S. Brian Willson: World Hero and Unflagging Fighter

The following comes from S. Brian Willson, Vietnam Vet and long-time anti-war and peace activist. His essays deserve to be widely read especially in a time when the abused and growingly disillusioned Iraqi Vets are seeking to mobilize against the war. Read on, and for more visit:

http://www.brianwillson.com


Summary of the Common Thread Running through these Essays
by S. Brian Willson
2000

"I am persuaded no constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government."
--Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, April 27, 1809

"The day is within my time . . . when we may say by what laws other nations shall treat us upon the sea. And we shall say it."
--Thomas Jefferson, 1801

"Montesquieu's doctrine that a republic can be preserved only in a small territory [has been proved a falsehood]. The reverse is the truth. Had our territory been even a third only of what it is we were gone. But while frenzy and delusion like an epidemic gained certain parts, the residue remained sound and untouched, and held on till their brethren could recover from the temporary delusion; and that circumstance has given me great comfort."
--Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Nathaniel Niles, 1801

"Imperialism has penetrated the fabric of our culture, and infected our imagination, more deeply than we usually think."
--Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, 1979

The post-Cold War pattern of unilateral U.S. military aggression conducted with virtual absolute impunity poses an extraordinary danger to any prospects for world peace and threatens the future livability for our species on the planet. This unipolar power position of the United States approaches a nearly ultimate ethos of arrogance, i.e., a global "Manifest Destiny," with few or no checkmates or legal/institutional limits. Peace American style, or Pax Americana, calls the shots. A closely related issue is the escalated drive under "neoliberal economics" to privatize all natural and human resources at public and ecosystem expense. It seems to me that this unchecked U.S. lawless interventionism to protect limitless greed is the primary political issue that we as a people must address. This bully foreign policy of the United States, of our so-called Constitutional democracy, is applied with gruesome violence whenever the U.S. President unilaterally so determines without any declaration of war or debate as required by our Constitution. Furthermore, it is carried out with the most incredible of double standards enraging populations of people all over the world. This behavior, then, greatly endangers the future safety and well being of U.S. citizens who will increasingly be objects of the growing rage brewing throughout the world. Thus, U.S. policy is both foolish and dangerous, extremely unwise. The people of the United States need to express their outrage at the U.S. government for conducting policies that almost certainly will produce growing threats to our lives.

There are many people and organizations throughout the globe that are increasingly aware of how this dangerous situation is threatening their wellbeing. Increasingly active efforts are becoming more visible to educate about and hopefully stop destructive unfettered global capitalism and the related U.S. and NATO military buildups with their corresponding varieties of international interventions. This organizing activity can be seen on the various continents of Asia, Africa, and Central/South America as well as in the United States and Europe. This is hopeful.

It is important to recognize that the connection between domestic (and generally western) values and lifestyles, and U.S. (and generally western) foreign economic and military policies are intrinsically connected. These interventionist foreign policies are absolutely necessary in order to maintain western values and lifestyles. These policies of the "free" market are increasing the rate at which breakdown is occurring in human cultures and Earth ecosystems. There is a Mother of all structural problems that stimulates these policies. Here in the U.S. with but 4.5% of the world's population we collectively consume nearly half of the world's resources. In the "developed" world 25% of the world's population collectively consume 85% of the world's resources. This means that the 75% in the impoverished world are squeezed with but l5% of the world's resources. To maintain this incredibly unfair, immoral enforced exploitation on others, a model that is totally unsustainable for any period of time, the privileged must be assured of access to virtually all the earth's resources wherever they may be found, including chattel and wage slavery as necessary to assure maximization of private corporate profits. Noble sounding rationales and convenient systems of denial are important aspects to this imperial system. This enables application of policies that assure control over people's lives and their land, precluding any possibilities for genuine justice and authentic self-determination (democracy). Since people generally resist this kind of control and repression over their lives, force must often be used to subdue them. This fundamental structural problem will be stressed throughout the readings as it is very important to fully grasp if we are to develop strategic alternative solutions.

This structural issue, it seems to me, must be addressed by people of conscience and integrity in the West, especially those of us who live in the United States and Europe. It poses as an extraordinarily difficult historic challenge because virtually all inhabitants of the U.S. and the western countries, no matter their socio-eonomic status, are to varying degrees, complicit. Of course there is substantial poverty and misery in the United States, with one in every five children growing up in poverty, for example. And the disparity in wealth and income is widening in the U.S. as well as globally. But relatively speaking, misery in the U.S. is somewhat less miserable than for a large portion of the world's impoverished. And there are a substantial number of persons in the U.S. who are not in misery, who are capable of being or becoming aware of the structural injustices. The people who are aware of the domestic and foreign crimes of state, and the incredible exploitive base supporting the U.S. lifestyle, or the American Way Of Life (AWOL), have special obligations, both under international and U.S. domestic law, as well as conscience, to stimulate local, regional, national and global debates about these life threatening, unprecedented threats to justice and genuine democracy. This would include articulating and experimenting with alternative economic and political theories and practices.

The challenge in the U.S. is complicated by the fact that our touted "democracy" is in fact a plutocracy and oligarchy, where the few rich, including the transborder corporations, own the formal, Constitutionally-based political system. This reality presents creative challenges as to how to genuinely organize and educate at the grass roots levels throughout the hinterlands of the United States. A grassroots organizing process could conceivably lead to a genuine democracy, despite the seemingly intransigence and criminality of the national political system.

The essays contained herein are intended to be informative about U.S. past and contemporary history, as well as raising questions, perhaps important, for building a new popular movement in the United States, and linking with similarly thinking and acting people and organizations on the other continents.

http://www.brianwillson.com/awolintro.html

Democracy v. Capitalism: historical considerations

Capitalism, with its pop culture’s projection of cheap glamor and frivolity, retains a strict fixation on the immediate present moment of gratification, and denies any validity to the boredom of past and future. Democracy, on the contrary, embraces human narrative, is committed to the unfolding and the retelling of individuals’ life histories, and follows unflinchingly the true stories of human history, in all their tragic nobility and comic absurdity.

