Author: Nancy LeTourneau

The author of this diary, buhdydharma, has given permission for it to be re-posted.

With the recent admissions by Vice President Cheney and the release of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on detainee treatment, what we have known in the blogosphere for years has now….finally….made it into the mainstream. The Bush Administration planned, developed and carried out an organized torture program stretching from Gitmo to Iraq, Afghanistan and secret prisons around the world.

Despite their protestations and attempts to cover themselves with highly questionable legal opinions, this was and is a War Crime. Their politicization and corruption of the Department of Justice has stymied any investigation and left all efforts at accountability and justice to the new Obama Administrations DOJ, and specifically to AG Designate Holder.

Now, even the New York Times is….again, finally…calling for a Special Prosecutor to investigate these crimes.
However, as we also know well in the Blogosphere, this is far more than an issue of crime, punishment and justice as it should be. It is a political issue. A ‘hot potato’ political issue considering that any and all attempts at investigation and prosecution will undoubtedly (and erroneously) be described by the Republicans, the Right Wing press and pundits, and even some (complicit?) Democrats as a ‘partisan witch hunt’ and as ‘criminalizing politics.’ in other words, there are huge political costs at stake here. It would be much, much easier to ‘move on’ or ‘not play the blame game’ or point fingers to the past.’

The Obama Administration will face incredible pressure to sweep these War Crimes under the rug of history. We in the Blogosphere need to provide the counter-pressure. We do that by making our voices heard, and one way to do that is by each and everyone of us, the thousands if not millions of blog readers, adding our names to a petition. The petition will ultimately be submitted to AG Holder, as well as to Change.gov. However it can make a great impact on the ‘public conversation’ just by being everywhere in the Blogosphere as well.

To that end, Docudharma and Democrats.com have teamed up to create, host, and distribute the following petition. The petition calls for Attorney General Designate Holder to, immediately upon being confirmed, appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all officials of the Bush Administration for Torture and War Crimes.

The petition:

Dear Attorney General Designate Holder,

We the undersigned citizens of the United States hereby formally petition you to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in War Crimes.

These crimes  are being euphemistically referred to as “abusive interrogation techniques” by such respected figures as Senator John McCain. These are euphemisms for torture. Torture is a War Crime. Waterboarding is a War Crime. The CIA has admitted waterboarding detainees. Recently, Vice President Cheney has brazenly admitted authorizing the program that lead to waterboarding, other forms of torture too numerous to list, and ultimately, the deaths by homicide of detainees.

As Major General Antonio Taguba, the Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison has stated:

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

The Washington Post recently summarized the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on detainee treatment thusly:

A bipartisan panel of senators has concluded that former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibility for the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and that their decisions led to more serious abuses in Iraq and elsewhere.

We the undersigned citizens demand a full and thorough investigation immediately upon your taking office. This investigation should be pursued no matter where it may lead and no matter what the political implications may be. To this end, we remind you that you work not on behalf of or for the President or the Congress, but for the People of the United States of America and for Justice itself.

The United States is a representative democracy. The actions of our government officials are done in the name of its citizens. War Crimes have been committed in our name. Torture has been done in our name. The only way to clear our name of War Crimes is to repudiate them through the aggressive prosecution of each and every person involved to the full extent of the law through the appointment of a Special Prosecutor.

We are urging everyone in the Blogosphere and beyond to get involved in this project…not just to sign the petition, but also to write diaries and blog posts in support of the effort. And also to display the linked badge (created by Edger) in your posts or on your sites. The easy to embed code for posting the badge can be found here.

Please feel free to contact us at admin@docudharma.com for more information or any technical assistance you may need.

And of course……Please go to Democrats.com and sign the petition!

I realize that I’m late to this, given the speed with which devotees of the series tend to gobble up the books, but I just finished reading the 7th and last book in the Harry Potter series: “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. I know, not some people’s idea of “great literature” but I loved this series!! I loved the engaging story, the powerful messages and the fact that so many kids – from young to old – are reading!! I just hope that now that JK Rowling is finished with this series, maybe she’ll do another one, this time with a girl as the hero.

