Full Disclosure and World Democracy Now!

View of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean with tip of Africa visible. Composite NASA image from the Scientific Visualization Studio for the International Polar Year 2005.

View of Antarctica from low orbit if the ice cap was removed. Created with Bedmap2 by the British Antarctic Survey with NASA’s ICESat and Operation IceBridge, 2013.

We live in the midst of a time of transition. Now is a time of final endings and new beginnings. We live during a time of great volatility, destruction, and fear, yet also one vibrant with dynamic and revolutionary possibilities.

Together we experience what seems to be the ending of the Modern Age as global capitalism breaks down, nation-states grow increasingly obsolete, Earth’s sixth Mass Extinction unfolds, technology races ahead, nuclear warfare returns to threaten all of us with obliteration, A.I. emerges in disturbing new ways, and global climate disruption accelerates. New energy sources and technologies begin to emerge as the old dinosaurs of coal and oil still roar.

Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and others are being rediscovered upon the centenary of the Russian Revolution as more information is uncovered to discover what actually occurred and not the slander and falsehoods portrayed as “history.” Socialism continues to evolve in the 21st Century as it integrates more with democracy and uncouples from authoritarianism. Newer, greener versions emerge such as Democratic Socialism, the expansion of democracy into all areas of life. The Left is in a process of rebirth and renewal even as its advocates are challenged not only by the rise of newly-confident and violent fascists but also by the grim realities of life in despotic, self-proclaimed “socialist” regimes such as Venezuela and North Korea who blame all of their woes on capitalist imperialists. Yet the Fascists and their authoritarian, nationalist allies are the ones currently in ascendance.

Both the Right and the Left have reached the limitations of isms rooted in the terminologies of 18th and 19th Century language so even dead giants polished off and reclaimed such as Marx soon end up abandoned by a world enthralled with the euphoria of our technonarcissism. At the same time our scientists discover more and more stars with more and more planets likely to support life. In the midst of such turmoil Humanity experiences more UFO and ET phenomena than ever before.

Growing numbers of whistleblowers dare come forward to disclose what they claim to know. These people include not only everyday folks, but top scientists and engineers, astronauts and pilots, military officers and intelligence agents, corporate CEOs, and high government officials. Most are credible people in their own right regardless if one agrees or disagrees with their individual politics and religions. Their testimonies and who they are can be verified. More and more experiencers are also coming forth, however, who appear believable, even charismatic, but who are not credible or verifiable. Many of our fellow Humans who risk all for the truth face ridicule, harassment, loss of jobs, dismissal, threats to families, and in some cases what appears to be murder disguised as suicides or accidents. Those who seek truth without leveraging critical thinking skills risk finding answers within the circular reasoning of cults. Or they struggle to free themselves from the groupthink of our societies at large.

Yet incredibly the mainstream mass media behaves as if these “UFO people” are stupid and insane. Mainstream academia, beholden to bureaucratic tyrants and the financial reins of their corporate overlords, remains too terrified and astonishingly ignorant to address these challenging subjects. Thus the people who most need to pull their heads up out of their smartfoneholes won’t even look at these life-changing issues. They will instead debunk these matters even when confronted with clear evidence governments deliberately created and engaged in debunking and smear campaigns during the height of the Cold War to distract the public from the enormity of the truth.

It is vital we human beings continue to awaken from old patterns of self-destruction to build new political and economic systems. We can do better than the horrors we visit upon each other and ourselves. We must ascend our current and prehistoric limitations.

We must support the establishment of a Constitutional, Democratic World Republic.

Creating a Democratic Socialist World Parliament with all representatives subject to recall in a participatory republic is a primary step in this direction.

We must find ways to wrest control of the world’s money powers away from central banking cartels, corporations, big banks, tax regimes, and energy conglomerates.

Demanding Full Disclosure now is imperative. We the People of Earth must know exactly what in the world is going on. Now!

What must we do now? Continue reading

Jackie Screams in Silence

Silent are the many Class War dead buried beneath the myths of Camelot

Watching Jackie felt like eating jagged broken glass thru my eyes as if eyeballs were little, bloody mouths wired directly into my brains. The movie is intense, jarring, and rich with excellent and challenging performances. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Texas six days before Thanksgiving 1963 was a sucker punch to the American gut.