To this end are added here historical considerations to help situate democracy’s current state of struggle within the broader context of American and world historical developments. Only by understanding the sources in past events of our present institutions, ideas, prejudices, and antagonisms, is their any hope of countering negative forces successfully and to see clearly the paths forward to be followed.

From the freebooting conquistadors who sought out and waged wars for the golden riches of Mexico and Peru, to the hunters, trappers and woodsmen who first established trade links with Native North Americans, to the forcible liquidation of Southeastern tribes by Andrew Jackson to expand white settlement, to the war of Texas Independence, and onward to today, the European presence in the New World has been dominated by a culture of coldly calculating profit motives, with an eye toward expanding private property for European descendents. The landscapes of America have always been regarded chiefly for their potential pricetags. The “freedom” of the New World has been, from the time of Columbus, not least the freedom of opportunity to strike it rich.

In the early 1600s, British, Dutch and French settlers began colonizing the Atlantic seacoast while under the sovereignty of European crowns, and they engaged in commerce and acquired raw materials under their competing economic authorities. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the British colonial societies banded together and boldly declared their independence from England, against an oppressive government whose arbitrary tyrannies had grown intolerable, and amid the general atmosphere of European Enlightenment idealism concerning revolutionary “rights of man.”

Ideas about truly universal suffrage, abolition of slavery (both racial-chattel and debt slavery), even radical transformations of traditional private property relations, were all current in the 1700s and were known to the colonial “Founding Fathers” who rebelled against their (quite literal) British fathers.

Nevertheless, America was not established on a broad footing of universal democracy, nor as a genuinely representative government. What was forged instead was a more limited practical compromise between the moneyed interests of the traditional property-owning classes, on the one hand, and the emerging ideals of progressive society, on the other. Thus the first stage of the American Republic defined as “citizens” only white men, its Constitution favored the colonial ruling class of landowners, and the racial-chattel slavery of the South was left untouched, protected implicitly by the Constitution’s protections of private property.

Native Americans were wholly ignored; legally and constitutionally speaking, they were an invisible and mute feature of the wild natural landscape itself. They were also foreign nations, as they remained throughout the United States’ westward expansion, and as they remain today, living as subjugated autonomous nations on “reservations,” under treaty terms that are still unhonored and trampled by paternalistic policies of a foreign conqueror’s government.

The first two hundred years of the United States were a gradual, tempestuous struggle to expand democracy—abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the two-day work weekend, abolishment of child labor, etc. But always this was a struggle against entrenched and shifting forces of reaction and regression, and these forces were and have always been strong, violent, coldly calculating and unscrupulous.

United States foreign policy in the nineteenth century was centered on establishing the US on as wide a territorial footing in the New World as possible. Before the Civil War, American interests lay in winning the game of North American colonialism; by buying or driving out the British and French from the Great Lakes and “Louisiana,” where Spanish holdings also had to be acquired; by establishing a clear line of demarcation between the US and the still British colonial Canada to the north; by wresting as much lands in the Southwest and West from Spanish-Mexican occupation, settlement, control and influence.

Throughout this time and even more so after the Civil War, this colonial expansion also entailed continual wars of elimination and eradication with Native American peoples. These wars often were, properly speaking, genocidal in effect and even in design. American popular hatred of the “Red Savage” was widely disseminated in academic parlance, in the press, and in popular culture alike. Like the deeply rooted racism of the South, which had developed as an integral part of the slaveowning ideology, anti-Indian attitudes were a largely unquestioned common core of the nineteenth-century American psyche. The Red Man was “doomed to die out,” and white “Civilization” was being spread by a divinely decreed “Manifest Destiny” across the North American continent.

In their opposition to the encroachments of white settlers, in their tragic struggles for self-preservation against militarily overwhelming armies, and an unscrupulous free enterprise system of private property and commercialism that was nevertheless foreign to the conceptions and communal mores of most tribes, Native Americans were widely demonized as “terrorists,” as “insurgents,” as “lawless barbarians.”

It is hardly a stretch to compare the Sioux warriors of the 1870s with the peasant Vietcong “communists” of the 1970s, comparisons many Native Americans themselves made at the time when they left their reservations to fight overseas in Uncle Sam’s Army (read, for example, John Fire Lame Deer’s testimony in Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions). Nor is it a stretch to compare today’s Middle Eastern traditionalists (whether in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, etc.) to the disparate nations of the American West who banded together in the 1880s-90s in common to oppose the commercial-military-religious juggernaut of US imperial expansion. In each case local populations are fighting to preserve their way of life and freedom of self-determination in the face of an arrogant invading force intent on subjugating, or “pacifying” them, and taking control of their environment and its valuable resources.

Readers inclined to doubt the description of the US conquest of North America as genocidal imperialism, thinking this some inflammatory “revisionist” picture of our history, would do well to remember the last states to be formalized in the Union. Before Hawaii and Alaska were finally brought under the umbrella of federalism in 1959, the last states were New Mexico and Arizona in 1912, and Oklahoma in 1907. New Mexico and Arizona, along with the Dakotas, are the states with the largest native occupied and reserved lands today. And Oklahoma—formerly “Indian Territory”—had finally been opened to white settlement in 1889, after it had been used as a last desperate containment camp for dispossessed and defeated tribal vestiges, driven there by forced march on foot or shipped by railcar, from South, North, East and West after defeats in wars.

By this time America was forced to become involved in the self-destruction of Europe, in WWI and, following in short order, WWII. Then, in the wake of the Second World War, the phoenix of the United Nations came to birth out of the ashes of a corrupt and self-immolating over-technologized corporate-military civilization. In its charter the UN declared an end to colonialism, and that people’s everywhere ought to be able to determine their own futures, be subject to no dominating imperial powers against their will.

