Back to Work

Though, as Greg Palast points out, it's helping others more than me.

Some years from now, in an economic refugee relocation “Enterprise Zone,” your kids will ask you, “What did you do in the Class War, Daddy?”

The trick of class war is not to let the victims know they’re under attack. That’s how, little by little, the owners of the planet take away what little we have.

I am sooo not helpin' myself lately...

All of these are curtesy of Rabbi Lerner's Tikkun Newsletter. I'm not, like, signed on and in-line with all his methods, but I certainly embrace the major goals Tikkun.org exhorts.

P.S. Unfortunately, we who do make this society function have not yet succeeded in gaining power over our economic policies, social policies and foreign policies from the elites of wealth and power who control the society. So we come back into the Fall with a world that is somewhat out of control. Below we are sending you a few articles to reorient you to the tasks that lie ahead. In future emails I’ll discuss with you the details of what we face. I apologize for the length of this email, but do want you to have the opportunity to hear some important voices that will help you avoid the simplistic analyses you’ll hear in the mainstream media. In sending you these analyses, of course, we don’t mean to imply that they represent our perspective, but only an interesting set of ideas that most of us rarely get to hear in the U.S. media None of them have, form our perspective, adequately integrated the spiritual vision of The Left Hand of God. Still, they are very worth reading. Please take the time.

Here's an essay which I hope is as crazy as it undoubtedly sounds to those who can't stomache the idea that Amercia may sometimes be way wrong.

I've thought things to comment throughout, mostly Pro, some Con, but am still in utterly discombobulated emotinal-wreckage mode.

Good luck, eh.

"The Tiger at Bay: Scary Times Ahead"
By Immanuel Wallerstein
http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/192en.htm
Commentary No. 192, Sept. 1, 2006

When many years ago, some of us said that the decline
of United States hegemony in the world-system was
inevitable, unstoppable, and already occurring, we were
told by most people that we ignored the obvious
overwhelming military and economic strength of the
United States. And there were some critics who said
that our analyses were harmful because they served as a
self-fulfilling prophecy.

Then the neo-cons came to power in the Bush presidency,
and they implemented their policy of unilateral macho
militarism, designed (they said) to restore
unquestioned United States hegemony by frightening U.S.
enemies and intimidating U.S. friends into unquestioned
obedience to U.S. policies in the world arena. The neo-
cons had their chance and their wars and have
spectacularly failed either to frighten those regarded
as enemies or to intimidate erstwhile allies into
unquestioned obedience. The U.S. position in the world-
system is far weaker today than it was in 2000, the
result precisely of the very misguided neo-con policies
adopted during the Bush presidency. Today, quite a few
people are ready to talk openly about U.S. decline.

So what happens now? There are two places to look:
inside the United States, and in the rest of the world.
In the rest of the world, governments of all stripes
are paying less and less attention to anything the
United States says and wants. Madeleine Albright, when
she was Secretary of State, said that the United States
was "the indispensable nation." This may have been true
once, but it is certainly not true now. Now, it's a
tiger at bay.

It's not yet fully the "paper tiger" of which Mao
Zedong spoke, but it's certainly on its way to being
exposed as a tiger crouching in self-defense.

How do other nations treat a tiger at bay? With a great
deal of prudence, it must be said. If the United States
is no longer capable of getting its way almost
anywhere, it is still capable of doing a great deal of
damage if it decides to lash out. Iran may defy the
United States with aplomb, but it tries to be careful
not to humiliate it. China may be feeling its oats and
sure that it will get still stronger in the decades to
come, but it handles the United States with kid gloves.
Hugo Chavez may openly tweak the tiger's nose, but
older and wiser Fidel Castro speaks less provocatively.
And Italy's new Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, holds
Condoleezza Rice's hands while pursuing a foreign
policy clearly aimed at strengthening a world role for
Europe independent of the United States.

So why are they all so prudent? To answer that, we must
look at what is going on in the United States. The de
facto chief executive, Dick Cheney, knows what needs to
be done from the point of view of the macho
militarists, whose leader he is. The United States must
"stay the course" and indeed escalate the violence. The
alternative is to admit defeat, and Cheney is not
someone to do that.

Cheney does however have an acute political problem at
home. He and his policies are clearly losing support,
massively, within the United States. The scare speeches
about terrorists and the accusations of treason
launched at his critics no longer seem to be as
effective as they once were. The recent victory of war
critic Ned Lamont over war defender Joe Lieberman in
the Democratic senatorial primary in Connecticut has
rattled the U.S. political establishment of both
parties. Within days, a very large number of
politicians seemed to move some distance in the
direction of closing down the Iraq operation.

If, as seems quite possible now, the Democrats win
control of both houses of Congress in the November 2006
elections, there risks being a stampede to withdraw,
despite the hesitancy of the Democratic congressional
leadership. This will be all the more sure if, in
various local elections, prominent antiwar candidates
win.

What will the Cheney camp do then? One can't expect
that they will gracefully acknowledge the coming of a
Democratic president in the 2008 elections. They will
know that they have probably only two years left to
create situations from which it would be almost
impossible for the United States to retreat. And since
they would not, with a Democratic congress, be able to
get any important legislation passed, they will
concentrate (even more than now) on trying to use the
executive powers of the presidency, under the docile
front man, George W. Bush, to stir up military havoc
around the world and to reduce radically the sphere of
civil liberties within the United States.

The Cheney cabal will however be resisted, on many
fronts. The most important locus of resistance will no
doubt be the leadership of the U.S. armed forces (with
the exception of the Air Force), who clearly think that
the current military adventures have greatly
overextended U.S. military capacity and are very
worried that they will be the ones held for blame later
by U.S. public opinion when Rumsfeld and Cheney have
disappeared from the newspaper headlines. The Cheney
cabal will be resisted as well by big business who see
the current policies as having very negative
consequences for the U.S. economy.

And of course they will be resisted by the left and
center-left within the United States who are feeling
reinvigorated, angry, and anxious about the course of
U.S. policy. There is a slow but clear radicalization
of the left and even the center-left.

When that happens, the militarist right will retaliate
very aggressively. When Lamont won the primary, a
reader of the Wall Street Journal wrote a letter saying
that "we have reached a tipping point in this country -
if we allow the left to govern as the majority our
country is finished." He calls Republican leaders
"inept." He, and many others, will be looking for
fiercer leaders.

Everyone worries about civil war in Iraq. How about in
the United States? Scary times ahead!