One could quibble about actress Natalie Portman’s attempt at Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy’s accent, but her harrowing performance rivets and horrifies. Portman becomes Jackie with such wrenching intensity it’s as if we’re invading the former First Lady’s privacy. The film portrays the Journalist, played by Billy Crudup, as an unnamed man but understood to be Theodore H. White, a historian and journalist turned propagandist and Camelot mythmaker.

The movie is in part a portrayal of a woman’s grief and shock at the public murder of her husband while at the pinnacle of their power. The film also, less convincingly but nevertheless disturbingly, illuminates the collusion between the chain-smoking former First Lady and the Journalist to control the public narrative and secure the myth of the American Camelot as “truth.” In its own unique way, Jackie reflects the legacy of Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama enmeshed with blood and brains in the way of American movies.

What makes this collusion even more bizarre was Jackie’s sterilization of her dead husband’s true legacy. To his credit, JFK was in many ways a traitor to his class of wealthy, bourgeoisie capitalists, and this article addresses this further down. Jackie Kennedy, however, fought, plotted, connived, and strategized to elevated JFK to the lofty, neo-feudal status of Camelot. A powerful and determined person, she was also relentless and ferocious as she grabbed the helm of history. Continue reading

Fighting Back against Trump and the Right beyond Inauguration Day Weekend

No flash in the pan protests! Sustained demonstrations are required.

Building Massive Resistance against Trump and the Alt-Right helps build a Democratic Socialist world.

Major demonstrations are being planned across the United States of America over these two days to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump as President and Mike Pence as Vice-President. Other marches and rallies in solidarity with this insurrection are planned in other cities around the world. These protests, even in the midst of winter, are expected to be huge. Already over 25,000 people took to the streets of New York City on the Thursday before Inauguration Day to demonstrate against Trump-Pence and their ugly and dangerously stupid agenda.

It would be naïve to think all these vigorous acts of defiance, resistance, unity, and courage will have much immediate effect. And with today’s technologies at our fingertips with social media, anything is possible. Even more naïve, however, is to believe we can simply pack up and go home and plop down as if OK, look how LOUD we showed Trump-Pence and the Alt-Right we roared! No. This is a long fight shaping up. We must be prepared for a long, long struggle!

Know, too, when we on the Left fight, we win in the end. To fight and win, however, we must come together to educate and organize ourselves to fight effectively.

Consider examples in American history of what efforts activists took to win. Let’s look at our own history. Struggle takes time, and the more we fight we win. Perseverance is key. The Civil Rights Movement lasted from the early 1950s all the way thru the 60s into the mid-1970s. Significant high points were the Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 followed 10 years later by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Then the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and National Services Act passed in 1965, and the Fair Housing Act in 1968.

The anti-Vietnam War movement began protesting in 1964 and grew so vigorous President Lyndon Johnson of the Democrats was compelled to withdraw from seeking reelection in March 1968. These anti-war demonstrations also compelled the next President, Republican Richard Nixon, to withdraw U.S. forces from the Vietnam War in March 1973. These civil rights and anti-war protests merged with other movements as resistance to Nixon exploded yet again during the Watergate crisis. Nixon resigned the American presidency in August of 1974. The labor and environmental movements are other classic examples of struggles taking years to manifest a string of powerful successes.

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Videos and Stories from the Unfinished Struggle for Workers’ Rights at REI

Six Videos, the Petition, and our Stories…and it’s not over

Note this article with its compilation of videos is not marketed or sold for profit nor is anything in this article being marketed and sold for profit. This article and the videos within may be freely shared as long as various sources and authorship are acknowledged.

“There is one word missing. One word that makes all the difference. This word is ‘organized’. That is: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, ORGANIZED citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” It speaks to the power of people mobilization; the power of true change that starts from the bottom wing…there is a growing, if naïve belief that all you need is a lot of passion, a lot of commitment, a lot of good intentions and lots of mavericks, rebels, disruptors, contrarians and challengers and, alas, change will happen. It won’t.” – Socio-cultural change activist Leandro Herrero of Spain on the necessity for activists to organize and organize quickly.

A workers’ revolt had brewed within REI since at least 2015. Matters came to a head in July 2016 as groups of workers rose up openly in nonviolent direct action. Among their issues at stake were demands for a living wage, for secure, predictable scheduling, and for democratic representation via a union. These demands burst open the heart of the matter to reveal whether the REI Co-op would be a truly cooperative business. Or a lie.