Nevertheless, it still took the United States until 1959, under increasing pressure at home and around the world, to settle on statehood for Alaska and Hawaii as a way to incorporate the last two most glaringly colonial occupations under American hegemony. Needless to say, the colonialist nature of the American presence in Hawaii (to say nothing of Alaska) has always been brazen and blatant. Even today no caring and observant visitor to the islands of Aloha can be unmoved by the Hawaiians’ continued resistances to American domination, to statehood itself, and the local movement to reestablish native sovereignty.

It is generally forgotten and ignored now, in America’s pious fictionalization of World War II, that the US was the ally of Communist Russia in fighting and defeating Nazi Fascism. Far more than an alliance of convenience joined us with the Soviets. We also shared a social liberal idealism, a vision of an equal, fair and just society where all people might live happy, healthy lives, free from exploitation and slavery. What destroyed the USSR was not communism, but kleptocracy, plutocracy, despotism, and militarism run rampant. These same forces have undermined and are now destroying American civil society as well, and the democratic spirit that has fostered it.

Now, as the “last world superpower” the US-backed (but not controlled) global corporate machine is assaulting democracy and stable civil societies everywhere. They will stop at nothing—not even at dismantling American civil society as it has been up to now, and a major cultural force for spreading the real radical vision of the Enlightenment—to pursue the entrenched interests of expanding global capital, of extracting from every corner of the world every last ounce of “resource” that can be “extracted” for sale and gain, and leaving the planet a wasteland of production, consumption, and, finally, total social disintegration.

A grim picture, surely, but one that is easily foreseeable in the ways and means of technological capital today, with its ethically bankrupt culture of “profit” and “development.” Nevertheless, it need not be the planet’s only possible future. We can change the course of events. But we must think smart, act courageously and creatively, and be willing to try radical experiments in social arrangement, in political systems, in energy production, and in how humans relate to and interact with one another and the planet.

To be continued....

Contrarian considerations: at least it's suitably radical

I'm not a member of any political party, contrarian and individualist more than anything else. Blind conformity, unchecked and unchallenged despotism, and violence and plunder, are what really get me riled.

That said, here's some congenially contrarian considerations from the Libertarian corners of our social fabric. Note: posting this here is not an endorsement from this blog of the author's views wholecloth, BUT he's got some darn good points about the "peculiar institution" of our presidency, and some passionately courageous views on what we ought to do about it. With the current madman despot, it is more timely than ever (I quote only punchy selections):


http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/down-presidency.html


Down With the Presidency

(delivered at a meeting of the John Randolph Club in Arlington, Virginia, on October 6, 1996)

...The presidency – by which I mean the executive State – is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere adjuncts. The presidency insists on complete devotion and humble submission to its dictates, even while it steals the products of our labor and drives us into economic ruin. It centralizes all power unto itself, and crowds out all competing centers of power in society, including the church, the family, business, charity, and the community.

I’ll go further. The US presidency is the world’s leading evil. It is the chief mischief-maker in every part of the globe, the leading wrecker of nations, the usurer behind Third-World debt, the bailer-out of corrupt governments, the hand in many dictatorial gloves, the sponsor and sustainer of the New World Order, of wars, interstate and civil, of famine and disease. To see the evils caused by the presidency, look no further than Iraq or Serbia, where the lives of innocents were snuffed out in pointless wars, where bombing was designed to destroy civilian infrastructure and cause disease, and where women, children, and the aged have been denied essential food and medicine because of a cruel embargo. Look at the human toll taken by the presidency, from Dresden and Hiroshima to Waco and Ruby Ridge, and you see a prime practitioner of murder by government.

..... As the presidency assumes ever more power unto itself, it becomes less and less accountable and more and more tyrannical. These days, when we say the federal government, what we really mean is the presidency. When we say, national priorities, we really mean what the presidency wants. When we say national culture, we mean what the presidency funds and imposes.

.... The presidency is seemingly bound by law, but in practice it can do just about anything it pleases. It can order up troops anywhere in the world, just as Clinton bragged in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. It can plow up a religious community in Texas and bury its members because they got on somebody’s nerves at the Justice Department. It can tap our phones, read our mail, watch our bank accounts, and tell us what we can and cannot eat, drink, and smoke.

The presidency can break up businesses, shut down airlines, void drilling leases, bribe foreign heads of state or arrest them and try them in kangaroo courts, nationalize land, engage in germ warfare, firebomb crops in Colombia, overthrow any government anywhere, erect tariffs, round up and discredit any public or private assembly it chooses, grab our guns, tax our incomes and our inheritances, steal our land, centrally plan the national and world economy, and impose embargoes on anything anytime. No prince or pope ever had this ability.


But leave all that aside and consider this nightmare. The presidency has the power to bring about a nuclear holocaust with the push of a button. On his own initiative, the president can destroy the human race. One man can wipe out life on earth. Talk about playing God. This is a grotesque evil. And the White House claims it is not a tyranny? If the power to destroy the entire world isn’t tyrannical, I don’t know what is. Why do we put up with this? Why do we allow it? Why isn’t this power immediately stripped from him?

......Each president has tended to be worse than the last, especially in this century. Lately, in terms of the powers they assumed and the dictates they imposed, Kennedy was worse than Eisenhower, Johnson was worse than Kennedy, Nixon was worse than Johnson, Carter was worse than Nixon, and Reagan – who doubled the national budget and permanently entrenched the warfare State – was worse than Carter. The same is true of Bush and Clinton. Every budget is bigger and the powers exercised more egregious. Each new brutal action breaks another taboo and establishes a new precedent that gives the next occupant of the White House more leeway.

[Ed.: And of course, now we can add W Bush to cap this mounting cavalcade of bad to worse presidents.]

....It was never the intention of the majority of framers to create the mess we have, of course. After the war for independence, the Articles of Confederation had no chief executive. Its decisions were made by a five-member Confederation. The Confederation had no power to tax. All its decisions required the agreement of 9 of the 13 states. That is the way it should be.

