating tactics developed in these movements so you can judge for yourself — and maybe add to your own resume.

Fortunately, excellent stories have been collected by authors Tina Rosenberg (“Revolution U”), Patrick Kearny (A Carnival of Revolution), Matthew Collin (The Time of the Rebels) and video producer Steven York (A Force More Powerful).

1. Flying under the radar

Dictators typically outlaw protest marches and give their security forces carte blanche to bash heads. In South Africa, blacks “solved” the problem by assembling large gatherings at funerals, the one kind of gathering the Apartheid government was not ready to ban. How could the deceased help it if she or he had tens of thousands of friends who wanted to mourn and follow the hearse through town?

In Serbia, Otpor developed a tactic of “flash” protests, introducing a game called “Arrest the Traffic Lights.” People would mob street intersections and simply jump up and down while the walk lights were green. When the light changed they’d carefully obey the law and disperse only to resume their protest when the light said “go” again.

In Chile in 1983 labor unions made plans for their first test of Pinochet after 10 years of violent repression. Copper miners about to go on strike observed the large number of soldiers assembling by their mines and swiftly changed tactics. Instead of a strike, they called for a national day of slow movement.

All over Chile, people simply drove, walked or worked in slow motion to express their solidarity. Later they banged on pots and pans at exactly 8 p.m. How do you arrest slow walkers or pot bangers? It’s a massive clown routine worthy of a Marcel Marceau. How could you not smile at your fellow slow motion actors? After that the ice was broken and an irresistible wave of protests began.

2. Obedience parody

If protests against a government are being discouraged, and you feel a need to walk with a large group, you can always choose to march in “support” of the government. So Otpor paraded “for” Milosevic’s socialist party, but did so with a small herd of sheep with signs around their necks announcing “We support the Socialist Party.”

In the Ukraine, student members of Pora (“It’s Time”) fought against the usurped election of their local tyrant named Yanukovych. He had a prison record so Pora members dressed up in prison uniforms and campaigned for him in the main streets of Kiev, Ukraine’s capitol.

In Egypt, activists helped government officials by setting up Facebook pages for them and Twitter accounts so they could spread their messages. One official’s favorite activities were listed for him as: “Kicking ass, taking names, and wearing decorations with more colors than you can find in a pack of Skittles.”

In Poland in 1987, a group of “socialist surrealists” called the Orange Alternative (combining Communist red with the Catholic yellow) produced parodies of official events. On one April Fool’s Day they marched to the central square in Wroclaw to express their love of the government through a voluntary work day.

Armed with mops and toothbrushes — which was very inefficient, I might add — they proceeded to clean up the square while singing socialist labor songs and dressing up like ideal workers from old Stalinist movies of the 1930s. Police again confronted the problem — what can you arrest them for? Cleaning up the square is a crime? Acting as fools gained protesters immunity from repression and a strengthened community of smiling co-conspirators.

3. Therapeutic pies in the face

If moving slowly together can help create community, imagine what collectively throwing a pie in the face of a dictator can be like. Otpor, in their most famous actions, brought out a barrel with Milosevic’s picture on it and let people hit it with a stick for only one dinar. Those who were unemployed because of Milosevic could hit it twice for free. The police only looked ridiculous when they stepped in to, in the words of Otpor, “arrest” the barrel. Pictures of the “arrest” would soon be posted in the Internet.

In Georgia in 2003, the group Kmara (“Enough”) created large banners where passers-by could take photos of themselves flushing their president, Eduard Shevardnadze, down the toilet. In Ukraine, by 2004 the action had moved to the Internet where citizen’s could throw eggs at their soon to be deposed leader Yankukovych, who had famously overreacted to a real egg throwing incident.

What is hitting a picture of a dictator but a version of the dunk tank? These actions go back to centuries-old carnival traditions of ridiculing the high and mighty. They crop up in movement after movement because they meet very basic needs. Throwing a pie at authority can be a low-risk participatory event with an appreciative community cheering one on. It’s not lazily watching Jon Stewart on TV — it’s physical action against authority, a physical break with patterns of passivity and isolation, a nonviolent rechanneling of simmering anger.

4. Idiocy rising to the top

Much of the humor of movements requires faith, a conviction that if you just set the table, the other side’s idiocy will provide all the humor necessary. For example, Otpor had their offices raided and computers hauled away. Knowing they had an informer “assisting” their activities, they put out the word they would be bringing in a load of new computer equipment. At the “secret” time trucks pulled up with heavy looking boxes. While laboring to lift these loads, the police intervened, only to discover all the boxes were empty. The story, with photos, went viral.