This is our story as a brief summary from my perspective. Thus this is only a small part of our big story from only one person’s point of view from a particular time and place. Indeed, the record of this peaceful uprising may even be your story. Much work remains to be done by we the working people. Our story, your story, remains unfinished. The truth, often forgotten or unacknowledged, is we who stood up before the media for our co-op and for our fellow coworkers who wouldn’t or couldn’t were scared. Yes, at times we felt terrified! We were afraid of being fired from REI and blacklisted from securing employment elsewhere. And we stood up anyway. We stood up and spoke what needed to be said and heard. Such actions took more courage than simply feeling brave. What made it possible was the support from our collective, cooperative community of REI Members, fellow coworkers, and former coworkers.

In the beginning, actions may be led by small numbers of people determined to organize and act in such a way, as the late, great anthropologist Margaret Meade liked to point out, as to change the world. They may be resisted at first by those who insist these leaders not speak for them but say, “some few individuals.” Progress cannot be stayed. Even the most peaceful revolution has setbacks and is set upon by cynics and automatic critics as well as often ignored by the apathetic and the resigned. It is acceptable to feel afraid, and let us move forward anyway even if scared. Yes, it’s OK to be afraid. Move forward anyway. Don’t let fear stop us, but do let fear keep us alert and on top of our game. Our revolt had repercussions benefiting many workers, although success wasn’t as widespread as initially believed.

One can trace this revolt back to the influences of the 2011 Wisconsin Insurrection followed by the Occupy Uprisings of 2011-2012. Out of Occupy Seattle emerged the political campaigns of economist Kshama Sawant, the Socialist Alternative candidate, for local offices in 2012-2013. She lost her race for the Washington House of Representatives, and won her election to Seattle City Council where she has served since 2014. These struggles overlapped with and were followed by the Black Lives Matter revolts beginning in 2013 and still ongoing. They in turn help inspire the successful Fight for $15 an hour minimum wage struggles of 2014-2016. This uprising was sparked by Alaska Airline employees in SeaTac, Washington, spread to Seattle, and then reverberated across the United States in the form of fast food strikes and other direct actions organized with assistance from Socialist Alternative and allies in the labor union movement such as SEIU (the Service Employees International Union) and UFCW (the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union).

More directly related to REI, however, were the 2014 demonstrations against sweatshop labor in making products for The North Face and against REI’s partnership with The North Face. The anti-sweatshop protests were small but loud, nationwide, and even erupted in other countries. A nationwide student labor union known as the United Students Against Sweatshops or USAS (http://usas.org) organized these demonstrations at REI and TNF stores.

The international horror in the wake of the April 2013 Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh was still fresh in the general public’s mind in 2014. Over 1,130 people were killed and nearly another 2,500 injured in this disaster. A foto of an unidentified man and woman buried in the rubble still embraced even in death became famous. Their nature of their actual relationship remains unknown, and the image of their tragedy affected the world. To be clear, while up to 28 Western companies including Benneton, J.C. Penney, Joe Fresh, Zara, Primark, and Walmart were involved in the Rana Plaza collapse, this list don’t seem to include any companies associated with REI or The North Face. Even so, the Rana Plaza catastrophe left a vivid impression on people about worker’s rights in general within our globalized capitalist economy.

Sweatshop labor is slave labor where predatory capitalists, the kind of capitalists that give responsible businesses and visionary, hardworking entrepreneurs a bad name, leveraged deeply indebted people into perpetual debt bondage and exploited children for their tiny hands and nimble fingers for profit. Such vulnerable people were beaten, fed little, worked with little rest or sleep, sexually violated, kept terrified, and generally traumatized. People died and were maimed in these slave factories. The problem afflicts many companies as human slavery and trafficking is a worldwide wicked problem. To be clear, these problems existed long before capitalism, and we have the power and vision here in the 21st Century to work together and resolve these conflicts.

Patagonia and Apple were among the few to take vigorous action to tackle this problem of slavery and trafficking, but unregulated capitalist imperatives to exploit resources and cheap labor for short-term profits, socio-cultural normalization, and political power makes cleaning up these messes self-defeating. The North Face, owned by VF Corporation in Greensboro, North Carolina, was one of the worst offenders. Only in 2015 did VFC and TNF start addressing sustainability and green energy issues, but still has not addressed its use of sweatshop labor.