For those of you who may not have been so inclined, I’d like to demonstrate how deeply Rowling gets at human nature in these stories. There are lots of messages in the book that I would call “spiritual” and not in the way most fundies worry about related to witches and warlocks. She wraps a lot of themes around the concept of “soul” and “humanity.” Using Voldemort and his supporters, who are called “Death Eaters,” she explores the dark side of these concepts.
The first of these was introduced in the third book (and my favorite of all of them) “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” The guards of the prison are “Dementors” and here is how they are described:

“When they get near me–I can hear Voldemort murdering my mum.”
     — Harry Potter

Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself…soul-less and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.

Now that’s some pretty dark stuff for a children’s book. At one point Harry asks his teacher Lupin why the dementors seem to be so attracted to him. As you may know, Harry’s parents were killed by Voldemort when he was just a baby and Lupin tells him that the dementors are especially attracted to those who have experienced trauma.

But Rowling, who has known death and depression in her own life, does some wonderful things with the anecdotes to dementors. First of all, when Harry has a brief brush with dementors, the clinic at Hogwarts (the wizarding school) treats him by giving him loads of chocolate to eat (Rowling also has a wicked sense of humor!). But, to battle off the dementors face to face, the spell he has to learn is the Patronus Charm.

The Patronus Charm conjures an incarnation of the caster’s innermost positive feelings, such as joy, hope, or the desire to survive.

The six and seventh book of the series focus on Harry and his friends trying to find and destroy the 7 “horcruxes” that Voldemort has created. This is another place where Rowling dives deep into the human soul to explain the depth of Voldemort’s evil as well as the power of humanity he has given up in the process. Voldermort wanted immortality more than anything else. As a young student he learned that if one commits the supreme act of evil – murder – your soul is split in two and you become less human. This prospect didn’t worry Voldemort though. That’s because he also learned that he could take one half of that split and put it in a “horcrux” to be preserved. The horcrux can be any object, animate or inanimate. But Voldemort doesn’t take any chances, instead of creating just one horcrux, he creates 7 – imagining this gives him immortality.

Here is how Dumbledore explains it all to Harry:

Lord Voldemort has seemed to grow less human with the passing years, and the transformation he has undergone seemed to me to be only explicable if his soul was mutilated beyond the realms of what we might call “usual evil.”

But evil does have its limitations. Here’s Dumbledore again in the final book:

That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of children’s tales, of love, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.

Just how many times do you suppose Cheney’s soul has been split? I would venture to say that it has happened so often that what’s left intact is almost indiscernible as human. But still, he knows nothing…nothing of children’s tales, of love and innocence. And therefore, there are mighty forces of power that will forever remain beyond his grasp.

Because I live in Minnesota, we are continuing to hear about bridges and infrastructure while the rest of the country moves on to the story of the day. As I hear these conversations daily and all of the talk about the millions, billions, and even trillions needed for roads and bridges, I’ve been thinking about something written by Derrick Jensen in the book “Culture of Make Believe.”

In the United States about forty-two thousand people die per year because of auto collisions, nearly as many as the total number of Americans killed in Vietnam. Everybody knows someone who has died or been seriously injured in a car crash, yet cars have insinuated themselves into our social life – and our psyches – so thoroughly that we somehow accept these deaths as inevitable, or not schocking, as opposed to perceiving them for what they are: a direct and predictable result of choosing to base our economic and social systems on this particular piece of technology. What’s worse is that even more people die each year from respiratory illness stemming from auto-related airborne toxins than die from traffic crashes.

More teenagers are killed by cars across the U.S. every afternoon than the fourteen high schoolers gunned down in Littleton. Everybody says that living in an inner city is dangerous, that you’re going to get shot. But the truth is that because of car crashes, suburbs are statistically far more dangerous places to live.

His words hit me on two levels. First of all, he makes a good point about our acceptance of pollution and the loss of life as a price we are willing to pay for the freedom to drive wherever we want whenever we want (not to mention all of the other costs like dependence of foreign oil and all of the money and blood that has been wasted in that persuit).

But on another level, this kind of thinking gets under my skin. How many others ways have we been conditioned to accept the idea of death and destruction in ways that we haven’t even been thinking about?

I actually had to stop reading Jensen’s book for awhile because I found that as I was reading it I was getting depressed to the point that it was affecting my ability to get through the day. I’ve promised myself that I’m just taking a break and will go back to reading when I feel strong enough again to take it. But this book is filled with other examples. Whether its our history of genocide against Native People’s, slavery, racism, sexism or the examples of corporate mass murder (ie, Union Carbide in Bohpal, India) he is showing that our culture is actually rooted in destruction.

