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Howard Zinn, as usual, gets it right...
...it's about building a movement!
Election Madness
By Howard Zinn, March 2008 Issue
There's a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I've never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held—security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and day, to barely keep his family going. His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our capitalist system for its failure to assure "life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness" for working people.
Just today, a letter came. To my relief it was not handwritten because he is now using e-mail: "Well, I'm writing to you today because there is a wretched situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis. That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can't tell you. . . . I did a security guard job today that involved watching over a house that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now."
On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page story in the Boston Globe, with the headline "Thousands in Mass. Foreclosed on in '07."
The subhead was "7,563 homes were seized, nearly 3 times the '06 rate."
A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000 people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones.
Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are gone in a flash. What's not gone, what occupies the press day after day, impossible to ignore, is the election frenzy.
This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.
And sad to say, the Presidential contest has mesmerized liberals and radicals alike. We are all vulnerable.
Is it possible to get together with friends these days and avoid the subject of the Presidential elections?
The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.
Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic political system won't allow them in.
No, I'm not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.
I'm talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.
But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.
Let's remember that even when there is a "better" candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.
The unprecedented policies of the New Deal—Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing—were not simply the result of FDR's progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army—thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.
In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.
Without a national crisis—economic destitution and rebellion—it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.
Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.
They offer no radical change from the status quo.
They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.
They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.
None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.
So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.
Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their homes—they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and refused to allow the auctions to take place.
The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of what people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.
Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war.
Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.
Howard Zinn is the author of "A People's History of the United States," "Voices of a People's History" (with Anthony Arnove), and most recently, "A Power Governments Cannot Suppress."
Posted on Mar 02, 2008 by
Hope for the Earth
Each morning I seem to wake up to the WOUB radio just as they issue the war report, and even less hopeful the global warming report. Over my morning tea I try to make some sense of it, but I find there isn't any sense to be made so I decided to put together my own credo for the future. Here's hope for the future - for our precious children and their children...Annie
1. Politicians, I repeat "POLITICIANS" (American ones anyway) are not going to stop what is happening with global warming. There are no big companies representing global warming, solar or wind renewable energy in a position to pay for their causes in the halls of Congress. AND if the person in office has been there for any time at all they are owned by corporate America so it is absolutely fruitless to waste one ounce of energy in their direction.
2. We must work on our local elected officials - the ones who haven't had enough opportunity to become politicians. Focus on township trustees - most folks don't even know who they are in their area. Focus on city council and county commissioners. They control your life!
3. Many reports say to change your household light bulbs to compact fluorescents but doing that alone is like spitting into the wind. That's not to say we shouldn't change out the old light bulbs, but it isn't the message we can promote and expect change. Folks change their light bulbs, then they drive their SUV to shops 10 times that day for something made in China, something they forgot on the first five trips or another electric-guzzling appliance.
We need to focus on those locally elected folks to get them to make town centers where it is possible so that transport by car isn't necessary, and show them how to work towards community gardens, rehabbing existing buildings instead of tearing them down, and on and on and on.
4. The Earth has the ability to heal itself if given the opportunity. I'm hanging onto this mantra for dear life.
5. We owe it to our children to teach them through our example about peace with our land, our homes and our relationships. In order to do this - THEY must hang out the clothes on the line, THEY must do the dishes by hand (dishwasher is a job description, not a machine), and THEY must sit down with us at mealtime and talk about their day.
6. We must never stop visualizing in our minds and hearts that there is hope for the earth because right now everywhere we turn we are saying there isn't any. Our children are the ones who will suffer from this thinking - and most of the rest of the adults aren't really listening. They are too busy shopping for those new-fangled light bulbs or buying that cheap food that has ingredients no one can pronounce.
7. So just for today (and tomorrow and all the days after that) I am going to visualize a world of peace, filled with trees, and bees and flowers and people who aren't shopping, but instead are savoring what they already have.
Annie Warmke is the co-owner of Blue Rock Station Science Center, a writer, a scientist and a grandmother who milks goats and never stops talking about how much she loves the Earth.
Posted on Dec 18, 2007 by
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Posted on Jun 13, 2007 by