See: https://rankabrand.org/sportswear-sports-shoes/The+North+Face.

See: http://reisweatshops.usas.org.

[Upate 2023 insert:] The two above links no longer work and are kept here for historic, archival purposes as original sources that worked back in 2017.

More workers in America and more workers in other nation-states such as Bangladesh are beginning to understand this is an international issue, indeed an international working class issue. Thus an issue that demands we workers hold the capitalist classes accountable as we further organize a new mass movement across the working and middle classes to build a progressive, planetary society. It is up to us to figure out what such action steps look like. We must find ways to rise above the endless arguments over -isms and understand expanding democracy into the workplace expands democracy for all.

What the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used to call “economic democracy” and what the progressive Left today such as Sen. Bernie Sanders call “democratic socialism” is often misunderstood by many and erroneously conflated with communism, totalitarianism, anarchy, Nazism, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and so forth. Those isms are not at all the same thing as economic democracy or democratic socialism. People who believe they are need to learn a few things. Indeed, this movement expanding democracy in the workplace is also an expansion of our individual liberties, human and civil rights, and social responsibilities. Equating such with dictatorship and tyranny is fearmongering feeding hysteria, polarization, violence, and ignorance.

People may disagree on approaches and degrees of this and that, debate whatever ignites their passions, but forget the Big Picture so many of us work to put together and build out. In many ways we are limited by our language. We get lost in fighting and arguing over political and economic -ism terminology from the 17th and 18th Centuries and the horrors of the 20th Century. Together we can choose to build a better local-global system for our 21st Century. Or not. The consequences are dire. It doesn’t work to go all out in support of cherry-picked progressive agendas only to bash labor unions and worker-owned cooperative businesses.

Below is the first of six videos here and is from United Students Against Sweatshops. It is a part of REI history we must remember and Corporate Headquarters wants us to forget. REI HQ preferred instead to distract people’s attention by ramping up its efforts to market the petty bourgeois abomination known as “glamping.”

Before REI workers launched their own petition for real change after so many were fired in late 2015, there was an earlier petition demanding “REI, Drop North Face Sweatshops!” I signed it myself on Monday 2 January 2017. Yes, I am ashamed to confess I was unaware of this petition until recently (2017) and didn’t realize the true nature of the anti-North Face protests back in 2014. In 2014 I was still emerging from almost two years of being homeless or semi-homeless while ill with severe depression and a cluster of autoimmune conditions. That’s no excuse, of course, and I share to give one a sense of what was experienced. As alluded to earlier, these struggles of solidarity for justice, equality, and liberty for working class people are far from over.

Max Silva, an REI Member, initiated the anti-sweatshop Petition for USAS with Moveon.org back in 2014. It still continues to gather signatures. Move On is financed in large part by billionaire George Soros. While I am not a fan all of Soros’s actions, the claims of rabid, Far Right conspiracy speculators his manipulations of geopolitics and unaware Leftist activists fund his faction of squabbling plutocrats to rule the world are not based on facts and reality. Despite such rubbish, Move On still charges hard as an activist NGO in the pursuit of good.

Review and sign the Petition to compel REI to drop North Face products here: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/rei-drop-north-face-sweatsho-1?source=c.em&r_by=6189219.

This accelerated worker and member discontent within the Co-op. The first phase of the 2015-2016 REI workers revolt culminated on the 11th of July 2016. A small group of retail workers from across the United States, although mostly from the West Coast, showed up in Seattle to go public en masse before the media. These workers were desperate, afraid, and courageous. I know as I was one of them. My coworkers and I were scared we would lose everything, and we didn’t have much left to lose as our wages and hours were so low and random. The possibility of getting fired and losing what little we had left terrified us. Even more scary was the prospect of being blacklisted from finding other work elsewhere if we were purged. We stood up anyway. We workers took a stand.

We did so with the support of Councilor Kshama Sawant of the Seattle City Council and the dynamic staff of her office. Among them was community and labor activist Jonathan Rosenblum who helped build grassroots networks across the country from New York City to Seattle. He helped us REI activists to distill our long lists of demands into three. We did so with the determined support of Socialist Alternative and UFCW 21. We did so with the support of many Members of the REI Co-op, and we did so with the support of larger numbers of our co-workers from all across the company who felt they had to stay discreet or anonymous but who informed us privately they were still with us. 