When Serbia’s government leveled charges that Otpor was a foreign-paid terrorist organization, Otpor took flatbed trucks and megaphones to the streets to denounce and expose the “terrorists” in their midst. They brought 17 and 18-year-old “terrorist” students in front of the public and grilled them about their activities.

Similarly, in Egypt, when the government officials denounced the protesters for serving “foreign agendas,” young people showed up at Tahrir Square with plain blank notebooks, complaining they’d left their foreign agendas at home.

5. Absurdity squared

Community organizing guru Saul Alinsky’s famous Rules for Radicals #3 states: “Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.” Or any forms of rationality they might ever recognize.

We enter here into pure Monty Python territory. Otpor, for example, would hold fake soccer games in the streets complete with uniformed referees and an imaginary soccer ball. Or they would hold parades in ridiculous fancy dress with no protest slogans, or gaily deliver cookies and flowers to police stations.

My favorite example is from the Orange Alternative in Poland. After the group carefully spray-painted graffiti around Wroclaw, the police would come by and paint it over with white paint. This would leave unsightly white splotches on building walls. Instead of posting yet more graffiti, the activists took red paint and turned the splotches into elves. (Think of Hegel’s dialectic here — but on LSD). As more and more red elves appeared, this morphed into a demonstration where thousands dressed up in red and marched chanting “Elves are real!”

American activists will recognize most of the elements of the festive model. Certainly the street theater of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) or “Billionaires for Bush” anticipates much of the spirit of the pro-democracy movements. But what stands out in the new movements is the integration of the class clowns with the nerds, of spontaneity with nonviolent discipline.

Traditionally people attracted to festive protests, group hugs, and consensus decision-making have been too laid back to organize effectively. The successful pro-democracy groups have managed to combine these elements with a caffeinated backbone of organizers who make the trains run on time and know when to shift gears.

Otpor leader Srdja Popovic, succinctly makes the point: “You can have 100,000 people in the streets and one single idiot who’s throwing stones, and he’s going to be the star of the day and this is how media operates.” The remarkable level of nonviolence maintained by these movements points to a concerted behind-the-scenes enforcement of a “no-idiocy” policy that leaves Seattle WTO veterans green with envy.

Pro-democracy movements established clear boundaries within which a “diversity of tactics” could flourish. Former Otpor leaders now run the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in Belgrade, which offers extensive training opportunities for inquiring minds.

Monty Python-style humor is rooted in centuries-old carnival traditions which, as Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin has so brilliantly taught us, emphasize that all of us are fools and clowns just waiting to slip on banana peels. It has a humility that cuts through any vestiges of elitism or know-it-all political correctness.

Carnival represents the joyful life that stands as the total opposite of the zombie-like death of corporate rule. It’s what I believe allowed Otpor and other pro-democracy groups of twenty-somethings to bridge age and cultural gaps and build powerful movements.

Occupy Wall Street is a bold “experiment in truth,” which my stock analysts tell me should lead to a bull market in protests. Let’s keep a smile on it.

[Wayne Grytting is the author of American Newspeak: The Mangling of Meaning for Power and Profit and a former teacher in Seattle. He writes a blog — Penetrating the Fog — on the uses of humor to open closed minds. This article was first published at Waging Nonviolence.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Leave a comment

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Beyond the Causal Veil
by Bill Meacham

Quantum indeterminacy operates inside your brain. What does that say about the nature of human will and decision-making?(1)

We’ve taken a look at the world of quantum physics before, but a little recap is in order in case you missed it. The quantum level is where thing are quite tiny, less than about 100 nanometers long. Here things behave very strangely. We can describe their properties and behavior mathematically by a formula called the “wave function,” and under certain circumstances the wave function divides into two or more pairs or branches, each with its own consequences. Each of these branches represents a potential future or a potential version of reality. When observed, only one of these branches is perceived; that is, only one of the potential futures becomes the actual perceived present.