Jensen is trying in this book to understand the hate that breeds this destruction. And I think he’s on to something. Very early on in the book he writes about a conversation he had with a friend of his named John about the similarity between hate groups and corporations:

He said, “They’re cousins.”
I just listened.
“Nobody talks about this,” he said, “but they’re branches from the same tree, different forms of the same cultural imperative…”
“Which is?”
“To rob the world of is subjectivity.”
“Wait – ” I said.
“Or to put this another way,” he continued, “to turn everyone and everything into objects.”

Jensen goes on to talk about how these forms of objectifying everyone and everything (therefore leading to hatred and destruction) have become so transparent that we don’t even see them anymore. One of his examples of this is his surprise in finding out that, even though the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 defines hate crimes as “a crime in which the defendant intentionally selects a victim…because of the actual or perceived race, color, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person,” the FBI does NOT define rape as a hate crime. In other words, we have lived so long with the hatred of women as demonstrated by the crime of rape, that the hatred has become transparent.

This, it seems to me, is why so many men get so defensive when accused of being sexist and why so many white people get defensive when we are accused of being racist. We literally can’t see it anymore. Here’s how Jensen puts it:

The problem we have in answering (or even asking) these questions comes from the fact that hatred felt long enough and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred. If feels like economics, or religion, or tradition, or simply the way things are.

We’re fighting an uphill battle folks – trying like hell to maintian our subjectivity and connection to each other and the environment that sustains us in the face of tremendous odds. Trying to keep our eyes open to the objectification when everything around us is trying to blind us to its ever-present reality. Here’s how Jensen describes our challenge:

Although we pretend we don’t know, we know, and because we know we try all the harder not to know, and to eradicate all of those who do, cursing and enslaving those who see us as we are, and who dare to speak of our nakedness, and cursing and enslaving especially those parts of ourselves which attempt to speak. But speak they will…All of this causes what passes for discourse to quickly become absurd, frantically so, as people say everthing but the obvious.

We were not meant for this. We were meant to live and love and play and work and even hate more simply and directly. It is only through outrageous violence that we come to see this absudity as normal, or to not see it at all.

It all started last Friday when Bruce Fein, a former Reagan official on Bill Moyer’s Journal argued that impeachement was necessary to save the constitution. That was some pretty powerful stuff!!

Then this week, Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review, wrote a column titled Impeach Now or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy (you have to scroll down over the ad about Hillary being a Republican).

When conservatives like Fein and Roberts are sounding the alarm bells, I wonder if we shouldn’t listen??

Here’s a few excepts from Roberts column:

Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.

Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of “executive orders” that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency.

Many attentive people believe that the reason the Bush administration will not bow to expert advice and public opinion and begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq is that the administration intends to rescue its unpopular position with false flag operations that can be used to expand the war to Iran.

Think about it. If another 9/11-type “security failure” were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has “a gut feeling” that America will soon be hit hard?

Why would Republican warmonger Rick Santorum say on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that “between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public’s (sic) going to have a very different view of this war.”

Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging “terrorist” attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?

The American constitutional system is near to being overthrown. Are coming “terrorist” events of which Chertoff warns and Santorum promises the means for overthrowing our constitutional democracy?

You can listen to Thom Hartman from Air America interview Roberts last Thursday here. He makes a strong case by talking about the executive orders that are in place NOW for martial law and the idea that it is inconceivable that Cheney and Rove would just be content to sit back and watch the Republicans implode in 2008.

Remember, Cheney and Rove don’t react to reality – they create it.

Makes you wonder if these guys who have spent years inside Republican circles might know/see something coming that the rest of us are missing.

In the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yesterday I finished watching “The Wire” season three. One of the sub-plots of the season is about a City Councilmember named Carcetti who sees the failings of the political and law enforcement efforts to address the issues facing Baltimore and decides to run for Mayor. Since this show avoids hero-making like the plague, we also get to see Carcetti’s faults as well as his ideals. Eventually, he hires a consultant who helps guide him in handling city business in ways that advance his chances to win a Mayoral race. But the lure of having the power to change things becomes compromised by what he feels (or is told) he needs to do in order to get there. Hence begins his corruption.

