My father was frightened of his father,
I was frightened of my father,
and I am damn well going to see to it
that my children are frightened of me.
—King George V (1865–1936)
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Denial
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
The Importance of the Illegal Drug Trade
According to the 2005 United Nations World Drug Report, the value of the global illicit drug market for the year 2003 was estimated at US$13 billion at the production level, at US$94 billion at the wholesale level, and US$322–$400[5] billion based on retail prices and taking seizures and other losses into account.
From Wikipedia "Illegal Drug Trade"
The Transform Drug Policy Foundation also states that The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has made several attempts to put a figure on the value of the global drug market. In its 1997 World Drugs Report the UNODC estimated the value of the market at US$400bn.[1] This estimate has been widely used by the media and law enforcement agencies but has come under criticism from some experts as being far too high.
The economist Peter Reuter has suggested that an inflated figure has resulted from a confusion between turnover – which may run into hundreds of billions – and international trade which is far lower, because most of the added value is within the borders of consumer countries.[2] An international trade worth 400 billion would put drugs alongside arms and oil amongst the world's biggest traded good. The more likely trade figure is nearer (and probably under) 100 billion – more comparable with the global trade in textiles...
In a seminar paper by Francisco E. Thoumi, published by the Transnational Institute, Thoumi says that an unpublished study by Peter Reuter for the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) resulted in an estimated range between US$45bn and US$280bn.[3
The point has to be made that whether the figure is $100 billion or $400 billion it is a lot of money and the gangs cannot account for more than a fraction of it. The rest has to be somewhere else and the most likely set of suspects are the people who are already handling billions of dollars such as the offshore money laundries connected to "legitimate" financial institutions or the folks who already have a history of involvement in high-level drug trafficking, namely the CIA. See http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/6712
Opposition to any reform of the drug laws is understandable. The people most vociferous in their support for the so-called War on Drugs are the people, or are associates of the people, who profit from the drug trade at the higher levels. The insane opposition to cannabis decriminalization also makes sense in light of this. Pot is the physically harmless competitor of all those profitable dangerous drugs and pot decrim could also lead to people wanting a saner approach to coke and smack usage. All of which would put an end to that easy cash flowing in and out of the financial system.
The fact that illegal drugs – and the massive sufferring associated with this black market - may be second only to the arms trade, or at least as large as textiles, points out the decadence of the contemporary economic system. War and drugging people as the biggest sectors of the economy shows a system in profound decay..
Friday, June 13, 2008
Canada Confesses To Part of Its Crimes Against First Nations People
CANADA CONFESSES PART OF ITS CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY –THERE HAS FINALLY BEEN AN OFFICIAL APOLOGY FOR ‘MURDER”, RAPE…
MNN. June 11, 2008….SODOMY, PEDOPHILIA, GERM WARFARE, STERILIZATION, MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS AND WHO KNOWS MAYBE EVEN NECROPHILIA OF INDIGENOUS CHILDREN IN ORDER TO “STEAL” OUR LAND AND RESOURCES. nThis is a start. Now we have to deal with other big issues, sovereignty and resources.
Our people were kidnapped and held hostage for three to four generations. Genocide is taking children away and killing them. It was only a small part of a bigger story of “gangsterism” and greed. Don’t be fooled! That evil program is still in full swing. Canada has no intention to stop. They continue to drive us off our land, to criminalize us, incarcerate us and to refuse to return control of our land and resources to us.
We don’t like being lied to. Saying “sorry” doesn’t cut it. Canada practically admitted to “murder” and theft in the first degree. While Prime Minister Harper was reciting his apology in the House of Commons, a permanent injunction was being granted to the city of Brantford to stop us from going onto our own lands to stop illegal development and to bring in the army if necessary. What forked-tongued two-faced hypocrisy! Anywhere else in the world when a people are threatened with military force, it is a “declaration of war”.
Every Canadian benefited from these crimes against humanity. They came her from Europe with empty hands. Stephen Harper said, “We are planning to move on”. This means that the perpetrators of these heinous crime have to be prosecuted in the international courts. More important, Canada is bound to the original relationship as “visitors” to our land who made promises to live peacefully under the Two Row Wampum Agreement. We are the land and resources owners and they have to negotiate with us to extend their stay.
Our future is tied to the Kaianereh’ko:wa, the law of Onowaregeh, Turtle Island. We cannot “bury the hatchet”! Planned murders of our children by the church and state cannot be pardoned anywhere. Canada broke international law to which they are bound.
At this moment illegal deals are being made by the government and its puppet band councils to deceive the people. Fraud and corruption is used to privatize under NAFTA every unsurrendered river and stream in British Columbia to send our water to California.