.... Indeed, formally, the Constitution gives few powers to the president, and few duties, most of them subject to approval by the legislature. The most important provision regarding the presidency is that the holder of the office can be impeached. It was to be a threat constantly hanging over his head. It was, most framers thought, to be threatened often and used against any president who dared gather more power unto himself than the Constitution prescribed.


.... What the neocon logic comes down to is this: The US has a moral responsibility to run the world. But the citizens are too stupid to understand this. That’s why we can’t use democratic institutions like Congress in this ambition. We must use the executive power of the presidency. It must have total control over foreign affairs, and never bow to Congressional carping. Once this point is conceded, the game is over. The demands of a centralized and all-powerful presidency and its interventionist foreign policy are ideologically reinforcing. One needs the other. If the presidency is supreme in global affairs, it will be supreme in domestic affairs. If it is supreme at home, there will be no states’ rights, no absolute property rights, no true liberty from government oppression. The continued centralization of government in the presidency represents the end of America and its civilization.

A key part of the theory of presidential supremacy in foreign affairs is the idea that politics stops at the water’s edge. If you believe that, you have given up everything. It means that foreign affairs will continue to be the last refuge of an omnipotent scoundrel. If a president can count on the fact that he won’t be criticized so long as he is running a war, he will run more of them. So long as he is running wars, government at home cannot be cut. As Felix Morley said, "Politics can stop at the water’s edge only when policies stop at the water’s edge."

Sadly, the Congress for the most part cares nothing about foreign policy. In that, it reflects the attitude of the American voter. The exception is the handful of Congressmen who do speak about foreign issues, usually at the behest of the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the increasingly global FBI. Such men are mere adjuncts of presidential power.

In fact, it is the obligation of every patriot not only to denounce a president’s actions at home, but to question, harass, and seek to rein in the presidency when it has sent troops abroad. That is when the watchful eye of the citizenry is most important. If we hold our tongues under some mistaken notion of patriotism, we surrender what remains of our freedoms. Yet during the Gulf War, even those who had courageously opposed this intervention in advance mouthed the old clichés about politics and the water’s edge and "supporting the troops" when the presidency started massacring Iraqis. Will the same happen when the troops are sent to China, a country without a single aircraft carrier, in retaliation for some trumped-up incident in the tradition of the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin?

If there is ever a time to get behind a president, it is when he withdraws from the world, stops wars, and brings the troops home. If there is ever a time to trip him up, question his leadership, and denounce his usurpations, it is when he does the opposite.

.... They [Republicans] came into office pledging to curb government, but are as infatuated with the presidency as Clinton himself. After all, they hope their party will regain the office.

Then the Republicans had the audacity to ask in bewilderment: why did the president beat Dole? What did we do wrong? The real question is what have they done right? James Burnham said that the legislature is useless unless it is curbing the presidency. By that measure, this Congress has been worthless. It deserves to lose its majority. And its party deserves to lose the presidency, whose powers they are so anxious to grab for themselves.

The best moments in the 104th Congress were when a few freshmen talked quietly of impeachment. Indeed it is their responsibility to talk loudly, openly, and constantly of impeachment. Today’s presidency is by definition in violation of the Constitution. Talk of impeachment ought to become routine. So should ridicule and humiliation. For if we care about liberty, the plebiscitory dictatorship must be reined in or tossed out."

So, the upshot here, and the question for us all: Where are all Libertarians, Constitutionalists, and other classical conservatives to join up in a widespread and grassroots groundswell to overthrow this pResident with the impeachment he deserves, and besmirch his character with the public ridicule and humiliation he has more than earned?

Greg Palast the pragmatist

San Diego CityBeat: "George Bush gets inaugurated in a few days and you, Howard Dean and others just contributed to a book called, What We Do Now: Manifesto for the Post-11/2 World. So what do we do now?"


Greg Palast: "We have a drug problem in America and it’s called television. We have a nation being turned into a bunch of fucking droids and getting so fat that pretty soon Americans are going to start oozing into each other’s protoplasm. We’ll just be giant globs with several feet and several heads probably wired straight into the television. This is the future I see.

Someone asked, “How do you explain what we do next,” and I said, “Dance. Fuck. Fight.” Make yourself indigestible to the system so that if you are ever swallowed up, you will be vomited out. I really think so. Make yourself unemployable. You’ll never get an interesting job if you’re employable. Get arrested, form a punk band and go to Indonesia and fall in love with someone who doesn’t speak your language. I’m not kidding. "

http://www.sdcitybeat.com/article.php?id=2743

MLK vs. America: "Beyond Vietnam"

One year to the day before his assassination at the hands of a still-undisclosed collusion of government operatives, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his speech "Beyond Vietnam" at the Riverside Church in New York City.

See: http://www.africanamericans.com/MLKjrBeyondVietnam.htm

It is strange to consider today, and in the white-washed official memory of MLK in the mainstream media and popular culture don't dare speak of it, but King found himself defending his outspoken opposition to Vietnam against the charge that "peace and civil rights [movements] don't mix."

In response to this narrow point of view King articulated a radical and uncomfortable angle of regard on the war, that it was an expedient mechanism of the status quo in this country for withdrawing from and ultimately dismantling very real advances that had been made in the mid-1960s for both civil rights and economic justice.

"Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."

"Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land."

And how did King clarify and substantiate his charges against the rising US war machine in Vietnam? He used the greatest weapon of all--history:

" They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954-in 1945 rather-after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China-for whom the Vietnamese have no great love-but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives."

King was willing to articulate clearly and without equivocation what has been the standard hypocrisy in US foreign policy in the post-war era: pursue colonialist and imperialist wars and alliances at any cost abroad, all the while spouting "freedom" and "democracy" and "defeat of communism" at home.

"For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by United States influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of a new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after ashort period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours."