It got me to thinking about all the blogwars on the progressive side that have been ignited by those on one side who want to be “practical” in order to win elections and those on the other side who refuse to give up principals in order to win. The old saying about “the end justifies the means” has plagued us in every realm of life from war as a means to peace, greed as a means to sufficiency, and corruption as a means to power.

But then, I wonder on a basic level, if we can ever incorporate truly pure means to reach our ends. Isn’t it almost always necessary to compromise in order to meet our goals? As an example, I wrote here a couple of weeks ago about having to raise money in order to support the work I am committed to doing in this community. That means occassionally making compromises in what I say (or more likely don’t say) to those who are prospective donors and, perhaps also turning a blind eye to their complicity in creating the kind of conditions we are working so hard to mitigate. Does this mean that I am beginning to engage in the “destructive means” to which MLK is referring?

I’m only using this specific situation as an example of the larger question and to show how this issue crops up in any attempt to try to bring people together to accomplish a goal. I do believe that what MLK said is true and that a compromise in means is certainly a slipperty-slope to corruption. And yet I also don’t think its possible to accomplish anything if we continue to hold to the purity of what we have defined as our values/ideals. So I’m asking where and how we draw the lines to avoid the slope. Or how we maintain our values while having to compromise to ever actually get anything done?

In asking these questions, I’m not saying we should join the Democratic Party bandwagon and embrace a “win at all costs” kind of mentality. And, as I write this, I keep feeling myself in the middle of polarities that I’m not comfortable with on either side. I wonder if some of the talk about “purity trolls” comes from this very tension. I think alot of the progressive blog diaspora came from personality clashes. But where it happened due to political differences, its seems to lead to ever smaller groups of like-minded people gathering to maintain their principles.

This leads me to think of a speech I found thanks to dove by Bernice Johnson Reagon titled Coalition Politics: Turning the Century. In the speech, Reagon makes the distinction between the “home” we develop for ourselves with like-minded people to be nurtured and sustained, and the coalitions we must build to save ourselves. Here’s a quote:

Coalition work is not done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets. And it is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort. Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there. They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home!….You don’t get fed a lot in a coalition. In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home. You can’t stay there all the time. You go to the coalition for a few hours and then you go back and take your bottle wherever it is, and then you go back and coalesce some more.

And to underscore the importance of coalition work:

It must become necessary for all of us to feel that this is our world…And watch that “our” – make it as big as you can – it ain’t got nothing to do with that barred room (home). The “our” must include everybody you have to include in order for you to survive. You must be sure that you understand that you ain’t gonna be able to have an “our” that doesn’t include Bernice Johnson Reagon, cause I don’t plan to go nowhere! That’s why you have to have coalitions. Cause I ain’t gonna let you live unless you let me live. Now there’s danger in that, but there’s also the possibility that we can both live – if you can stand it.

Maybe one of the ways we can maintain our principles as we seek out coalitions to get things done is to make sure that we have a “home” to come back to. But one of the things Reagon leaves out of her description of “home” is that in addition to feeding us, it needs to be a place that grounds us…a place where we are challenged when we start sliding too far down that slippery slope of letting the ends justify the means – headed for corruption.  

First of all, a confession and a warning. The confession is that for the last few weeks I’ve been obsessed with the HBO series “The Wire.” I think the creator, David Simon, is a prophet for our times. The warning is that I’m going to share some videos and they contain pretty harsh language. So, if you think it will bother you, be duly warned to not watch. OK, now on with it…

I’d like to introduce the “game” with a clip from the first season of “The Wire.” And I’ll give you a little background so you understand the conversation if you haven’t watched the show. In this clip D’Angelo is teaching two of his “corner boys” how to play chess. D’Angelo supervises the drug trade at a high-rise and his uncle, Avon, runs the show on the west side of Baltimore. Avon’s right-hand man in the business is Stringer. So, here’s the clip:

The boys catch on quickly that D’Angelo is teaching them about more than the game of chess – they know they are in ‘the game” and who the players are. But, as the creators of “The Wire” let us know, this is more than just about the drug trade. So, how would this same lesson look if we were teaching it to white upper class yuppies getting their master’s degree in business…politics…etc?