Is this desperation because Canada and the U.S. or someone is trying to keep the colonial scam going? Canada absolved the churches of responsibilities. The program to murder school children and to put them in unmarked graves was not random. All the churches , Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and United, stepped up to the plate to do dirty deeds for the state. It was part of the “pogram” to remove us completely to claim Onowaregeh, Turtle Island. What kind of special education does it take to forget that it’s wrong to kill kids?
Harper admitted they did not know our culture, our traditions and did not respect our basic human rights. They still don’t. Now that they have clearly admitted to being “busted”, shouldn’t the genocide stop?
The colonizers must respect our sovereignty, identity and culture. To start, they must stop all uranium and diamond mining, clear cutting and contamination of our environment. Stop trying to put us away in jails and holding cells to punish us for protecting the environment. Every single piece of Turtle Island, our resources and possessions must be returned to us so we can regnerate the natural beauty and health of Turtle Island.
Nothing is going to change if they can help it. To stop racism and lies the true history has to be taught in every school. Our education and language programs have to be improved. Clean water and decent homes have to be provided to all of us. All the elements that work together to demoralize our young people and incite them to commit suicides have to be stopped.
Canada is going to put up a monument as a symbol of this apology. Take down those hideous monuments to the true murderers of our people like Champlain, Humphrey Gilbert, Laverendrye, DeDenonville, Amherst and other scoundrels. Towns are still named after these mass murderers. Get rid of that depiction of the tied up Indian in bondage on the Clock Tower of the Parliament Buildings. We cannot rebuild our nations on monuments or empty words. Real reconciliation means restoring the traditional homelands and resources of the various Indigenous people who have been dispossessed. Anything less is a farce.
Canada stage managed this performance. It was sickening to see colonial lap dog Phil Fontaine of the Assembly of First Nations accept Harper’s apology on our behalf. It was a pre-written script probably by government spinners. We were never asked if we wanted him to accept this apology or to even accept it. The supporting remarks were made by the heads of colonially funded “puppy dog” organizations that jump to their “master’s” commands.
The money being offered to some of the victims is our own money. Any profit from our lands held in trust is “blood money”. We want an economy. Stop depriving us and forcing us out of our communities. Release all our trust funds immediately. Everything that was “kicked back” to the Vatican must be returned to us. These churches that committed these atrocities have investments from our lands worth billions and have declared stock portfolios well over $100 million. Release these to us. Give us our funds that the Canadian government holds as “trust funds”, namely the “Indian Fund”, the “Consolidated Revenue Fund” and the “Contingent Liability Fund”.
All levels of government should stop issuing illegal permits for exploitation of our lands and resources. Stop using our land and resources as collateral to borrow on international money markets.
The Queen and all the other “carpet baggers” who head the corporate criminal organizations that murder, rape and pillage us and our possessions should now be prosecuted in the international court for their crimes.
Our parents were threatened with imprisonment if they did not release their children to the control of the church and state. How long does it take to forget what our children saw – other children being murdered and even being forced to help bury them. They were deliberately given contagious diseases from which many died. There was out-and-out murder of over 50,000 at the hands of teachers, priests, nuns and staff. Our children were used in experiments by German doctors in the 1930’s and then disposed of. The children were threatened to never tell anyone about it.
It was the “I Apologize” Show, with Phil in a war bonnet, with smudging, all players with their scripts in hand and an audience seated strategically around. Someone on cue even yelled from the House of Commons gallery, “Way to go, Phil. You are our leader”. This government sanctioned desperado is not our leader! The sanitized plot did not include murder, torture, sterilization, kids witnessing killings and medical experiments on them.
You, the abusers, are in dire need of healing. In Australia the prime minister apologized to the Aborigines and they now live under a form of ‘martial law’! What will happen now when the army is brought in on us as happened in 1990?
Kahentinetha Horn
MNN Mohawk Nation News
Thursday, June 12, 2008
The So-called Residential Schools Apology.
A Day, and a Decade, Later: What has Changed for Us?
by Kevin D. Annett
I awoke this morning to the same familiar sounds of east Hastings street, as birdsong was smothered by traffic's din - a day after a government "apology", and a decade after a Tribunal that started everything.
Faces have come and gone in one day, and in thirty six hundred, but the same cold reality stared back at me today in the hard eyes of angry desperation of the men and women, mostly aboriginal, who share these streets, and who never rest.