Double-Slit experiment resultsA famous experiment, widely replicated, called the Double-Slit experiment reveals the strangeness of this level of reality. It consists of sending light through two side-by-side vertical slits to a recording medium, such as film; and it shows, among other things, that light can behave both as a stream of particles and as a wave. When light is sent through one slit at a time, a vertical band appears. In this case light acts like a series of particles that go through the slit, hit the recording medium and make an impression. If you open the slit on the right, the band appears on the right, and if you open the slit on the left, the band appears on the left. You would expect that if both slits were opened, the result would be two side-by-side bands. In fact, however, the result is a strong band in the middle, the expected bands on the left and right, and then dimmer bands extending outward in each direction. Light in this case acts like waves that cause interference patterns. That is, when a crest meets a crest, a more intense crest results; and when a crest meets a trough they cancel out. The bands of light are from the crests reinforcing each other, and the darkness in between is the from crests and troughs canceling each other out.

Even more interesting, when light is emitted one photon at a time and aimed at the two slits, it shows the same interference pattern. You would expect that a photon would go through one slit or the other. In fact it appears to act like a wave that goes through both slits, interferes with itself, and results in an impression in one and only one of the bands.

And you cannot predict in advance where the photon will make an impression.

You can predict that given a great number of photons, they will result in bands. That is, they won’t all end up in the same place, but rather in various places according to their probability distribution. But there is only a probability, not an absolute certainty, that any single photon will end up in one place or another.

We might well ask what causes the wave, which is mathematically described as a collection of probabilities of being detected in various places, to be in fact detected at only one place. I’ll return to this question shortly. For now, note the quantum indeterminacy, our inability to predict the final location of any single photon. The sequence in which the singly-emitted photons will arrive is completely unpredictable. We have a radical discontinuity of causality.

In ordinary life and in classical (non-quantum) physics, we have a clear concept of causality: a cause is something that reliably produces an effect. Given the same or a similar set of circumstances, we expect the same results to appear. Hitting a billiard ball at a certain angle and with a certain force will always cause it to move in a certain direction and at a certain speed. This conception of causality has three parts:

Regularity – A cause always produces its effect according to physical laws that can be discovered by observation and experiment.
Temporal sequence – The cause always precedes its effect in time. The cause never follows the effect.
Spatial contiguity – There is always some physical connection or spatial contact between the cause and its effect, or a chain of such connections.

At the quantum level, the regularity is missing. There is no set of circumstances that causes the photon always to be detected in a specific place. (And, as we have seen, sometimes spatial contiguity is missing as well.)

Once the photon has been detected then the ordinary chain of causality takes over. The beginning of a macroscopic event can certainly be dependent on a microscopic event. In that case, each microscopic possibility at the beginning can lead to a different chain of macroscopic events at the end.

This becomes important when we consider that some events in the brain happen at the quantum level.

The human brain is a mass of electrochemical activity. It contains approximately 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, and up to five quadrillion connection points between them. Neurons are the fundamental elements of the brain; they transmit electrochemical impulses to and from other neurons, sense organs or muscles. Some impulses are triggered by sense organs, and some by the excitation of neighboring neurons. Some impulses excite or inhibit neighboring neurons and some cause muscle contractions that move the body.

Parts of a neuronA neuron consists of several parts: numerous dendrites, which look vaguely like trees with many branches, a cell body, and a single axon, a tube that divides at the end to many terminals. Dendrites are the incoming channels; they receive electrochemical impulses from other cells, which then pass through the body and out the axon terminals. Between the axon terminals and the dendrites of the neighboring neurons are gaps, called synapses, only twenty nanometers wide. On the other side of the synaptic gap from the axon is a receptor area on a dendrite of a neighboring cell. An axon can have many terminals, and each dendrite can have many receptor areas. Thus each neuron transmits impulses to and receives impulses from a great many neighboring neurons. Some neurons receive impulses from up to 10,000 neighbors. Some in the cerebellum receive up to 100,000. Clearly the brain is an organ of almost unimaginable complexity.

The impulse traveling through the neuron is an electrical charge. A neuron either transmits the impulse (we say it fires) or it does not; it is a binary element, either on (firing) or off (not firing). When the electrical charge reaches the synaptic gap, it triggers the release of chemicals, neurotransmitters, which is why we call brain activity electrochemical. A single release of a neurotransmitter might be too weak to trigger the receiving neuron, but since each neuron forms outgoing synapses with many others and likewise receives synaptic inputs from many others, the combination of several inputs at once can be enough to trigger it. Or the receipt of an inhibitory neurotransmitter can prevent an impulse that otherwise would have fired. The output of a neuron thus depends on the inputs from many others, each of which may have a different degree of influence depending on the strength of its synapse with that neuron.