Its clear from the outset who the pawns are. And in my mind, the “queen” is none other than our bunker-loving Cheney (wouldn’t he just love that inference??). The “castle” or “stash” is whatever commodity the king is trying to exploit – military/industrial complex, oil, whatever. Notice how the castle moves reguarly and needs to be guarded. The question is, who is the “king.” I don’t think its GW. My bet would be that its those that manage the “castle.” We see that folks like Rupert Murdoch are just as willing to support Hillary as they are to support Bush. The “game” is not about winning the White House. Its about using your “queen” to protect your “castle” and ultimately your position as king. Just to underscore this point, the whole theme of this lesson and the title of this episode is “The king stay the king.”

Now we’ll jump forward to season three. Stringer has gathered all the various groups running the drug trade in Baltimore and developed a “cooperative.” Instead of killing each other off, they are working together and, doing so, have a monopoly in the city that they use to inflate their earnings. But, even so, he is killed by someone with an old vendetta. In this clip, folks are gathered for his funeral and Avon, who has struggled with the “new game” begins to wonder if maybe Stringer was right. But Slim Charles lets him know how the game works:

Lesson: The king stay the king. And once you in it, you in it. If its a lie, then we fight on that lie. Be we gotta fight.

That’s the game. In my mind, we only have one choice – do we want to play or not? It doesn’t sound like much of a choice since, as D’Angelo says, “the pawns get capped quick.” “Unless,” as Bodie says at the end of the first clip, “they some smart-ass pawns.” That’s what seems to keep us all in the game – willing to risk getting capped quick – in hopes of becoming queen and getting to do the king’s business (ie, Hillary willing to put it all on the line so she can be queen and do the king’s business).

Today, I’m thinking about all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways I participate in this game? What would it look like if we just stopped playing? Do we make up a new game and try to invite others to join? Or is there some alternative to playing games?

Steven D wrote a wonderful diary today titled Why We Will Stay in Iraq. Here is my comment in the diary:

Excellent diary Steven and I agree with you 100% except for this:

The only thing that can prevent this catastrophe from occurring is the political will and courage of our elected representatives.

I don’t think we can afford to put the responsibility on our elected officials. My take on things is that, at least at the national level, democracy is over. The sooner we recognize that – the sooner we’ll begin to define our alternatives. Northdakotademocrat used to write wonderful diaries here about the effectiveness of non-violent resistance. For me, our only hope to prevent the catastrophe you describe is if enough of us start to think about those kinds of alternatives.

Of course we all know that Bush/Cheney have done everything in their power to destroy democracy in this country and build their vision of the American Empire. But I began to give up on democracy in this country when I saw how the media and the Democrats treated Howard Dean. The final blow came after our most recent elections. From what I can see, the people spoke loud and clear on the issue of Iraq – but it seems that folks inside the beltway aren’t listening to us. They are too busy listening to the corporate contolled media and the military/industrial complex.

My conclusion is that we have now entered a period where democracy is over and we live in an oligarchy. Here’s how wiki defines the word:

Oligarchy (Greek Ὀλιγαρχία, Oligarkhía) is a form of government where political power effectively rests with a small, elite segment of society (whether distinguished by wealth, family or military prowess). The word oligarchy is from the Greek words for “few” (ὀλίγον óligon) and “rule” (ἄρχω arkho).

Does that mean we are powerless – NO!! As I said in my comment to Steven, it just means that we need to find other ways than electoral politics to express ourselves. The first thing to do is to decide where our power lies. And as I’ve already said, I don’t think that is with our elected officials. That means that trying to influence them is not likely to work. Even if we were to get several million protesting on the streets every day – if our goal was to influence them, I think it would be a waste of time.

Given that everything in our system is based on money/profits/greed, I think our power is in our pocketbooks. But it would take some real intelligent organizing to harness that power. We all know the years of back-room organizing it took to finally culminate in the Civil Rights movement. That’s where I think we should be focusing our efforts.

I’ll leave you with a wonderful story I just found on Margaret Wheatly’s web site:

Yitzhak Perlman, the great violinist, was playing in New York. Yitzhak Perlman was crippled by polio as a young child, so the bottom part of his body doesn’t work well and he wears these very prominent leg braces and comes on in crutches, in a very painful, slow way, hauling himself across the stage. Then he sits down and, very carefully, unbuckles the leg braces and lays them down, puts down his crutches, and then picks up his violin. So, this night the audience had watched him slowly, painfully, walk across the stage; and he began to play. And, suddenly, there was a loud noise in the hall that signaled that one of his four strings on his violin had just snapped.