We REI Coworkers had many, many even conflicting demands. Dozens! In just a few meetings we distilled them into three primary ones. They were, 1) immediate implementation of the $15 an hour minimum wage instead of a three-year long phase-in, 2) predictive scheduling, and, 3) we need a union. Our first two demands were met. The third was not. There remains the lack of some form of organized, internal democratic representation of us workers as a group to management.

There are several different ways towards building a workers’ democracy. One way is thru a union. Another is thru cooperative ownership of the company as a true cooperative business with democratic deliberation and planning. Or a hybrid of the two. Cooperative worker ownership and/or unionization defends hard-won gains, sustains the network, and advocates for greater democracy. There are successful examples of worker-owned, consumer-owned hybrid cooperatives, and most of them are also unionized. Clearly this struggle isn’t new but is as old as the exploited standing up to those who exploit them. Our struggles are far from over for democratic socialist representation is THE most important battle to win.

Back in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., came to recognize there can’t be any political democracy without having economic democracy and one can’t have capitalism without war. He came to champion what we today call democratic socialism. King was assassinated in April 1968 while in Memphis, Tennessee. He’d traveled there to support striking sanitation workers and their new union. Those terms remain highly charged today. The next five videos, however, demonstrate what’s possible when people from across the working classes come together to move what many thought were immovable mountains, especially REI, the mythic icon of the American Pacific Northwest and the Great Outdoors. Continue reading

In the Swirl of a Dish

Petri Dish Man’s Urban Seattle Socialist Vignette

Hungry. Sun blazing in my eyes. Making me squint as my belly growled low like a dog guarding a slab of meat. Hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Felt ravenous after I spent too much of the morning in the hospital being poked, pierced, measured, and explored by fantastic doctors and their curious assistants. Prodded me like a damn bug followed by quick pecks on their computers. Felt as if I was a giant insect splayed out and peeled apart in an enormous Petri dish by mad scientists and clever kids. Who behaved as if any moment they would hobble over and slather weird baby food goo all over me to see what monsters might grow. Ahhh, yes, call me…Petri Dish Man! BAM! BAM! BAM! DON’T BAN THE PETRI DISH MAN! ran thru my head over and over, tho I dared not tell anyone at the time, as it felt so strange.

Brought back memories of being in the Battle of Seattle during the so-called Anti-Globalization Revolts, and memories of being in Occupy Seattle and Occupy Olympia. Yes, even brought back memories of being homeless during the Great Global Recession after rich, capitalist pundits declared it long over. Despite being such a proficiently medically inspected man, however, I felt grateful for Obamacare’s ACA here in Washington State. Thank goodness it covered what my employer’s private health insurance plan wouldn’t cover. I shake my head funny too, as it seemed plain old common sense for 21st Century America, indeed all of Planet Earth, to have an integrated single-payer universal health care system, a democratic economic system, a socialist system.

Thus satiated on clarity of vision, I ventured hungrily into The Dish, a funky Seattle café, for a belated breakfast. Call it brunch. Time was 11:30 am. It’s a lively little café in my neighborhood. I currently live in a small, quasi-cooperative household below the landlord’s family in a house uprooted from the I-5 Corridor running north and south across the States between Canada and Mexico. The house sits beneath three immense Western redcedar trees in the Tangletown-Latona part of Green Lake up in the middle of North Seattle. At least till the rent rockets up. Only my second visit to this cafe, too. Rarely eat out anymore. Now it’s a treat! The place was abuzz, too.

Two staffers had called in sick, however, leaving the business understaffed. Only two other people were out front serving including one new worker who admitted she didn’t know how to work anything quite yet. But they were game and smiled anyway. Big, welcoming smiles, too. They bustled in and out among crowded customers, and the one cook in back paced himself as he had to. The warm smells of cooked food swirled with exuberant colors intoxicated yours truly Petri Dish Man.

