As we all know now, the US political system represents large corporate/financial interests almost exclusively, and very little substantive differences exist on the national level in the policies of Democratic, and Republican politicians; albeit for some "wedge" issues, like gay marriage, abortion, and gun control.
They both are pushing this, and other countries further into the savage world of completely unregulated "casino" capitalism, which, if continued, will make this and other "developed" countries more like what we presented some time ago, in this article describing the horrors of life for the masses in Jakarta, Indonesia. In addition to accelerating global environmental resource depletion and collapse.
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2012/03/free-market-train-jakarta-is-coming.html
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2012/03/free-market-train-jakarta-is-coming.html
Yet, all is not hopeless, because in the past, as now in the present, positive changes often have, and do start at local and regional levels, before expanding, and becoming national in scale. Good examples right now are the erosion, due to the legalisation of marijuana sales/consumption in a few states (CO and WA for now, more coming over the next few years...) of the useless and punitive "War on Drugs", which has disproportionately imprisoned vast numbers of non-white people in the US, and given it the world's highest prison population. And in many states, the minimum wage is now higher than the national minimum of 7.25 USD per hour. These state-level developments, in turn, expanded from ones on municipal scales, where various towns and cities had before passed their own legislation in these areas.
So it is always encouraging to follow positive developments at these levels, and watch how they expand. One of our favourite events recently was the election in Seattle, WA, of an actual Socialist to their city council, Kshama Sawant, who is an economics professor. She gave a beautiful inaugural address, which follows below:
Published on Thursday, January 9, 2014 by The Nation
I Wear the Badge of Socialist With Honor
The full text of the new Seattle city council member’s inauguration speech
Editor’s note: At a ceremonial swearing-in on Monday, Kshama Sawant became Seattle’s first socialist city council member in almost a century. The full text of her inauguration speech is below.
My brothers and sisters,
Thank you for your presence here today.
This city has made glittering fortunes for the super wealthy and for the major corporations that dominate Seattle’s landscape. At the same time, the lives of working people, the unemployed and the poor grow more difficult by the day. The cost of housing skyrockets, and education and healthcare become inaccessible.
New Seattle Council member Kshama Sawant, left, stands with Nicole Grant, who assisted in a ceremonial swearing-in. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
New Seattle Council member Kshama Sawant, left, stands with Nicole Grant, who assisted in a ceremonial swearing-in. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
This is not unique to Seattle. Shamefully, in this, the richest country in human history, fifty million of our people—one in six—live in poverty. Around the world, billions do not have access to clean water and basic sanitation and children die every day from malnutrition.
This is the reality of international capitalism. This is the product of the gigantic casino of speculation created by the highway robbers on Wall Street. In this system the market is God, and everything is sacrificed on the altar of profit. Capitalism has failed the 99%.
Despite recent talk of economic growth, it has only been a recovery for the richest 1%, while the rest of us are falling ever farther behind.
In our country, Democratic and Republican politicians alike primarily serve the interests of big business. A completely dysfunctional Congress DOES manage to agree on one thing—regular increases in their already bloated salaries—yet at the same time allows the federal minimum wage to stagnate and fall farther and farther behind inflation. We have the obscene spectacle of the average corporate CEO getting seven thousand dollars an hour, while the lowest-paid workers are called presumptuous in their demand for just fifteen.
To begin to change all of this, we need organized mass movements of workers and young people, relying on their own independent strength. That is how we won unions, civil rights and LGBTQ rights.
Again, throughout the length and breadth of this land, working people are mobilizing for a decent and dignified life for themselves and their children. Look at the fast food workers movement, the campaigns of Walmart workers, and the heroic activism to stop the Keystone XL pipeline!
Right here in SeaTac, we have just witnessed the tremendous and victorious campaign for fifteen dollars an hour. At the same time, in Lorain County, Ohio, twenty-four candidates ran, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as ‘Independent Labor’ and were elected to their City Councils.
I will do my utmost to represent the disenfranchised and the excluded, the poor and the oppressed—by fighting for a $15/hour minimum wage, affordable housing, and taxing the super-rich for a massive expansion of public transit and education. But my voice will be heard by those in power only if workers themselves shout their demands from the rooftops and organize en masse.
My colleagues and I in Socialist Alternative will stand shoulder to shoulder with all those who want to fight for a better world. But working people need a new political party, a mass organization of the working class, run by—and accountable to—themselves. A party that will struggle and campaign in their interest, and that will boldly advocate for alternatives to this crisis-ridden system.
Here in Seattle, political pundits are asking about me: will she compromise? Can she work with others? Of course, I will meet and discuss with representatives of the establishment. But when I do, I will bring the needs and aspirations of working-class people to every table I sit at, no matter who is seated across from me. And let me make one thing absolutely clear: There will be no backroom deals with corporations or their political servants. There will be no rotten sell-out of the people I represent.
I wear the badge of socialist with honor. To the nearly hundred thousand who voted for me, and to the hundreds of you who worked tirelessly on our campaign, I thank you. Let us continue.
The election of a socialist to the Council of a major city in the heartland of global capitalism has made waves around the world. We know because we have received messages of support from Europe, Latin America, Africa and from Asia. Those struggling for change have told us they have been inspired by our victory.