King's eloquent and unflinching opposition to the Vietnam war machine and its domestic propaganda was becoming a liability to the warmongers, the profiteers and the corporate status quo that dominated the political landscape of the late 1960s. To men like Kissinger, Rumsfeld, George Bush Sr., and their partisans, the power and influence of social leaders like MLK was best solved with an assassin's bullet (as had worked with JFK).

In 1999, after a final truth-finding trial in Memphis (Kings v. Jowers), the King family issued a statement, very much on the record, though in the five years since that time it has hardly been whispered by the reality-factory of the corporate mass media. They said:

"3. After hearing and reviewing the extensive testimony and evidence, which had never before been tested under oath in a court of law, it took the Memphis jury only 1½ hours to find that a conspiracy to kill Dr. King did exist. Most significantly, this conspiracy involved agents of the governments of the City of Memphis, the state of Tennessee and the United States of America. The overwhelming weight of the evidence also indicated that James Earl Ray was not the triggerman and, in fact, was an unknowing patsy.

4. We stand by that verdict and have no doubt that the truth about this terrible event has finally been revealed.

5. We urge all interested Americans to read the transcript of the trial on the King Center website and consider the evidence, so they can form their own unbiased conclusions."

You can read the full trial transcripts and the fuller King family statement at:

http://www.thekingcenter.org/news/trial.html#Transcript

And we can best honor Martin Luther King by speaking out against the declawed, defanged, white-washed "official memory" of MLK and his death being peddled by the reality-factory of the corporate mass media machine, and by learning and being inspired by the FULL record of Dr. King's radical activism and social dissent between 1965 and April 4, 1968. And perhaps in his example and his words we can find the courage and creativity to speak and act out against the forces of violence and greed that still inflict their terror, with increasing power and impunity, on our nation and the world.

Consumers and Producers

The class struggles, which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the Communist Manifesto (first published in 1848) identified as underlying and animating all human social history, did not end with the supposed “fall” of Communism in the late twentieth century. They continue unabated.

The spectacular success of global capitalism has resulted in remarkable new configurations of exploiters and exploited. Marx and Engels, from the vantagepoint of the mid-nineteenth century, believed that capitalists, in mobilizing mass industrial workforces, were creating their own gravediggers. They did not adequately foresee the crafty potential for capitalist ideology, elaborated and disseminated in pop culture, to pit workers, wage-laborers, and producers against one another and, most importantly, against themselves. Perhaps they underestimated the proclivities toward pleasure and immediate self-interest in human nature.

Consumerism and its seductive commodities culture make producers and low-level marketers of those commodities voluntary accomplices in their own exploitation, the exploitation of other producers, and the unsustainable plunder of the natural world. In becoming consumers, producers are divided against themselves. This is the competition of the proletariat for individual survival, harnessed by capitalism for private profits, which Marx and Engels identified as the dynamic of capitalism, but now ratcheted up to new levels of social and psychological alienation.

Ask the AFL-CIO whether business management has ever fought fair in their treatment of labor interests. Ask Walmart employees, or cross-examine its middle managers, how swiftly and resolutely the world’s largest retailer and wealthiest corporation deals with any whispered rumor of labor organization and union.

Big business in this country, along with the government, remains deeply, even violently inimical to labor unions. In the last thirty years American presidents of both parties have stepped in to break labor strikes, sometimes in the name of “national security,” contrary to the interests of labor. At the same time, many hard-working Americans, even among the working poor, will express anti-union sentiments and hold skeptical opinions about organized labor.

Many decent hard-working Americans actually believe that federal budget ills are mainly caused by the “welfare state.” How wrong they are! Social Security, food stamps, WIC and other social programs are hardly at fault; the blame rests squarely on a bloated military industrial complex, and that other, “corporate welfare” program, the systematic favoring of business and particular moneyed interests at the expense of the public interest. These parasitic social diseases have ruined our fiscal solvency.

But where could the working poor have got such an idea? From business and government itself, both of which has spent untold resources on combatting the ethics and processes of collective labor, and keeping American workers divided against themselves, and against workers in other countries. Anti-communist propaganda throughout the twentieth century, especially during the Cold War from the 1950s to the ’80s, was expressly underwritten by corporate America. The “Red Scare” was the fright of the privileged few who saw the underprivileged many as a threat to their moneyed interests and the rise of their stock portfolios.

A small headline in the business section of a Salem, OR, newspaper on January 1, 2005, attests very eloquently to the class struggles still simmering in this country: Possible unions biggest worry to health-care bosses.

The brief article runs: “Northwest health-care executives are most concerned about union organizing, according to a survey by a national labor-relations firm….Nearly 71 percent of the surveyed executives said they are most concerned about union organizing, but 96 percent agreed that educating employees is the best method to prevent it.”

“Preventing” union organization through “educating” employees—that is precisely the sort of cynically self-interested language that business thrives on, here suggesting that unions are a sort of public health issue that needs to be staved off through well-intentioned public awareness campaigns.

Yet the labor union is deeply democratic in principle: that the conditions and compensation for work should be adequate to the needs of all workers, and be reflective of all workers’ basic health and welfare. This is but an instance of the most basic principle of democracy, inscribed in the American Declaration of Independence, that the nature and authority of any government ought to derive from the consent, not the coercion, of the governed.

But government and business leadership do coerce the compliance of employees with the same whip that has always been used by ruling classes to control those they rule: by limiting the means to subsistence and basic survival, food, water, shelter. By holding over the poor the grim prospect of poverty, of penniless destitution and propertyless indigence, capitalism has continued to advance its successes at the ongoing expense of democracy everywhere.

But the stick of threatened poverty has also been supplemented by the genetically modified carrot of industrial overabundance, that outlandish basis of the consumer culture and the real secret of the “American middle-class miracle.” Consumerism too depends on workers being divided against themselves, because overproduction and overconsumption are not in anybody’s or anything’s longterm interest, considered rationally; they only serve the short-term profit interests that reside at the top of the tall and steep global wealth pyramid erected by capitalism and buttressed up by undemocratic regimes, environmental devastation, and human misery worldwide.