Steven Harper said "I'm sorry" to these people yesterday, but he didn't look sorry as he lectured the gala throngs on Parliament Hill about the Indian residential schools. He didn't look outraged, either, as he spoke about children being ripped forever from their homes and way of life. Nor, for that matter, did any other politician who spoke to the carefully arranged crowd of natives and whites.
But there was plenty of sorrow and outrage on our streets yesterday. Somebody else had just died, a native man named Vince who had, naturally, been jailed in residential school as a kid and suffered horribly there, and every day of his life thereafter. The clusters of people who camp around Main and Hastings were discussing Vince yesterday, rather than shuffling off obediently to the official viewings of Steven Harper's "apology" arranged by the government's flunky native chiefs.
"That's one less Indian problem for the fuckers" commented Bingo, a homeless native guy who is always at the forefront of our protests outside the Catholic church that killed Vince.
"All their nice words don't mean crap. Maybe to them they do but hey, it's always been like that, right?".
Right.
As much as Steven Harper and his friends know nothing of Bingo and Vince, they could not have spoken in Parliament yesterday and garnered such undeserved praise without the two of them, and all the other suffering throngs on every mean street across Canada that residential school survivors call home.
Yesterday's Parliamentary extravaganza, in fact, was built entirely on the efforts and revelations of these survivors that began ten years ago today, in a union hall in the east end of Vancouver.
It was called the North West Tribunal into Canadian Residential Schools, and it was sponsored by a United Nations affiliate called IHRAAM. Early that spring of 1998, the late Harriett Nahanee and I invited IHRAAM to come and listen to the stories of the residential school survivors who we had been working with for two years, many of whom had - like Harriett - witnessed killings and burials of fellow students at the schools.
From June 12 to 14, twelve IHRAAM judges and a UN observer heard stories of murder, torture, involuntary sterilization and medical experimentation in west coast residential schools, from eyewitnesses: people like Belvy Breber, Dennis Charlie, Elmer Azak and Ed Martin. Exactly one reporter showed up to the event - the Globe and Mail ran a short piece about the Tribunal on June 20, 1998 - but the Tribunal was an historic first: the only independent attempt ever to document deliberate genocide by the government and churches of Canada.
This single event was responsible for all of the changes and gains that have been won for survivors in the past decade, including yesterday's acknowledgment by a head of state that children did indeed die in church-run Indian residential schools in Canada. The Aboriginal Healing Fund, the first court settlements, and the Liberal government's 1999 "apology" to survivors all occurred less than a year after our Tribunal.
And yet, like Bingo and Vince, the IHRAAM Tribunal is officially ignored, and for the same reason: it does not fit into the government's plan of containment and concealment that was so evident yesterday in the House of Commons.
That plan is quite simple: to reduce the fact of genocide and mass murder to an accomodated issue of "abuse" that can be "resolved" with certain words and payments - and, in the process, to absolve the churches responsible for the crime from any responsibility for it.
A simple plan, but a potentially explosive one because of two threats: the spectre of lawsuits and scandal as more survivors came forward in the wake of the IHRAAM Tribunal; and the appearance of first my book Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust, spawned by the Tribunal, and then, last year, my documentary film UNREPENTANT, whose release prompted the raising of the issue of disappeared residential school children in Parliament in April, 2007.
Inspector Peter Montague of the RCMP is even more complimentary towards me. The chief smear artist of the covert operations branch of the RCMP in B.C., Montague engineered the public relations disaster known as the Gustafson Lake standoff, when unarmed Shuswap natives were assaulted by military vehicles and 77,000 rounds of fire from RCMP officers. Oddly, Montague was then assigned to the residential schools issue in 1996, after the first lawsuits began against his employer and the United Church of Canada.
Montague sent a number of undercover agents into our IHRAAM Tribunal, two of whom are still busy smearing me all over the world. But to one of these agents, who subsequently spilled the beans, Montague said,
"Kevin Annett is the one to worry about ... Discredit him and you discredit the issue." (spring, 1999)
It's strangely reassuring to see how so very little has changed in the past decade, which figures, considering how much the churches and government have to lose if they ever had to actually face the music over all those kids they killed in their residential schools. Still today, the official organs of church, state and mass media in Canada seem haunted and obsessed by me, as if I am the issue; as if I personify the massively guilty conscience of "white" Canada.
That guilt struggled to be assuaged yesterday in Parliament, and in the media orgasm that tries to convince us that the "issue" of residential schools is finally resolved. But it cannot be alleviated, any more than can the pain of Bingo, or Vince.
We are, all of us, quite missing the point: namely, that one cannot "apologize" for or resolve that which we do not understand.