The ghost of a homeless guy watched everything right over the lip of his big orange coffee cup. He was so invisible it as was if I couldn’t see him but nevertheless still sense his presence. I felt the color of his large, tattered coat fade charcoal and gray. Was his bright orange cup just a reflection of the Sun upon a glass bowl of slivered fruit? No, he wasn’t there, just a coat and a cup and the ghost of a man who gave up everything precious but his dignity and curiosity.

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Grexit Crisis: Update and Reevaluation

Part 2 and follow-up to “Grexit Crisis: EU Disunion or Greater Unification?”

Sometimes the fate of the world hinges on how a seemingly local crisis is resolved or escalates. Nothing happens, however, life goes on regardless of changing circumstances, and the existence of fate itself is dismissed. So it is with Greece.

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The underlying and all consuming economic and political system itself must be not changed but transformed. Today that system is Finance Capitalism triumphant. It devours all political systems from liberal democracies to despotic tyrannies, in turn leaving Corporatocratic Fascism triumphant in politics and governments. People from before Aristotle to beyond Wallace Stevens have observed everything changes yet somehow remains the same anyway. The nature of slavery has changed, and yet, we still have slavery. And so it is with Greece.

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Grexit Crisis: EU Disunion or Greater Unification?

Sometimes the fate of the world hinges on how a seemingly local crisis is resolved or escalates. So it is with Greece.

2x.01 Grexit Crisis

Greece and Europa, and yes, the world is at yet another unsteady crossroads. We look at the Grexit Crisis within the context of the Bigger Picture here in this article. The outcome of today’s Grexit Crisis may plunge us further into recession and depression, or begin to turn things around for the working class everywhere. The Grexit Crisis may trip us closer into a nuclear world war, which, seriously, already looms far closer than many realize or most want to think. Or in a much more preferable outcome so rearrange the balance of military and geopolitical power as to make such a conflagration unlikely. The European Union could fracture, as seems likely, as it is primarily a non-democratic financial treaty organization, or draw itself together into a truly democratic political federation where the working classes assert more socialist power.

The leaders of the European Union, under pressure from the Troika, today gave Greece and its Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras five more days to submit another set of proposals. The Troika demanded the new proposals be worded as if the Greek government is, ironically, responsible to save the Eurozone from financial catastrophe and possible economic collapse. It’s as if those political puppets of the capitalist plutocrats are crying, “Save us by further enriching the banksters who engineered this damn mess in the first place!”

The creditors of the Troika composed of the European Central Bank (ECB), the International Monetary Fund, and the European Commission (EC as the executive body of the EU), demand repayment and greater austerity from a nation unable to do either. The Troika has manipulated and exploited Greece and sucked it dry. If anything, the banksters, those pro-Troika gangsters in business suits, praised as educated standard bearers of capitalism, behave as financial vampires. Anchored in bastions of global financial power, they are determined to uphold the domination of finance capitalism as a form of neo-fascist tyranny over Europa. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the woman who stared down Vladimir Putin and made him squirm in his chair earlier this year, comes across more and more as another cold-hearted Margaret Thatcher. We are all in a global class war, and the Grexit Crisis is a major battle in our struggle.

Much fear and paranoia has been and continues to be projected out into the mainstream mass media as well as some of the alternative ones. The pro-Troika side fears whatever they do or don’t do with Greece will set a bad example for the rest of the Eurozone. If they bail out Greece, then other nations within the EU will expect something similar. If they kick out one nation, then the others would fear being kicked out in the future, too, including for any hidden purpose with debt burdens as an excuse to cover the real reasons. If Greece exits the Eurozone, thus the Grexit, Greece exits the European Union. How else can the Greeks stay in, as the EU is not a political union of equals but the result of an economic treaty between unequal members?

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The Already Thirty-Five Years’ War

1979-2014 and still counting!

Pope Francis denouncing global violence as "a piecemeal Third World War."

Pope Francis denouncing global violence as “a piecemeal Third World War” at Redipuglia Cemetery where 100,000 Italian soldiers killed in the First World War are buried in Italy near its border with Slovenia, 13 September 2014. Agence France Presse (AFP).

We have been engaged in a nearly continuous but rarely acknowledged war for thirty-five years. It began in 1979, twenty-two years before the terror attacks of 9/11. This war is fought around the globe as a patchwork of campaigns between various factions of multiple and shifting alliances. Even Pope Francis recognized this odd and gruesome conflict as a “piecemeal third world war.” Although the combat is small in scale, it has at least two characteristics of a world war: 1) the sheer number of nation-states, stateless-nations, and non-state groups engaged, and 2) fighting and bombing on every continent save Antarctica.