Because of overproduction and overconsumption America and other “First World” nations are now entering a postconsumer stage of capitalist development.

The addictive thrill of consumption is fading. Its negative side effects everywhere abound. Mountains stand denuded of ancient forests. Hills are gutted in industrial mining operations, and ever more earth is moved for massive building projects. Suburbs of cheaply built homes sprawl far and wide. Food portions balloon out of all proportion to basic nutritional needs. Motorists clog the highways, driving longer, farther, faster, demanding more roads to satisfy their thirst for driving novelties, driving just for its own sake, consuming ever more gasoline. Inventories of cheaply made goods, apparel, homewares, electronics, sit on shelves, then are swept away into the gray and black markets of dollar stores and street vending, to make way for the next season’s fashions and fads. All of it a burdensome drain on the limited resources of the planet’s biosphere, adding to the warming greenhouse gases, all of it destined for trash heaps.

The most eloquent symbol of the postconsumer culture is the garbage truck and the landfill. Although capitalism touts “efficiency,” its most authentic, end-stage product is waste itself. The postconsumer culture thrives on and revolves around rituals of waste production and disposal. Every instance of consumption, from opening the package to throwing out the leftovers, is bookended by generating trash and removing it from one’s presence, in preparation for the next instance of consumption. Postconsumer culture is addicted to its own pollution.

In a mere thirty or so years, the capitalist marketplace has created a vast sector of grossly underpaid service employment, comprised of degrading, mind-numbing jobs to sustain the culture of convenience and overconsumption demanded by industrial overproduction. These workers are required to work through weekends, holidays, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, their employment kept constantly precarious by bullying middle managers and the threat of dismissal for the least infraction or dissent. No one would argue that a Seven-Eleven cash register attendant is a high-skilled job that deserves a very high wage. But the job should not exist in the first place. Nobody ever needs a Slurpee and a hot dog at 3:30 in the morning. The culture of convenience exists only to cater to, and promote, overconsumption.

An economy of overproduction relies on ever decreasing the quality of products in favor of unlimited quantity. The ideal commodity is one with designed obsolescence; things are made to be broken. It relies on a duplicitous ad-driven pop culture that abuses consumer intelligence with lies of endless novelty and product improvement. It relies on the exploitation of genuine human sentiment and ideals, and of human sexuality, in order to tinge commodities, trinkets, and food items, with a residue of sentimental and erotic desire.

Overproduction is thus dependent on a truly nefarious exploitation of human motivations and psychological drives in order to generate the necessary demand for overconsumption.

Participation in pop culture, therefore, entails a very real element of masochistic self-abuse. The effect of this self-abuse is a demoralized complacency. Both capitalism and “conservative” reactionary political factions further capitalize on this demoralizing effect to advance their narrow and antidemocratic interests, and thus have learned to foster overconsumption above all else as the most effective means to maintaining the corporate capitalist status quo.

The surreal obesity epidemic in the US and other “First World” areas is indicative of overconsumption’s self-destructive dynamic. Overproduction, which Marx and Engels saw as the novel danger of technological industrialism, has been turned to the task of continually stuffing the void of psychological dissatisfaction among the working classes, who suffer from a nagging sense of helplessness and a lack of civic and political agency.

In such a climate it is no wonder that all varieties of junk religion now abound, which offer over-simplified versions of reality, of human history and human potential, while providing individuals a social setting for sentimentalized emotional outlet in song, “worship,” “praise,” and basic human companionship and fellowship. Nevertheless, contemporary forms of traditional and evangelical Christianity (not to mention religions and sects deriving from other historical traditions) are not very successful at removing their adherents in any real way from the moral seductions and entrapments of the capitalist consumer culture.

Indeed, the political status quo of that culture, the so-called “conservatives,” have proven very successful at manipulating the traditional language and symbolic forms of mainstream Christian religious culture in order to persuade them that capitalist exploitation—through industrial and corporate occupation of their rural areas, through fewer and fewer jobs with less pay and lower benefits, through the impoverishment and trivialization of their children by poorly funded public education and the constant assaults of pop culture—that these forms of physical and spiritual colonization are actually in their best interest.

Told that urban populations are their natural born enemies, suburbians and what is left of the rural citizenry have learned to distrust and react against “liberal” ideas and “values.” This rhetorical ploy is part of the more general strategy of keeping working classes from recognizing their basic common interests, against the real elite of money which cares neither for rural nor urban poor, nor academia and science, nor laws and regulations, except as so many hurdles to leap and barriers to overcome in the pursuit of expanded fields for profit-taking.

Thus one pressing goal for progressives, if they want to achieve any success, will be to cut through the current political rhetoric that pits country against city in a culture war, thereby making rural and urban working poor inimical to one another, despite their common economic and social interests.

In 1944 Woody Guthrie and Cisco Huston first recorded their song “The Farmer- Labor Train,” which called for workers of city and country nationwide to unite in a political party. The song was used in modified form in 1948 by Henry Wallace in a third-party Presidential campaign. To the tune of “Wabash Cannonball” Woody and Cisco articulate what is still today a relevant message, and angle of vision, for working class interests that cuts across the deceptive “culture wars” which are in large part so much ideology for a corporate-government status quo that keeps money flowing in the “right” direction: towards the wealthy and greedy and away from the poor and needy.

It is a powerful song. Find it, listen to it. Let us make it one of our anthems. Let’s have it guide us in our strategy of rearticulating the labor class interests across the geographic and demographic spectrum of this country, and beyond to other nations, in order to achieve some real progress, sooner rather than later.