To comprehend the horror and fact of the residential schools requires that we look first and last at ourselves, as we truly are: as part of a Thing that has spawned not only genocide, but planetary ecocide.
Holding up such a mirror to that truth and to my own culture has been my sole waking purpose for the past thirteen years. And, thankfully, I have witnessed over those years an amazing thing: the official wall of denial has begun to crumble, despite all the King's horses and all the King's men.
Last year, it would have been inconceivable for the Canadian media and government to be speaking almost casually about unmarked graves and dead residential school children. Yet now, even the National Post proclaims in its headlines, "Are Reconciliation and Truth Compatible?" (a slogan I've used for years now); and it's suddenly become fashionable for the press to play voyeuristically with tales of buried native children, while holding no-one in particular accountable.
More is being admitted, all the time, as the Thing's mask slips. So don't believe the Big Lie emanating from Ottawa yesterday. It's all smoke and mirrors, designed to hide the crumbling tower of colonial Canada.
Believe, instead, that Vince's time of vindication is coming; and along with it is approaching a great and terrible judgement on those masters of Church and State who like to imagine they have gotten away with their crime.
Ten years has taught me to stand aside from their world, as it topples.
June 12, 2008
......................................................................................................
Kevin D. Annett is a community minister, film maker and author who lives and works in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, on occupied Squamish Nation territory.
His website is: www.hiddenfromhistory.org
Friday, June 6, 2008
Occupy The Auto Plants!
The only way to save auto workers jobs – or minimally
their severance pay - is to occupy the factory,
as other Ontario workers have done. Ultimately, the
workers should own and run the plants themselves.
See http://mollymew.blogspot.com/ for information on
the CAW blockade.
For another take on this issue see:
http://www.marxist.com/canada-oshawa-plant-nationalize-auto-industry.htm
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
The Spirit of Change
Barack Obama was awakened during the night following his latest Democratic Party Presidential debate. Two ghosts stood before him. "We are the spirits of Samuel Adams and William Lamb."
"Who?" Obama asked in a daze, unsure if he was hallucinating from lack of sleep.
"We’re the ghosts of real change."
"I am the spirit of Samuel Adams, a revolutionary for American liberty and promoter of the Declaration of Independence."
"And I am the spirit of William Lamb, a founder of the U.S. Populist movement in the 1880s-1890s, supporter of the Omaha Platform, and organizer of the People’s Party."
Obama was puzzled. "You’re both dressed funny, but more to the point, why are you here?"
"We’ve come to talk. You, Clinton, even McCain, speak constantly about ‘change.’ We’ve watched your debates, read news on your light screens, and…"
"Light screens? Do you mean televisions and computers?"
"Ah yes, that’s what you call them. Anyway, all you candidates talk about is who will bring change to this country: real change, fundamental change, policy change to address unmet needs and give citizens more power."
"Sounds especially like me," Obama said assuredly.
"We’re not so sure," said the ghosts in unison. "We believe political change in our times was more profound than anything being proposed now."
And so Sam, Lamb and "Bam," advocates from three turbulent periods in U.S. history, huddled to discuss political change.
*************************
SAM: I agitated for the greatest change in the history of our nation, political independence from Great Britain. The Declaration of Independence, passed on July 4, 1776, presented a lengthy list of "repeated injuries and usurpations" by the British government and asserted that the 13 colonies were "Free and Independent States."
LAMB: Weren’t you a signer?
SAM: Yes, one of 56 signers of the Second Continental Congress, a revolutionary, illegal body.
BAM: Did the British consider you and your ilk "terrorists"?
SAM: A renegade if not worse, in part for supporting the Declaration. I said in 1776, "Is not America already independent? …Why not then declare it."1 The power and inspiration of the Declaration were these unequivocal assertions: "All Men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights… That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from Consent of the Governed… [and] whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government… [in fact] it is their Duty to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security."
The essence of the document, revolutionary then and now, was the conviction that people can and should be governing–not kings, popes or generals.
British rule could not be "reformed." The King’s army and crown corporations could not be made accountable to the public. They all had to be replaced, so I worked for revolutionary change, for a system of self-rule.
LAMB: The Declaration was an inspiration to us Populists. But be honest, Sam, sixty-nine percent of the Declaration’s signers held colonial office under England. Many who supported both it and the revolution were colonial lawyers, landowners and merchants, including you, who only wanted independence from Great Britain to impose their own brand of political and economic control. Following the revolution, did you not say, "In monarchy the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death"?2
SAM: I did?
LAMB: Yup.
SAM: Still, I opposed the British Stamp Act, helped organize the Boston Tea Party and the Committees of Correspondence, colonists who organized into small groups to share information and mobilize the public.