This war has also been called the Middle East’s version of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) and the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) due to its widespread, confusing, and desultory patterns of overlapping conflicts and aims. Yet this war is barely recognizable as one long war. Even fewer see the direct relationships between the capitalist system and warfare. The more people see and openly acknowledge we have been in an ongoing war for at least 35 years, the greater we experience a long, overdue change of perspective. The sooner more and more people recognize this long war and numerous others are driven largely by capitalism with its systemic exploitation of ethnic and religious divisions to better access and control natural resources and transportation routes, the sooner we develop strategies to end war. A deep shift in perspective may shift how we approach and resolve this conflict. First we need to see what we are doing.

The morning after airstrikes and cruise missile attacks on homes and buildings destroyed by the United States, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates in Syria with France and the U.K. planning to join the campaign against the Islamic State, 24 September 2014.

Two days after the People’s Climate March in 2,200-2,500 cities across the planet and the morning after airstrikes and cruise missile attacks on homes and buildings destroyed by the United States, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates in Syria with France and the U.K., already in Iraq, planning to join Dutch forces in the Syrian campaign against the Islamic State, 24 September 2014.

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Response to a Concerned Small Business Owner over 15 NOW

Earlier this month I posted a link on one of my social media sites to an essay I wrote the night before, “Yes, $15 an hour minimum wage, NOW!” Among the people who responded along a spectrum between yes and no were two from my native state of Virginia. Let’s call one of them Brigid, which, of course, is not her real name. Brigid, a progressive liberal more radical than many and as mellow as a Summer pond at twilight, expressed concern about us activists moving too fast to raise the minimum wage. She thought proponents for $15 now would be wise to slow down and take more time. After all, why rush it and mess it up for all of us?

More captivating, however, was a wrenching inquiry from a friend of mine back East. He was a small business owner who ran a small but bustling bakery and café. My friend, let’s call him Isaac, declared raising the minimum wage up to $15 an hour “would put” him “out of business in one month.” Unless, he said, he jacked up his prices. I could hear him as he pounded his fist upon the countertop as he continued. “The socialist-workers rights-stick-it-to-the-man person in me loves it, but I am the man here. This seriously would break me,” he wrote. “Why do this if prices just rise in concert with pay?”

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Blundering into Armageddon

Are our leaders mad? Are they deliberately setting the stage for a series of interlocking wars and economic collapses? All to look like accidents? Our leaders’ heartless mistakes of opportunity may indeed wipe out millions, even billions. For what? Are they are prepared to absorb extreme costs as the price to pay for extreme victory? Or are our leaders clueless? Are they just fucking stupid? Reacting with military precision directed with sloppy, nationalistic stupidity to converging crises overwhelming common sense, good judgment, and cooperative intelligence? And what the hell are We the People gonna do? Are we going to just read about it in a tweet the next day after half the world blows up? “Good morning! 1/2 earth blown up…the end looks better n movies & cool, i can still tweet!”

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Raise the Minimum Wage

It’s not about the Money

Up Close and Uncompromising! The front of one of the famous Red T-Shirts worn by volunteers for Kshama Sawant's Socialist Alternative Campaign for Seattle City Council, Position 2, the 5th of November 2013. Photo by William Dudley Bass.

Up Close and Uncompromising! The front of one of the famous Red T-Shirts worn by volunteers for Kshama Sawant’s Socialist Alternative Campaign for Seattle City Council, Position 2, the 5th of November 2013. Photo by William Dudley Bass.

Those who argue against raising the minimum wage do not get it. The naysayers spin broken webs of economic facts and figures rooted not in the reality of our natural environment but inside the charts and computer algorithms of a virtual world divorced from physical reality. It’s not about the money. I want to stand up and shout, “It’s not about the money; it’s about people! Real live human beings!”

I really want to jump up and yell, “It’s not about money, you insert language most foul!” Such verbal intensity, however deliciously vulgar, would just rile up the troll militias, so I won’t cuss here. It’s challenging enough to feel compassion and empathy for my fellow human beings, including those who exhibit cruelty and heartless stupidity. No matter. We all suffer. Everyone single one of us experiences suffering. Life is Struggle.