What is interesting for the present discussion is what happens to cause the neurotransmitters to travel across the synapse. The chemistry is a bit complex, but basically neurotransmitter chemicals sit docked in little pockets, called vesicles, waiting for something to release them. When the electrical impulse arrives at the terminal, it opens up channels that let calcium ions in. The calcium makes the vesicle fuse with the cell wall and open up so the neurotransmitters go out into the synaptic gap and then hit the receiving neuron.

The channels through which calcium ions enter the nerve terminal from outside the neuron are tiny, only about a nanometer at their narrowest, not much bigger than a calcium ion itself. The calcium ions migrate from their entry channels to sites within the nerve terminal where they trigger the release of the contents of a vesicle. At this submicroscopic level of reality, quantum indeterminacy is in play. A given calcium ion might or might not hit a given triggering site; hence, a given neurotransmitter might or might not be released; hence the receiving neuron might or might not get excited (or inhibited).

In other words, at the most fundamental level, brain functioning is not causally determined.

And since the ordinary chain of causality takes over after the quantum event happens, quantum uncertainty at the synaptic level can lead to causal uncertainty at the level of the whole brain. And that means – since the state of the brain at least heavily influences, if not causally determines, our perceptions, thoughts, feelings and actions – that human conduct is not fully causally determined in the physical world.

What causes a quantum event – in this case the impact of a calcium ion on a triggering site – to cease being merely a probability and start being something that happens at a certain place? Not anything in the physical world. There is a causal discontinuity in nature. Events at the quantum level of reality have no physical cause, but are themselves causes of subsequent events. What is on the other side of the causal discontinuity?

At this point we move beyond what physics can tell us, but clearly it leaves open the possibility that human will is free and even that something that transcends our ordinary notion of the physical – a soul, perhaps, or a god or a plethora of deities – intervenes in the physical world.

Some protest that the causal uncertainty at the quantum level of reality is merely statistical. Events happen randomly; hence, we can draw no conclusions about nonphysical causality, free will, the existence of a soul or of God, or any such thing. In particular, they say, a decision that is initiated by a random occurrence is no more free than one initiated by physical causality. But random as they may be individually, quantum events considered as a group certainly do exhibit regularities. Light passed through double slits exhibits distinct patterns, not random noise.

Consider a pointillist painting, which consists of distinct dots of pigment. If you look at it up close, all you see is random dots. When you view it from afar, you see identifiable forms and shapes, recognizable objects, patterns. So what are the patterns that we find in the behavior that issues from the firing of our brain cells? Does what is outside the bounds of physical causality have any regularity or structure of its own that we can use to understand and predict what it will do? Are there any categories of causal explanation that might be applicable?

The answer is, yes, of course there are: the concepts that pertain to agents. We explain the behavior of agents not in terms of physics and chemistry but in terms of their perceptions, beliefs, desires and goals.

By “agent” I mean the usual: something with will and intention, something that initiates movement without an external nudge, something that acts or has the power to act on its own rather than merely reacting to events. Agency is a different category of causation from physical causation. What agents do is not uncaused, but what causes agents to act is their beliefs and desires, not mechanical or chemical forces. And what agents do is not completely predictable. We try to influence people by persuasion, but we can only influence them, we cannot completely control them. Rather like a single photon, we can never be sure what somebody will do until they have done it. Nor can we be sure what we ourselves will do until we have done it. And afterwards we recognize that we could have done differently.

We are agents not automata. In other words, we have free will. Now the question is, what shall we do with it?

———–

Notes

(1) What follows is summarized from my paper “The Quantum Level of Reality,” located here: http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/Quantum.html. That paper contains more detail and all the footnotes and references. See also “Do Humans Have Free Will?” here: http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/FreeWill.html.


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Posted on November 1, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Gandhi meets Monty Python:
The comedic turn in nonviolent tactics

By Wayne Grytting / Waging Nonviolence / November 1, 2011

On October 3rd, protesters at Occupy Wall Street failed to march. Instead they clumsily lurched. With white painted faces, glazed looks and dollar bills hanging out of some mouths, protesters chanted “I smell money, I smell money…” It was Corporate Zombie Day.

Scenes like this and the sight of Guy Fawkes masks, clown suits, drumming circles, and surrealistic posters all over the country have left many commentators scratching their heads. Is this protest or carnival? Maybe we should tell them. There’s been a sea change in the protest industry.

“A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future,” proclaims Adbusters, the initiators of Occupy Wall Street. A key part of this rechanneling of tactics has been a move away from both angry protests or passive waiting-to-be-clubbed-by-police-batons to age-old carnival-style antics.