Everyone expected that they would be watching Yitzhak Perlman put back the leg braces, walk slowly across the stage, and find a new violin. But this is what happened. Yitzhak Perlman closed his eyes for a moment. Yitzhak Perlman paused. And then he signaled for the conductor to begin again. And he began from where they had left off. And here’s the description of his playing, from Jack Riemer in the Houston Chronicle:

“He played with such passion, and such power, and such purity, as people had never heard before. Of course, everyone knew that it was impossible to play this symphonic work with three strings. I know that. You know that. But that night, Yitzhak Perlman did not know that. You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before. When he finished, there was an awe-filed silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. Everyone was screaming and cheering and doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had just done. He smiled. He wiped the sweat from his brow. He raised his bow to us. And then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet and pensive and reverent tone,

“‘You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.'”

I had a powerful week and have been spending most of this morning trying to sort it all out – thinking maybe there was some way I could write about the thoughts spinning around in my head. And just now the thought came to me that the theme going on is related to class struggles in the US. I can’t really pull any other theme together, so I thought I’d write about my week chronologically and maybe that act, or discussion that follows, will help calm down some of this noise in my head. So, here’s my week:

Sunday

I’m watching c-span book tv and Lewis Lapham is being interviewed. They show a clip from a documentary he made a few years ago titled The American Ruling Class. It looks real interesting so I go to look for more information about it and find a clip on youtube from the movie.

In the clip, Barbara Ehrenreich (author of “Nickled and Dimed”) schools a young Yale grad about the reality of the lives of those in the “other America.” When he talks about the philanthropy of the ruling class, she responds by saying:

Philanthropy…Don’t tell me about philanthropy Jack. The real philanthropists in our society are the people who work for less than they can actually live on. Because they are giving of their time and energy and talents all the time so that people like you can be dressed well and fed cheaply and so on. They’re giving to you.

Monday

I work for a small non-profit that is in the midst of a $1.8 million capital campaign. This means occassionally having meetings with the “urber wealthy” in this community to ask for donations. I always leave those meetings feeling conflicted. In order to do my job and support the work we are trying to do in the community – I need to ask for this funding. But meeting with these people and keeping my mouth shut about what I REALLY want to say leaves me feeling tainted.

On Monday we met with a man who is one of the most wealthy people in the state. He is also one of the most self-centered arrogant people I have met in my life. He doesn’t know if he’ll make enough money from his hedge funds this year to be able to make a donation. We all know its these types that control things in this country – but it feels like a kick in the gut to actually meet one of them – much less to have to grovel and ask for his spare change.

What’s going on back at the office is that a few staff worked late last night taking a couple of kids to an auction so that maybe they could find a bicycle they could afford for them. And then there’s the kid whose mom is drug addicted so he lives with his grandmother on her social security. He was offered an internship with our City Attorney this summer because he worked himself out of special ed, was mainstreamed and got straight A’s. But he doesn’t have any clothes to wear for the internship. So a couple of days ago our staff person took him shopping.

Wednesday

My book group has its monthly meeting and we’re talking about Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks (is your head spinning yet???) We had a discussion about our unconscious forms of classism and how we might go about deciding “what is enough” so that we can get out of the greed game.

Thursday

Ever since I read an article about a speech that David Simon (creator of the HBO series “The Wire”) gave a few weeks ago, I’ve been watching season two being replayed on BET on Thursday nights. As I was watching this week, I looked for clips of Simon on youtube and found the whole speech in three segments. I think this man is a true prophet of the 21st century. Here is the first segment of his speech and I’ll give links for the next two below for those that have 25-30 minutes to watch the whole thing:

Here’s clip two

Here’s clip three

I highly recommend watching the whole thing. I credit David Simon with helping me integrate what I do professionally (working with kids and families in an urban area) with my broader interest in public affairs. I know there are huge issues facing this country. But for me, nothing is more important than his assertion that in our post-industrial economy, our elevation of capitalism to a sacred position, means that every day “human beings are worth less.” (his words) The effect this has on our urban areas and the kids and families who live in them is one of the great challenges of our time.