To all those prepared to resist the agenda of big business—in Seattle and nationwide—I appeal to you: get organized. Join with us in building a mass movement for economic and social justice, for democratic socialist change, whereby the resources of society can be harnessed, not for the greed of a small minority, but for the benefit of all people. Solidarity.
© 2013 The Nation
Many progressive people, some quite prominent, have even expressed that they feel voting is useless to enact significant changes, due to the corporate-owned mass media's stranglehold on US life. And we can understand their point of view, and discouragement. But, the more people who vote for other parties candidates on a national level, the greater the message will be to "the powers that be" of dis-satisfaction with the status quo. And to not vote on the local and state scales would definitely hinder many positive events from occurring, so we here at the APR do encourage any and all to get out and vote early and often!
SPIRITUAL DEATH
Of course, today marks the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose murder in 1968 (one year to the day after his famous speech in which he first vocally and strongly came out against the Vietnam War) came directly in response to his increasingly radical anti-war and economic justice stances. Which is conveniently, and deliberately suppressed in all "mainstream" stories on his life and work. We've written several articles on his legacy though, we can't imagine what he'd think of how the US government has behaved over the past 30 years.
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2010/01/remembering-what-he-died-for.html
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2010/01/remembering-what-he-died-for.html
Our favourite article we saw today on MLK's birthday was this one, describing how US President Obama is trying to sell the NSA spying programs as being beneficial, legal, and not a threat to personal freedom. Yet it was programs like these, using the technologies of their day, that were used against all the prominent civil rights, anti-war, and progressive figures in the 1950s and 60s, including MLK. To blackmail and discredit them, at the minimum. Give it a read, it's really enlightening.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/01/20-4
Published on Monday, January 20, 2014 by Informed Comment
Gov’t That Surveilled MLK in Bid to Destroy Him Wants Us to Trust Them
(Photo: Reuters/Rowland Scherman/U.S. Information Agency/U.S. National Archives)Among the ironies of Barack Obama trying to sell us the gargantuan NSA domestic spying program is that such techniques of telephone surveillance were used against the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in an attempt to destroy him and stop the Civil Rights movement. Had the republic’s most notorious peeping tom, J. Edgar Hoover, succeeded in that quest, Obama might never have been president, or even served in Virginia restaurants.
Now that MLK is recognized by all but a tiny minority of Americans (Dick Cheney being in the minority) as a national hero, it is sometimes hard to remember that the Establishment treated him in his own lifetime like a criminal conspirator. He merely demanded the end of Jim Crow Apartheid and equal rights and opportunities for African-Americans with whites in every state of the union. As a result of this entirely reasonable demand, required by the 14th Amendment, he was placed under 24 hour a day surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As with everything in the Cold War, the pretext was that King might have Communist associates. Just as the NSA grabbing our metadata today is justified by the pretext that all 310 million of us might have al-Qaeda associates.
King’s powerful “I have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Capitol provoked a frothing at the mouth Hoover to swing into full action against him.
One of Hoover’s aides wrote in a memo after that 1963 event,
“In the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech…We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”
At Hoover’s urgent request, Bobby Kennedy permitted the FBI secretly to break into King’s premises and those of his associates and plant bugs. They also bugged meetings where he spoke and hotels he stayed in. Let me repeat that. The reaction of the head of the FBI and the attorney general of the US to King’s dream that little boys and girls of different races would play games with each other was to record his every word and action and those of his friends.
If that speech can get you that kind of scrutiny in the USA, then why should we ever trust any high government official with our personal information? Most of us are at least as idealistic as that.
The FBI caught MLK in a couple of extramarital encounters. Hoover, who had profound sexual hang-ups probably to the point of psychosis, hated him with a passion. Having spent his career using the information he gathered on Congressmen to blackmail them, he apparently hoped to use MLK’s “alleycat” “degenerate” (Hoover’s words) against him.
Hoover, the supreme perv, sent him an anonymous threatening letter:
“You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that . . . The American public … will know you for what you are — an evil, abnormal beast . . . Satan could not do more . . . King you are done . . . King, there is only one thing left for you to do . . . You know what it is … You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
Presumably Hoover hoped to drive King to suicide under threat of having his dalliances revealed; presumably also MLK would have put together that Hoover had his private life in his files.
When King was awarded the Nobel Peace prize, Hoover attempted to derail the ceremony by trying to leak the affairs to the press. To their credit, the editors and reporters recoiled from the squalor of the entire matter and refused to touch it.
The point is that King’s private life is irrelevant to his public demands and his public role. He was demanding constitutional rights for all Americans. Who he shtupped in his spare time is not germane to the rightness of that demand.
Note that today’s NSA collection of all Americans’ smartphone records shows who they called and texted and where they were when they did it. All American dalliances are as transparent in those records as King’s were to Hoover. If the US government was willing to try to blackmail King and many other public figures (Hoover always went straight to any Congressman on whom he got dirt and let him know about it, putting the man in his back pocket), then it is willing to blackmail anyone who becomes inconvenient.
That Barack Obama thinks we’re so naive or uninformed about American history that we will buy his assurances that the NSA information on us would never be used is a sad commentary. Indeed, we cannot know for sure that Obama himself and other high American officials are not being blackmailed into taking the positions they do on domestic surveillance. If the American people do accept such empty words, then I suppose they deserve to have Hoover’s pervy successors in their bedrooms.
Copyright 2014 Juan Cole