A festive atmosphere has reigned supreme in all of the successful pro-democracy uprisings of the past two decades. In Poland, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Tunisia, and Egypt, music and humor were everywhere. Why?

Musically, Eastern European rallies were powered by punk rock bands while in the Arab Spring, “hip-hop has become the rhythm of the resistance,” writes author Robin Wright. Tahrir Square, says journalist Sarah Carr, “was essentially a comedy explosion.” Tunisia was “a pioneer in revolution and now it’s at the forefront in comic expression,” proclaims the voice of Captain Khuzba, the masked cartoon hero who fought Tunisia’s secret police armed with a loaf of French bread. In Serbia’s pro-democracy movement in 2000, Srdja Popovic, a leader of Otpor (“Resistance”) reports, “Everything we did had a dosage of humor.”

Otpor is the organization credited with forging the nonviolent tactics used in the Arab Spring and earlier pro-democracy movements in Georgia and Ukraine. Founded in 1998 following a period of failed demonstrations by a small ragged group of twenty-somethings, it had within two years built a movement that overthrew Serbia’s dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

Otpor learned early that humor could be a gigantic ice breaker, cutting through citizen’s fear and apathy and “turning oppression upside down.” They fine-tuned the art of comedic resistance, added modern marketing techniques and the strategic framework provided by Gene Sharp.

The starting point for Sharp in From Dictatorship to Democracy is a recognition that “The common error of past improvised political defiance campaigns is the reliance on only one or two methods, such as strikes and mass demonstrations.” His remedy was a heavy dosage of “low-risk, confidence-building actions.” Street theater and under-the-radar comic protests.

Following this path, Mykhailo Svystovych, of Ukraine’s youth movement group Pora (“It’s Time”) recalls: “We didn’t do rallies with speakers, we did theatrical events.” The massive rallies we viewed on TV — this was the final chapter prepared by years of small guerrilla incursions.

Who were Otpor’s heroes? In interviews they list names we might expect: Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and an unexpected source: Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Stop the presses. What? How did those clowns sneak into the club? What is it about Monty Python-style humor that lends itself to deposing tyrannies? Let’s look closely at the exact laughter creating tactics developed in these movements so you can judge for yourself — and maybe add to your own resume.

Fortunately, excellent stories have been collected by authors Tina Rosenberg (“Revolution U”), Patrick Kearny (A Carnival of Revolution), Matthew Collin (The Time of the Rebels) and video producer Steven York (A Force More Powerful).

1. Flying under the radar

Dictators typically outlaw protest marches and give their security forces carte blanche to bash heads. In South Africa, blacks “solved” the problem by assembling large gatherings at funerals, the one kind of gathering the Apartheid government was not ready to ban. How could the deceased help it if she or he had tens of thousands of friends who wanted to mourn and follow the hearse through town?

In Serbia, Otpor developed a tactic of “flash” protests, introducing a game called “Arrest the Traffic Lights.” People would mob street intersections and simply jump up and down while the walk lights were green. When the light changed they’d carefully obey the law and disperse only to resume their protest when the light said “go” again.

In Chile in 1983 labor unions made plans for their first test of Pinochet after 10 years of violent repression. Copper miners about to go on strike observed the large number of soldiers assembling by their mines and swiftly changed tactics. Instead of a strike, they called for a national day of slow movement.

All over Chile, people simply drove, walked or worked in slow motion to express their solidarity. Later they banged on pots and pans at exactly 8 p.m. How do you arrest slow walkers or pot bangers? It’s a massive clown routine worthy of a Marcel Marceau. How could you not smile at your fellow slow motion actors? After that the ice was broken and an irresistible wave of protests began.

2. Obedience parody

If protests against a government are being discouraged, and you feel a need to walk with a large group, you can always choose to march in “support” of the government. So Otpor paraded “for” Milosevic’s socialist party, but did so with a small herd of sheep with signs around their necks announcing “We support the Socialist Party.”

In the Ukraine, student members of Pora (“It’s Time”) fought against the usurped election of their local tyrant named Yanukovych. He had a prison record so Pora members dressed up in prison uniforms and campaigned for him in the main streets of Kiev, Ukraine’s capitol.

In Egypt, activists helped government officials by setting up Facebook pages for them and Twitter accounts so they could spread their messages. One official’s favorite activities were listed for him as: “Kicking ass, taking names, and wearing decorations with more colors than you can find in a pack of Skittles.”