The working classes get life is a struggle. So do artists and small business owners. So do the unemployed, the underemployed, the homeless, the foreclosed, the laid off, the poorly paid, the uneducated, the overeducated, students deep in debt, the hungry, the sick, the pissed off. Reformers understand action is better than indulging in cynicism, apathy, and do-nothingism. Revolutionaries understand reform only goes so far before it dead ends in a mirage. Struggle serves to move the working classes from enduring ever more suffering to survive to rising up to stand in their power and thrive.

During these bleak but exciting times I volunteered for Kshama Sawant’s openly Socialist campaign for Seattle City Council. I joined with other veterans of the Occupy Uprisings from the Green Party of Seattle and the Seattle branches of the Socialist Alternatives to serve to get her elected. Other Socialist Alternatives ran strong campaigns elsewhere, especially Ty Moore in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It proved a tight race. Still counting ballots days after the Election. We rocked the city and made waves across the nation. Ripples were felt around the world. It was an astonishing experience. A small, highly disciplined organization raised well over $110,000 and marshaled over 300 volunteers, many of them part-time volunteers such as myself. What helped us stand out in addition to our red t-shirts was our uncompromising stand for a $15.00 an hour minimum wage.

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Our Current Capitalist-ProtoFascist System as Faux Democracy vs. Neo-Communism and True Democracy

Our human reality as complex social mammals will always banish ideological rigidity to the shadows and destroy all efforts to build any and all Utopias.

Every time.

Perceptions

Perceptions Matter. What People think is true but isn’t vs. What’s so & thus is true vs. What’s possible, especially for us to create once we learn to work together.

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Lessons from Class Warfare and the Death of Occupy

An Analysis of the Successes and Failures of the Occupy Uprising, Occupy’s Comparison with Previous Recent U.S. Revolts, and What’s Likely to Occur Next

Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Earth! Occupy Love! What is our one Demand? WHAT IS OUR ONE DEMAND?

Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Earth! Occupy Love! What is our one Demand? WHAT IS OUR ONE DEMAND? Image altered from the Commons.

Occupy, of course, is not dead. The residue of the movement continues to smolder among the ruins of the Great Global Recession. An occasional flare-up bursts forth in protest here and there. In the underground of cyberspace, however, there lives a vibrant hum of activity. Instead of dramatic visibility in parks and streets, many in the Occupy movement carried their ideals, values, and freshly exercised practices away to their homes, farms, businesses, and neighborhoods.

A new alternative civilization is emerging from the osmosis of Occupy into the greater culture at large. A good term to describe this organic yet deliberate dynamic planetary community is the Breakthru Civilization. We’re breaking thru old paradigms and ways of being that no longer serve humanity as these obsolete ways aid in the destruction of life on Earth. Breakthru from love and respect for life to love and respect our selves, one another, and our planet. It is a difficult challenge to move forward towards hate, fear, and violence with compassion, forgiveness, and love armed with nothing more than aware minds, open hearts, and firm backbones. Yet this Breakthru accelerates the expansion of individual awareness and mass consciousness to understand and embrace Socialism as perhaps the only immediate alternative to the current system dominated by Capitalism and corporatist fascism.

The number of activists has dwindled since those promising days from September 2011 to May 2012. They certainly no longer reflect the greater 99%. Instead, Americans woke up to the reality of economic inequality and class war. Occupy called attention to this invisibly visible ugliness so vividly the topic of class warfare was debated among Republicans and Democrats during the 2012 Presidential Elections. Yet Occupy itself subsided into the nooks and crannies of local neighborhoods.

What happened? Especially after so much occurred in the beginning to astonish and galvanize people around our planet?

Before I answer those questions, we must acknowledge and celebrate Occupy’s multiple successes. Occupy left enough of a significant impact, certainly in the short term as this story has yet to run its course, to perhaps catalyze a larger and more multifaceted transformation than is often realized. It’s still too new. So let’s celebrate a few successes:

"The Extreme Inequality is Killing us - our Commons, our Democracy." Syd Fredrickson in Occupy Seattle, October 8, 2011.

“The Extreme Inequality is Killing us – our Commons, our Democracy.” Syd Fredrickson of the Green Party in Occupy Seattle, 8 October 2011. Photo by William Bass.

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