Woody Guthrie's "Farmer-Labor Train"

Here are the lyrics to Woody Guthrie's 1944 song "Farmer-Labor Train"

(see http://www.woodyguthrie.de/farmlab.html
and hear a snippet at http://www.mp3.com/albums/300016/summary.html)

From the high Canadian Rockies to the land of Mexico,
City and the country, wherever you may go,
Through the wild and windy weather, the sun and sleet and rain,
Comes a-whistlin' through the country this Farmer-Labor train.

Listen to the jingle and the rumble and the roar,
She's rollin' through New England to the West Pacific shore.
It's a long time we've been waitin', now she's been whistlin' 'round the bend,
Roll on into Congress on that Farmer-Labor train.
[TRAIN WHISTLE IMITATION]

There's lumberjacks and teamsters and sailors from the sea,
There's farmin' boys from Texas and the hills of Tennessee,
There's miners from Kentucky, there's fishermen from Maine;
Every worker in the country rides that Farmer-Labor train.

There's warehouse boys and truckers and guys that skin the cats,
Men that run the steel mills, the furnace and the blast,
Through the smoky factory cities, o'er the hot and dusty plains,
And the cushions they are crowded, on this Farmer-Labor train.

Listen to the jingle and the rumble and the roar,
She's rollin' through New England to the West Pacific shore.
It's a long time we've been waitin', now she's been whistlin' 'round the bend,
Ride on on into Congress on that Farmer-Labor train.
[HARMONICA TRAIN WHISTLE IMITATION]

There's folks of every color and they're ridin' side by side
Through the swamps of Louisiana and across the Great Divide,
From the wheat fields and the orchards and the lowing cattle range,
And they're rolling onto victory on this Farmer-Labor train.

This train pulled into Washington a bright and happy day,
When she steamed into the station you could hear the people say:
"There's that Farmer-Labor Special, she's full of union men
Headin' onto White House on the Farmer-Labor train."

When in the course of human events...

Manifest Democracy

A Counter-Declaration to the Project for a New American Century

It has been half a millennium since Europeans unleashed the ruthless leviathan of rational capitalism upon the world at large. No living species has not, by now, been drawn ineluctably into its jaws. The most powerful human institutions the world has ever known all stand ready at arms to defend the rights of capitalist development against any and all conceivable opposition, the United States Government and its Armageddion military might, the CIA, Great Britain, IMF, the United Nations, WTO, the World Bank.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, the specter of Communism has, we are told, been exorcised. China is communist in name only and day by day grows more brutally capitalist in fact, leaving Cuba as its last lonely stronghold. Even here the US has a foothold colony at Guantanamo Bay, which has become the United States' first bold experiment in offshore penal colonies, a fate worse than death reserved for the new enemies of the capitalist free market.

Demonized as "terrorism" by the capitalist status quo hell-bent on unfettered expansion, does this new enemy have a name that is not a stigmatizing label from its opposition?

It does. That name is democracy.

Democracy is the last social system, with real-life processes tried and tested in the fires of human experience, which capitalism itself acknowledges as a legitimate power. It is for this reason that capitalism has been desperate to conflate and confuse democracy with itself, to subjugate its moral and historical force to the private ends of capitalist profit.

Thus capitalism is now entrenching its forces on the frontlines against democracy, and will stop at nothing until all its hard-won achievements have been dismantled, and all its manifestations are either eliminated, suppressed, or neutralized by hollow substitutes.

At this dire historical crisis, therefore, it is incumbent upon all champions and supporters of democracy to extricate it, clearly and definitively, from the obfuscating and appropriating rhetoric of the capitalists who are quickly alienating the democratic spirit from the world's people.

At this dark and late hour the people of the world must join together to make manifest democracy.

Stay tuned. . .

New Indiana Governor kills state labor unions

On his second day in office the new Republican Governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, signed an executive order rescinding state labor unions' collective bargaining rights. He did so "to protect the children."

The Governor assured Indiana state workers that they are still free to join unions, and to pay union dues--just that now it will be a completely futile exercise....

The Republican Party tries to assure the world that this move does not indicate an anti-labor movement in Indiana....


http://www.indystar.com/articles/7/208764-5127-092.html

_________

By Kevin Corcoran and Mary Beth Schneiderkevin.corcoran@indystar.com
January 12, 2005

Gov. Mitch Daniels canceled union contracts covering nearly 25,000 stateworkers Tuesday, saying they stood in the way of his efforts to rapidly overhaulIndiana government.

The order, which will end the ability of those employees to negotiate pay,benefits and work rules with state officials, ends a 15-year policy thatDaniels' three Democratic predecessors maintained by choice.

Daniels, a Republican, said he was ending bargaining rights partly to form aseparate agency to handle child welfare and child support without having toconsult with union officials. The state has been criticized for its handling ofseveral highly publicized child abuse cases.

"This is an important day for children in Indiana. . . . It's an importantday for reform of government," he said Tuesday, flanked by a group of childadvocates outside his office.

The governor said rescinding the state's union contracts would make it easierfor him to boost the pay of child welfare caseworkers and high-performingstate employees. Daniels' actions won't affect pay raises that state workers areto receive this year.

Reaction from the affected employees, who include state troopers, welfarecaseworkers and prison guards, ranged from applause to disappointment.

The unions had bargained for health care subsidies, handled workers'job-related grievances and protected employees' rights during disciplinary proceedings. Daniels' move also means workers lost seniority rights in bidding for jobs,transfers and vacation time.

Members of Indiana's Black Legislative Caucus slammed Daniels' executiveorder.

"It is hard to reconcile the words of our new governor on his first day inoffice with his actions on the second day," Rep. Greg Porter, D-Indianapolis,the caucus leader, said in a written statement.

"Gov. Daniels has spoken long and loud about supporting those hard-working state employees who dedicate their lives to helping the people of Indiana, butnow it appears that he does not support their efforts to earn a decent wage."

Republican lawmakers were quick to praise Daniels while emphasizing his actions do not signal the beginnings of an anti-labor movement in state government.

"There are political implications to this that we will have to watch," said Rep. Luke Messer, R-Shelbyville, and executive director of the state RepublicanParty.