In Poland in 1987, a group of “socialist surrealists” called the Orange Alternative (combining Communist red with the Catholic yellow) produced parodies of official events. On one April Fool’s Day they marched to the central square in Wroclaw to express their love of the government through a voluntary work day.

Armed with mops and toothbrushes — which was very inefficient, I might add — they proceeded to clean up the square while singing socialist labor songs and dressing up like ideal workers from old Stalinist movies of the 1930s. Police again confronted the problem — what can you arrest them for? Cleaning up the square is a crime? Acting as fools gained protesters immunity from repression and a strengthened community of smiling co-conspirators.

3. Therapeutic pies in the face

If moving slowly together can help create community, imagine what collectively throwing a pie in the face of a dictator can be like. Otpor, in their most famous actions, brought out a barrel with Milosevic’s picture on it and let people hit it with a stick for only one dinar. Those who were unemployed because of Milosevic could hit it twice for free. The police only looked ridiculous when they stepped in to, in the words of Otpor, “arrest” the barrel. Pictures of the “arrest” would soon be posted in the Internet.

In Georgia in 2003, the group Kmara (“Enough”) created large banners where passers-by could take photos of themselves flushing their president, Eduard Shevardnadze, down the toilet. In Ukraine, by 2004 the action had moved to the Internet where citizen’s could throw eggs at their soon to be deposed leader Yankukovych, who had famously overreacted to a real egg throwing incident.

What is hitting a picture of a dictator but a version of the dunk tank? These actions go back to centuries-old carnival traditions of ridiculing the high and mighty. They crop up in movement after movement because they meet very basic needs. Throwing a pie at authority can be a low-risk participatory event with an appreciative community cheering one on. It’s not lazily watching Jon Stewart on TV — it’s physical action against authority, a physical break with patterns of passivity and isolation, a nonviolent rechanneling of simmering anger.

4. Idiocy rising to the top

Much of the humor of movements requires faith, a conviction that if you just set the table, the other side’s idiocy will provide all the humor necessary. For example, Otpor had their offices raided and computers hauled away. Knowing they had an informer “assisting” their activities, they put out the word they would be bringing in a load of new computer equipment. At the “secret” time trucks pulled up with heavy looking boxes. While laboring to lift these loads, the police intervened, only to discover all the boxes were empty. The story, with photos, went viral.

When Serbia’s government leveled charges that Otpor was a foreign-paid terrorist organization, Otpor took flatbed trucks and megaphones to the streets to denounce and expose the “terrorists” in their midst. They brought 17 and 18-year-old “terrorist” students in front of the public and grilled them about their activities.

Similarly, in Egypt, when the government officials denounced the protesters for serving “foreign agendas,” young people showed up at Tahrir Square with plain blank notebooks, complaining they’d left their foreign agendas at home.

5. Absurdity squared

Community organizing guru Saul Alinsky’s famous Rules for Radicals #3 states: “Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.” Or any forms of rationality they might ever recognize.

We enter here into pure Monty Python territory. Otpor, for example, would hold fake soccer games in the streets complete with uniformed referees and an imaginary soccer ball. Or they would hold parades in ridiculous fancy dress with no protest slogans, or gaily deliver cookies and flowers to police stations.

My favorite example is from the Orange Alternative in Poland. After the group carefully spray-painted graffiti around Wroclaw, the police would come by and paint it over with white paint. This would leave unsightly white splotches on building walls. Instead of posting yet more graffiti, the activists took red paint and turned the splotches into elves. (Think of Hegel’s dialectic here — but on LSD). As more and more red elves appeared, this morphed into a demonstration where thousands dressed up in red and marched chanting “Elves are real!”

American activists will recognize most of the elements of the festive model. Certainly the street theater of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) or “Billionaires for Bush” anticipates much of the spirit of the pro-democracy movements. But what stands out in the new movements is the integration of the class clowns with the nerds, of spontaneity with nonviolent discipline.

Traditionally people attracted to festive protests, group hugs, and consensus decision-making have been too laid back to organize effectively. The successful pro-democracy groups have managed to combine these elements with a caffeinated backbone of organizers who make the trains run on time and know when to shift gears.

Otpor leader Srdja Popovic, succinctly makes the point: “You can have 100,000 people in the streets and one single idiot who’s throwing stones, and he’s going to be the star of the day and this is how media operates.” The remarkable level of nonviolence maintained by these movements points to a concerted behind-the-scenes enforcement of a “no-idiocy” policy that leaves Seattle WTO veterans green with envy.