LAMB: You were a great communicator, organizer and agitator Sam, but it was selective. Your instigation of mob protests was directed only at British rule and wealth, not the consolidation of power by colonial elites. This omission carried over to the Declaration, which ignored inequalities of property, and I ask, "How could people have equal rights, with stark differences in wealth?"3 The Declaration was a form of manipulation to focus anger and attention only on British rule.
BAM: While the Declaration is as inspirational as many of my speeches, there are several glaring omissions, notably independence for black slaves, women and native people. The draft of the Declaration included a grievance against the King for transporting slaves but was removed before adoption. Native people were called "the merciless Indian Savages..." and there was no room for women in "All men are created equal."
LAMB: Change during your period, Sam, was not as dramatic as during my lifetime. I helped organize the largest and most elaborate democratic mass movement in US history: Populism. It was a mass democratic insurgency among "plain people"–farmers and urban workers–to respond to the impoverishment of millions of farmers and workers by banks, railroads, and the consequences of economic and political centralization.
BAM: I haven’t heard much about the Populists.
LAMB: Most people of your day haven’t. We’ve been largely erased from history books. 0nly our "spirits" remain.
The Populists sought to create a democratic movement to counter the hierarchical culture of the day. It was "a new way of looking at society, a way of thought representing a shaking off of individual forms of deference… individual self-respect and collective self-confidence… class consciousness… growing political sensibility… the mass expression of a new political vision."4
BAM: Now I see why there’s not much known in our culture about you people.
LAMB: The creation of this democratic movement for revolutionary change was achieved in sequential steps: forming organizations, recruitment, education, and political action. State farmers Alliances were the original organizing base. I organized over 100 sub-alliances in Texas alone and eventually the National Farmers Alliance. We recruited through large-scale Populist-sponsored farmers cooperatives and I was the Texas Alliance’s first purchasing and traveling agent. Hundreds of newsletters and 40,000 "lecturers" were disseminated throughout Texas. We educated members continually, our version of the Committees of Correspondence, Sam. Collective political action bridging farmers and laborers was achieved through the Populist Party, which I helped launch.
SAM: This still doesn’t sound very revolutionary, pal. You weren’t talking about overthrowing the government.
BAM: Promoting major change through a political party is my goal, too.
LAMB: It was revolutionary, Sam, and there is a difference, Bam, between Populist goals and yours.
Populists constantly talked about "the coming revolution" through ballots not bullets. Revolution meant creating a "third party of the industrial millions" and overthrowing the two party system. We saw many elections as rigged and the electoral college as undemocratic. We tried to bring the corporate state under popular control through democratic politics.5
As fellow Populist Tom Watson said, "It’s useless to ask Congress to help us, just as it was folly for our forefathers to ask for relief from the tea tax; they revolted and so should we."6
The unifying platform for Populist revolution, the "Second Declaration of Independence," was the Omaha Platform. The 4000 delegates to the first People’s Party Convention in Omaha, Nebraska, adopted it on July 4, 1892–116 years after the first Declaration.7
SAM: Where’s Nebraska?
LAMB: Later Sam. The Omaha Platform, like the Declaration, spoke to the grievances and demands for major change within the context of its time.
BAM: What did it say? Perhaps I should include elements of it in the Democratic Party platform if I’m the Presidential candidate.
LAMB: The Omaha Platform’s Preamble states:
"The conditions which surround us best justify our cooperation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized; most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the polling places to prevent universal intimidation and bribery. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists."8
BAM: Sounds like something Dennis Kucinich would say!
LAMB: The Omaha Platform was a culmination of ideas and strategies from farmers and workers over a six-year period. Like the Declaration, it listed both grievances and fundamental prescriptions.
The platform called for abolishing the national banking system giving private banks control over money and credit; public ownership or control of the railroads, telegraph and telephone in the interests of the people; a federal graduated income tax; prohibition of alien land ownership; direct election of US Senators; the citizen initiative, referendum and recall; the secret ballot; and maybe most creatively, adoption of a "sub-treasury" system to expand currency based not on gold or silver but on agricultural products.
SAM: Still, many of these changes were "reformist." What’s so radical about direct election of Senators if the Senate is part of a political system favoring a small number of elites?
LAMB: Some of our planks were less radical than others. The Progressives, those who followed the Populists, pushed for the more modest measures. Some eventually became law. Other proposals were more substantial, such as public control of banks, railroads and telephones. The goal of its financial sections, the key portions of the Platform, were radical: to transfer control of the monetary system from the nation’s corporate banks and return it "in the name of the whole people," to the U.S. Treasury.9
All our demands, however, sought to shift the balance of power, economic and political, toward "plain people." These changes were as revolutionary in our time as forcing the British out of the colonies in yours.