During last year's election, Indiana's two major state workers' unions, theUnity Team and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, supported Kernan. A smaller union representing State Police, conservationofficers and Excise Police remained neutral, but the Indiana State Police Alliance, which is not a union, endorsed Daniels.

Half of the 35,000 state executive branch employees earn less than $29,738 ayear. About two-thirds of those workers have been represented by unions.

In place of the contracts, Daniels gave more state workers the right to appeal firings, demotions and suspensions without pay to the State Employees' Appeals Commission. That five-member panel, appointed by the governor, can reverse personnel decisions.

"We will insist on full protection of employees against any arbitrary orunfair actions," he said. "In many ways, life will not change at all."

Daniels broke the news Tuesday to union leaders during a brief meeting at the State Personnel Department in the Indiana Government Center. His chief ofstaff, Harry Gonso, and his personnel director, Debra Minott, stayed behind totalk with union officials after Daniels had departed to announce his executiveorder.

UAW Region 3 Director Terry Thurman, who attended the meeting with Daniels, said later he wasn't surprised but took issue with the governor's reasoning.

"If he thinks we're not interested in protecting children, he's way offbase," Thurman said.

Daniels said state workers could continue to join unions, and unions could keep collecting dues from members with the state's help. He also said his personnel director would meet every three months with union officials to hear their concerns.

Practically speaking, however, union officials say there's little they can do without bargaining power. They say that in the past, the appeals commission upheld 98 percent of management decisions, and that union grievances resulted in fairer outcomes.

"Quite frankly, how many people are going to want to pay for something they're not getting that much out of?" said Keith Gill, the public safety union's president.

Indiana is unusual among states because this negotiating authority, not foundin state law, had depended on each incoming governor signing a new executive order. Daniels chose not to renew that order and then rescinded contracts thatwere supposed to run through mid-2007.

At least 13 states have laws on the books giving state workers collectivebargaining rights. In Indiana, the Democrat-led House has passed bills to create a collective bargaining law, but the Republican-controlled Senate has blockedit every time.

Now both chambers are under Republican control, and a collective bargaining law is unlikely.

Some state employees were troubled by Daniels' decision.

"It's a horrible idea," said Irene Hansen, who works at the Indiana State Library. "The union is the only safeguard against management taking advantage of employees. This turns back the clock for Indiana."

Francis "Fuzz" LeMay, president of the Unity Team's Local 9212, said theunion will close up shop and about 10 union representatives will go back to their regular state jobs at agencies such as the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Family and Social Services Administration and the Indiana Department ofTransportation.

"Obviously we're disappointed. There's nobody who will speak up for state employees now," said LeMay, a prison guard.

Daniels got a different reaction when he dropped in later Tuesday on ameeting of a couple of hundred Family and Social Services Administration employees. They were meeting their new bosses and learning more about how Daniels intends to break up the agency to create a separate agency to handle child protection and child support collections.

When Daniels asked if anyone had questions, no one raised a hand until oneman spoke up.

He didn't have a question. Instead, he told Daniels he and others respected him for making what was surely a tough decision to end collective bargaining.

The auditorium broke into applause.

"Thank you," Daniels said, with some surprise in his voice.

"When I heard or read that people were simply not doing the job they werepaid to do, and therefore putting kids at risk, and could not be moved orsanctioned, that got my attention," he said. And, he told them, "I hope fervently itwill work out very, very well for every worker in government in the state ofIndiana."

Star reporters Eric Martin and Michele McNeil contributed to this story.

Call Star reporter Kevin Corcoran at (317) 444-2770.

birth of a blog

It started with a stolen election. Not the first, probably not the last, but without a doubt a historic one. The second millennium of Christendom ended with a bang, and since a dimestore cowboy had freebooted his way into the executive chair, it sparked a third world war, one that is just now ramping up and shows no signs of ending for a very long time.

Times that try men's and women's souls. Electronic gadgetry, along with older, less hightech, more time-tested methods of bullying voters out of the polls, were leveraged into a corporate takeover of the American state. Some of us watched it happen, day by mindblowing, gutwrenching day, watched it unfold before our very eyes. We fought and screamed. We are still fighting, kicking and screaming. We are also thinking together, talking low and taking our stands.

Most of America did not watch, do not even know it happened. The press corps of corporate syndication said look the other way, watch that spoof of real news the Peterson trial, gawk at Desperate Housewives. And so America is choosing pop culture over democratic culture, Walmart consumerism over global justice and world citizenship.

This blog, like many others, is being brought to birth amid the mouldering embers of the latest strike on native soil in GWBush's war of terrorism on every fragile living thing that is good, just, noble, beautiful. Friends will be invited to join, and I hope it will become yet another gathering place for us to think out our radical revision of this American life. I will be publishing my thoughts and visions, observations and complaints, my darkest fears and most brilliant glimmers of hope.

It's time for clear thinking and radical action. Radical -- from Latin for root: let's get our fingers dirty in the gardens and the wastelands of this five hundred year old NEW WORLD of dark tragedies and lofty idealism. Let's pull and tug and grasp it by the roots, and get the grassland prairies, the forests, the wetlands to flourish with the evergreen of democracy again.

Wisdom of a South Korean Farmer in Despair

The following comes from the end of a Project Censored story on the consolidation of global agribusiness in the hands of a few huge transnational corporations:(http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/19.html)"Prior to committing suicide as an act of political protest on September 10, 2003 against the World Trade Organization in Cancun, Mexico, Lee Kyung-Hae, a 56-year old farmer from South Korea circulated the following statement. “My warning goes to all citizens that human beings are in an endangered situation in which uncontrolled multinational corporations and a small number of big WTO official members are leading undesirable globalization of inhumane, environmentally degrading, farmer-killing and undemocratic policies. It should be stopped immediately, otherwise the false logic of neo-liberalism will perish the diversities of global agriculture with disastrous consequences to all human beings.” "