Pro-democracy movements established clear boundaries within which a “diversity of tactics” could flourish. Former Otpor leaders now run the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in Belgrade, which offers extensive training opportunities for inquiring minds.

Monty Python-style humor is rooted in centuries-old carnival traditions which, as Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin has so brilliantly taught us, emphasize that all of us are fools and clowns just waiting to slip on banana peels. It has a humility that cuts through any vestiges of elitism or know-it-all political correctness.

Carnival represents the joyful life that stands as the total opposite of the zombie-like death of corporate rule. It’s what I believe allowed Otpor and other pro-democracy groups of twenty-somethings to bridge age and cultural gaps and build powerful movements.

Occupy Wall Street is a bold “experiment in truth,” which my stock analysts tell me should lead to a bull market in protests. Let’s keep a smile on it.

[Wayne Grytting is the author of American Newspeak: The Mangling of Meaning for Power and Profit and a former teacher in Seattle. He writes a blog — Penetrating the Fog — on the uses of humor to open closed minds. This article was first published at Waging Nonviolence.]

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Larry Ray : Cellular Civil Rights in Mississippi?

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Graphic by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.

Civil rights for diploid cells?
Legal ‘personhood’ in Mississippi

The draconian redefinition of abortion and commonly used methods of contraception as murder would do away with a woman’s right to make her own decisions about childbearing.

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / November 1, 2011

GULFPORT, Mississippi — On Tuesday, November 8th, Mississippi voters will either support or defeat a proposition that would give a fertilized human egg the same legal rights and protections under the State’s Constitution that apply to living, breathing people.

Few voters in Mississippi would bother to turn out to support particulars of defining the legal status of the fusion of two haploid gametes. Most folks might think that was a pair of some new deer species and the vote would regulate its hunting season.

But clarification of those biological terms quickly spread in evangelical conservative code for anti-abortion, suddenly making zygotes, diploid cells, and gametes candidates for legal “personhood” among the fervent and zealous.

The Mississippi proposition’s draconian redefinition of abortion and commonly used methods of contraception as murder would do away with a woman’s right to make her own decisions about childbearing. The so-called “personhood” measure seeks to do away with those rights guaranteed under the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Such a state constitutional change would not only ban all abortion care but could also outlaw many common forms of birth control, limit medical treatment options for pregnant women, and ban reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization.

This was tried in Colorado twice, in 2008 and 2010, and voters overwhelmingly defeated the ballot measures each time.

But that that was Colorado and this is Mississippi, the state that tops the Gallup poll list of America’s most frequent churchgoers with 63% of the population attending church weekly or almost every week. Vermont, incidentally, has the least churchgoers with only 23% attending regularly, but then they are a bunch of Yankees.

Mississippi’s strong religious voice has long determined what folks can and can’t do in the state. Alcohol was made illegal in 1907, and Mississippi was the last state to repeal Prohibition in 1966. When I moved here to the Gulf Coast in 1980, sale of alcohol was from state-controlled “package stores,” whose signs had to be flat against the building and in letters of a specified size. No neon and no hanging signs like other stores.

I stopped in one my first week here for a bottle of sour mash bourbon and after ringing up the purchase, the nice lady leaned over the counter and asked, sweetly and helpfully, if I “wanted a Baptist Bag.” I must have had a totally puzzled look so she pulled a regular large brown grocery bag from under the counter and mentioned that “lots of customers prefer to carry out their bottles in this kind of bag.” At the time, I found this all rather provincially colorful.

Thirty-one years later you still cannot buy hard liquor on a Sunday even in the “wet” counties, and Mississippi’s provincialism has a much darker hue today that is potentially much more dangerous. Many evangelical and fundamentalist believers now want to impose their narrow, extreme beliefs down to the human cellular level upon all who live in the State of Mississippi.

And with 63% of the population being steady church goers — and voters — both the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor are making it clear that legal human rights for a single fertilized human egg is just peachy with them.

Abortion foes piously proclaiming their belief in the sanctity of life seem to look at that sanctity differently regarding Mississippi’s death penalty. Their opposition to family planning, birth control, and contraception is loud and clear, but there seem to be no voices raised against the biblical evils of fornication. The libidinous Viagra and Cialis commercials still dominate the nightly news.

November the 8th will show if Mississippi’s reckless religious fundamentalists would, as The New York Times noted, “protect zygotes at the expense of all women while creating a legal quagmire — at least until the courts rule it unconstitutional, as they should.”

I have to hope that Mississippi will ultimately not vote to support this attempt by a vocal segment of organized religion to limit the personal and civil rights of the women who live here.