Here’s a clip from the 4th season of “The Wire,” which focuses on kids in middle school. It could be some of our staff at work – I’ve been part of these kinds of conversations with them:

Saturday

So, that’s my week and here I sit trying to make sense of it all. David Simon admits he doesn’t have answers – he’s just trying to wake us all up to what is happening. I don’t have any answers either. I’ll just keep trying to help a few kids in St. Paul have a chance. But I think we need to do better than that – somehow.  

You may have heard that Yoko Ono gave Amnesty International the rights to all of John Lennon’s music in order to inspire a new generation of human rights activists. Amnesty International has put together a cd titled “Instant Karma” with Lennon’s songs sung by some of the biggest names in music today with all the proceeds going to end the crisis in Darfur. You can learn more about all of this and listen to clips of the music at the Instant Karma website.

To whet your appetite, here are a few of the selections you’ll find:

U2 – Instant Karma
R.E.M. – #9 Dream
Los Lonely Boys – Whatever Gets You Through the Night (my favorite so far)
Jackson Browne – Oh, My Love
Green Day – Working Class Hero
Black Eyed Peas – Power to the People
Widespread Panic – Crippled Inside (another favorite of mine)

If you’re a procrastinator, this might be just the Father’s Day gift you’re looking for – especially if your Dad has great music taste.
As an introduction to this initiative, I thought I’d share the best music video EVER made, with a few words from Yoko. Prepare yourself for brilliance.

I know that many progressives have come to the conclusion that electing Democrats won’t solve many of the problems we face in this country. And I agree. Although, I do think a case for incrementalism can be made…less people will die due to lack of health care, response to national disasters, etc, with a new Democratic administration. This is not something I am willing to dismiss easily. But I don’t see a Democratic administration being able to make the changes necessary to stop the continuing disaster of our foreign policy and how we treat the most vulnerable among us.

There are a lot of things that need to change in order for me to have much hope in this country. But, as I started to talk and think about in my last diary on authoritarianism, I’m most interested these days in what is wrong with our collective psyche (my therapist self just will NOT go away!!) that keeps us from even seeing these issues clearly, much less working together to demand the changes. I suppose its kind of like the difference between a “top-down” solution that would come from electing the right leader and the “bottom-up” solution of changing what people are looking for in leaders. I think the latter deserves much more attention than we have been giving to it.
There are many ways to look at this issue, but today I’m really interested in an article from Salon written by Gary Kamiya and titled Why Bush Hasn’t Been Impeached (h/t to TerranceDC). I’d recommend that everyone read the article, but I’ll just pull some of the more salient quotes to give you an idea of what he is saying:

Bush’s warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America’s support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It’s a national myth. It’s John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness — come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we’re not ready to do that.

Bush tapped into a deep American strain of fearful, reflexive bellicosity, which Congress and the media went along with for a long time and which has remained largely unexamined to this day. Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves.

To this day, the primitive feeling that in response to 9/11 we had to hit hard at “the enemy,” whoever that might be, is a sacred cow. America’s deference to the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach is profound.

It is not just the law that America has turned away from, but what the law stands for — accountability, memory, history and logic itself.

A society without memory, driven by ephemeral emotions, which demands no consistency from its leaders but only gusty patriotism, is a society that is not about to engage in the painful self-examination that impeachment would mean.

This “violent self-righteousness” goes beyond just our policies about war, torture, rendition, and other crimes that our government has committed. Just take a look at other examples: We are coming dangerously close – and maybe even over the line at times – with wanting to punish people we (in all our wisdom, cough, cough) have decided MIGHT be capable of crimes (the one percent doctrine applied to the criminal justice system). And certainly rounding up and/or condemning brown people because we think they might be here illegally comes from the same place. Even our dialogue with those with whom we disagree is too often charactarized by (verbally) violent self-righteousness.

I agree with Kamiya that there is something seriously wrong with our collective psyche and until we can find a way out of the morass of violent self-righteousness, no election is ever going to change much. I wonder what would happen if we turned all the energy and money we currently spend on trying to find leaders who we think can get us out of this mess, and started using it to enact that age-old saying…”Physician, heal thyself,” might we finally begin to find what we’re looking for??