Changes advocated by the Populists, however, transcended its political platform and cooperative buying and selling programs. The crux of Populism was creating a democratic culture. Populists attempted to build a cooperative community or commonwealth within the framework of American capitalism, one that put people at the center of the political and economic decisions affecting their lives. It became a movement culture that was understood, accepted and lived by millions of citizens.10
Progressives didn’t go that far. After the Populists were defeated in 1896, those who sought change accepted the corporate state and tried merely to temper its worst abuses through the creation of "regulatory" laws and agencies. This is the political and economic model you, Bam, and others working for "change" are stuck with today.
SAM: The Populists failed in the end. It was hardly revolutionary if it didn’t yield much change.
LAMB: True, we didn’t win. Elements of the Omaha Platform are now law, but there is no cooperative, democratic culture. Isn’t the same true of the Declaration and those who worked for true self-governance in 1776? Its essence of a government operating with the "consent of the governed" has not been realized. Today, those claiming that We the People have not only a right but a duty to revolt if unalienable rights are not secured would be called "extremists," even "terrorists" and treated accordingly.
BAM: A fundamental shortcoming of the Populists was their excluding blacks. Populist structures and members were often racist. In fact, many who call themselves "Populists" in recent times hold racist beliefs.
LAMB: That’s a sad truth. The radical dream of early Alliance founders in Texas was to create an interracial farmer-labor coalition. Alliance lecturers organized many black Alliances which led to the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance. Nevertheless, internal and external racism impeded social unity, economic cooperation, and electoral victory.
*************************
BAM: The change I speak of today is tied to offering real hope. I believe we can make government better, more responsive to people. We can control special interests and restore faith and trust in public officials. Hillary Clinton believes much the same. Even McCain supported campaign finance reform.
I believe we can make health care universal, increase labor and environmental provisions of NAFTA and other trade agreements, temporarily suspend home foreclosures, begin immediately to bring some troops home from Iraq, and strengthen ethics in government. This is a small part of my progressive change agenda that I can create with the support of voters. Clinton supports many of the same programs.
Other former Democratic Party candidates were even more radical. John Edwards spoke out against corporate power. Dennis Kucinich promoted a single-payer health care system, eliminating the role of insurance corporations all together, and called for undoing NAFTA.
My vision of change will be fueled if economic conditions worsen for Americans.
LAMB: Nothing you or any other Presidential candidate suggests will reduce corporate constitutional rights and powers or promote people’s self-governance.
With due respect, Bam, deep change was never brought about by those in positions of power. It occurs when people act together in insurgent movements. And insurgent movements are not a function of hard times, but of insurgent cultures. Difficult times crush people. Insurgent cultures provide real hope and make possible those processes of organizing, recruiting, educating and politicizing that create and sustain change.11
BAM: How can you say this? My messages of change and hope are drawing record numbers to my campaign. People are inspired, energized, empowered.
LAMB: True. But don’t mistake attraction to your campaign with behaviors necessary for a healthy democracy. As Populism declined, little stood in the way of growing political and economic concentration. Democratic aspirations were replaced by mass resignation and plenty of escape into consumerism, entertainment and drugs.
You and your message fill a void only because people of your time do not know and have never experienced an authentic insurgency movement for self-governance. Not just to end a war, expand civil rights or create environmental protections, but a movement affirming individual and collective self-confidence in seeking real political and economic democracy.
SAM: Bam, missing in your and other presidential candidates’ analysis is the larger issue of how the power and authority of "We the People," as promoted in the Declaration and Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, has been usurped.
LAMB: By the wealthy class and business corporations, I might add. We need changed rules not only changed faces.
SAM: That’s what I thought the Declaration tried to do in 1776.
LAMB: And the Omaha Platform 116 years later, in 1892.
BAM: Do you two realize that 116 years after 1892 is this year, 2008?
LAMB: Rather than working for the adoption of a single national declaration or platform at this time, The Program on Corporation, Law and Democracy (POCLAD) urges decentralized, participatory gatherings to study the Declaration of Independence and Omaha Platform, along with democracy campaigns and cooperative programs from current grassroots organizations. They’ve collected it all in a Democracy Insurgency Movement packet. This will add another seed to those already sown across the country, one that may lead to a "Third Declaration of Independence" and genuine governance by "consent of the governed."
BAM: It sounds like a dream, like my experience tonight.