But then again, as far as civil rights are concerned, from the cellular level on up, we have to realize that it was just one year ago that a federal judge ordered the Walthall County School District in Mississippi to halt policies that had allowed some of its district’s schools and classes to become segregated… again. Segregation was outlawed in 1970.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor who now lives in Gulfport, Mississippi. He also posts at The iHandbill. Read more articles by Larry Ray on The Rag Blog.]

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Ted McLaughlin : The Occupy Movement is Changing the Conversation

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

It’s changing the conversation:
The wealth gap and the Occupy Movement

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / October 31, 2011

The image above brings home a very disturbing fact about the United States — the vast inequality of wealth and income in the country. This inequality, which grows worse with each passing week — since Congress has done nothing about it — was the primary cause of this Great Recession (just like a previous and very similar gap caused the Great Depression).

But there is a big difference between the previous gap causing the Great Depression, and the current gap causing the Great Recession. The previous gap was caused by the Republican Party favoring the rich and the corporations. But when the Democrats got into power they changed the economic policies, put people back to work (using WPA and CCC), created the Social Security system, and gave the country new hope.

But things were different this time. After the Republicans went back to their old ways of favoring the rich and the corporations, causing the current economic mess and the loss of millions of jobs, the people again put the Democrats back in power in 2008. But this time nothing happened.

It turns out that the rich and corporations had gotten smarter — instead of just buying the Republican politicians, they also bought a passel of Democratic politicians (the blue dogs). And the Republicans combined with the blue dogs were powerful enough to prevent any economic changes or job creation.

After watching the Congress muddle around for nearly three years without changing the failed “trickle-down” Republican policy or doing anything to create a substantial amount of jobs, it became obvious that too many members of Congress (of both parties) were controlled by the corporations and the rich and nothing was going to be done to help ordinary and hurting Americans.

In fact, the situation was being made worse by cuts to education and social programs while the rich continued to get unnecessary tax cuts and the corporations received unnecessary subsidies.

If any needed change was going to occur, it would have to start with the American people — not the corporate-owned politicians in Congress. When this became obvious, it resulted in the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

It may have started small with only a few hundred protesters in New York City, but it struck a chord with the American people and spread quickly to many other American cities — first the large cities, and then in the smaller cities, and finally to cities around the world. It has now grown so large that it can no longer be ignored.

But can the movement cause real economic change in the United States? Probably not until and unless it grows even larger, but it has caused a couple of minor changes already — and one of those could lead to much bigger changes down the road.

The first change is that it is starting to scare the big banks on Wall Street. At about the same time that the Occupy Wall Street movement started, one of the biggest banks (Bank of America) announced they would start charging their depositors a $5 a month fee for using their debit cards (accessing their own money). Several other of the giant Wall Street banks indicated they would do the same.

But the American public, led by the Occupy Wall Street protesters, gave voice to their anger over this latest insult from the greed-mongers of Wall Street (whose illegal actions triggered the recession).

Many people threatened to pull their money out of the giant banks and put it into local banks and credit unions. There was even a day set aside, November 5, to do this en masse. Now the big banks are backing down. J.P. MorganChase, U.S. Bancorp, Citigroup, PNC Financial, KeyCorp, and other banks are now saying they will NOT follow Bank of America’s lead in charging for use of a debit card. And frankly, it would not surprise me if Bank of America didn’t reverse their decision soon.

But the Occupy Wall Street movement has caused an even more important change — one that could lead to needed economic changes down the road. They have altered the national dialogue, especially on the nation’s news media outlets. Last summer all the media wanted to talk about was the national debt, an issue that is far less important than job creation and income inequality. A review of the 24-hour news sources (MSNBC, CNN, Fox) in the last week of July showed the following mentions:

Debt……………7,583
Unemployment……………427
Unemployed……………75

But after a month of the Occupy Wall Street movement that has changed. A review of the same news sources during the week of October 10-16 showed the most popular word references had changed to:

Jobs……………2,738
Wall Street……………2,387
Occupy……………1,278
Unemployment……………506
Debt……………398
Unemployed……………194

This is good change. A problem cannot be solved until the public is discussing it as an important issue, and that is unlikely to happen until the issue is being covered by the media. The movement still needs to grow to be the catalyst for a real change in economic policy, and that can happen now because the nation is now paying attention and starting to discuss the real issues.

[Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger. Read more articles by Ted McLaughlin on The Rag Blog.]

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