LAMB: A dream? It all depends on the people and their determination to create real change.
*************************
Greg Coleridge is a POCLAD principal and works for the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee.
To order a Democracy Insurgency Movement packet, contact POCLAD at people@poclad.org or call 508-398-1145.
Endnotes:
1. Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, History of the United States, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949, p. 140.
2. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1980, p. 94.
3. Zinn, p. 73.
4. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 33.
5. Ibid, p. 124.
6. Ibid, p. 88.
7. Ibid, p. 277.
8. The Omaha Platform.
9. Goodwyn, op. cit., p. 93.
10. Ibid., p. 164-5.
11. Ibid., p. 61.
From By What Authority, a publication of the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD) Vol. 10, No. 1 Spring, 2008 www.poclad.org
http://www.poclad.org/bwa/Spring08.htm
"Who?" Obama asked in a daze, unsure if he was hallucinating from lack of sleep.
"We’re the ghosts of real change."
"I am the spirit of Samuel Adams, a revolutionary for American liberty and promoter of the Declaration of Independence."
"And I am the spirit of William Lamb, a founder of the U.S. Populist movement in the 1880s-1890s, supporter of the Omaha Platform, and organizer of the People’s Party."
Obama was puzzled. "You’re both dressed funny, but more to the point, why are you here?"
"We’ve come to talk. You, Clinton, even McCain, speak constantly about ‘change.’ We’ve watched your debates, read news on your light screens, and…"
"Light screens? Do you mean televisions and computers?"
"Ah yes, that’s what you call them. Anyway, all you candidates talk about is who will bring change to this country: real change, fundamental change, policy change to address unmet needs and give citizens more power."
"Sounds especially like me," Obama said assuredly.
"We’re not so sure," said the ghosts in unison. "We believe political change in our times was more profound than anything being proposed now."
And so Sam, Lamb and "Bam," advocates from three turbulent periods in U.S. history, huddled to discuss political change.
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SAM: I agitated for the greatest change in the history of our nation, political independence from Great Britain. The Declaration of Independence, passed on July 4, 1776, presented a lengthy list of "repeated injuries and usurpations" by the British government and asserted that the 13 colonies were "Free and Independent States."
LAMB: Weren’t you a signer?
SAM: Yes, one of 56 signers of the Second Continental Congress, a revolutionary, illegal body.
BAM: Did the British consider you and your ilk "terrorists"?
SAM: A renegade if not worse, in part for supporting the Declaration. I said in 1776, "Is not America already independent? …Why not then declare it."1 The power and inspiration of the Declaration were these unequivocal assertions: "All Men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights… That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from Consent of the Governed… [and] whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government… [in fact] it is their Duty to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security."
The essence of the document, revolutionary then and now, was the conviction that people can and should be governing–not kings, popes or generals.
British rule could not be "reformed." The King’s army and crown corporations could not be made accountable to the public. They all had to be replaced, so I worked for revolutionary change, for a system of self-rule.
LAMB: The Declaration was an inspiration to us Populists. But be honest, Sam, sixty-nine percent of the Declaration’s signers held colonial office under England. Many who supported both it and the revolution were colonial lawyers, landowners and merchants, including you, who only wanted independence from Great Britain to impose their own brand of political and economic control. Following the revolution, did you not say, "In monarchy the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death"?2
SAM: I did?
LAMB: Yup.
SAM: Still, I opposed the British Stamp Act, helped organize the Boston Tea Party and the Committees of Correspondence, colonists who organized into small groups to share information and mobilize the public.
LAMB: You were a great communicator, organizer and agitator Sam, but it was selective. Your instigation of mob protests was directed only at British rule and wealth, not the consolidation of power by colonial elites. This omission carried over to the Declaration, which ignored inequalities of property, and I ask, "How could people have equal rights, with stark differences in wealth?"3 The Declaration was a form of manipulation to focus anger and attention only on British rule.
BAM: While the Declaration is as inspirational as many of my speeches, there are several glaring omissions, notably independence for black slaves, women and native people. The draft of the Declaration included a grievance against the King for transporting slaves but was removed before adoption. Native people were called "the merciless Indian Savages..." and there was no room for women in "All men are created equal."
LAMB: Change during your period, Sam, was not as dramatic as during my lifetime. I helped organize the largest and most elaborate democratic mass movement in US history: Populism. It was a mass democratic insurgency among "plain people"–farmers and urban workers–to respond to the impoverishment of millions of farmers and workers by banks, railroads, and the consequences of economic and political centralization.
BAM: I haven’t heard much about the Populists.
LAMB: Most people of your day haven’t. We’ve been largely erased from history books. 0nly our "spirits" remain.
The Populists sought to create a democratic movement to counter the hierarchical culture of the day. It was "a new way of looking at society, a way of thought representing a shaking off of individual forms of deference… individual self-respect and collective self-confidence… class consciousness… growing political sensibility… the mass expression of a new political vision."4
BAM: Now I see why there’s not much known in our culture about you people.
LAMB: The creation of this democratic movement for revolutionary change was achieved in sequential steps: forming organizations, recruitment, education, and political action. State farmers Alliances were the original organizing base. I organized over 100 sub-alliances in Texas alone and eventually the National Farmers Alliance. We recruited through large-scale Populist-sponsored farmers cooperatives and I was the Texas Alliance’s first purchasing and traveling agent. Hundreds of newsletters and 40,000 "lecturers" were disseminated throughout Texas. We educated members continually, our version of the Committees of Correspondence, Sam. Collective political action bridging farmers and laborers was achieved through the Populist Party, which I helped launch.
SAM: This still doesn’t sound very revolutionary, pal. You weren’t talking about overthrowing the government.
BAM: Promoting major change through a political party is my goal, too.
LAMB: It was revolutionary, Sam, and there is a difference, Bam, between Populist goals and yours.
Populists constantly talked about "the coming revolution" through ballots not bullets. Revolution meant creating a "third party of the industrial millions" and overthrowing the two party system. We saw many elections as rigged and the electoral college as undemocratic. We tried to bring the corporate state under popular control through democratic politics.5
As fellow Populist Tom Watson said, "It’s useless to ask Congress to help us, just as it was folly for our forefathers to ask for relief from the tea tax; they revolted and so should we."6
The unifying platform for Populist revolution, the "Second Declaration of Independence," was the Omaha Platform. The 4000 delegates to the first People’s Party Convention in Omaha, Nebraska, adopted it on July 4, 1892–116 years after the first Declaration.7
SAM: Where’s Nebraska?
LAMB: Later Sam. The Omaha Platform, like the Declaration, spoke to the grievances and demands for major change within the context of its time.
BAM: What did it say? Perhaps I should include elements of it in the Democratic Party platform if I’m the Presidential candidate.
LAMB: The Omaha Platform’s Preamble states:
"The conditions which surround us best justify our cooperation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized; most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the polling places to prevent universal intimidation and bribery. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists."8
BAM: Sounds like something Dennis Kucinich would say!
LAMB: The Omaha Platform was a culmination of ideas and strategies from farmers and workers over a six-year period. Like the Declaration, it listed both grievances and fundamental prescriptions.
The platform called for abolishing the national banking system giving private banks control over money and credit; public ownership or control of the railroads, telegraph and telephone in the interests of the people; a federal graduated income tax; prohibition of alien land ownership; direct election of US Senators; the citizen initiative, referendum and recall; the secret ballot; and maybe most creatively, adoption of a "sub-treasury" system to expand currency based not on gold or silver but on agricultural products.
SAM: Still, many of these changes were "reformist." What’s so radical about direct election of Senators if the Senate is part of a political system favoring a small number of elites?
LAMB: Some of our planks were less radical than others. The Progressives, those who followed the Populists, pushed for the more modest measures. Some eventually became law. Other proposals were more substantial, such as public control of banks, railroads and telephones. The goal of its financial sections, the key portions of the Platform, were radical: to transfer control of the monetary system from the nation’s corporate banks and return it "in the name of the whole people," to the U.S. Treasury.9
All our demands, however, sought to shift the balance of power, economic and political, toward "plain people." These changes were as revolutionary in our time as forcing the British out of the colonies in yours.
Changes advocated by the Populists, however, transcended its political platform and cooperative buying and selling programs. The crux of Populism was creating a democratic culture. Populists attempted to build a cooperative community or commonwealth within the framework of American capitalism, one that put people at the center of the political and economic decisions affecting their lives. It became a movement culture that was understood, accepted and lived by millions of citizens.10
Progressives didn’t go that far. After the Populists were defeated in 1896, those who sought change accepted the corporate state and tried merely to temper its worst abuses through the creation of "regulatory" laws and agencies. This is the political and economic model you, Bam, and others working for "change" are stuck with today.
SAM: The Populists failed in the end. It was hardly revolutionary if it didn’t yield much change.
LAMB: True, we didn’t win. Elements of the Omaha Platform are now law, but there is no cooperative, democratic culture. Isn’t the same true of the Declaration and those who worked for true self-governance in 1776? Its essence of a government operating with the "consent of the governed" has not been realized. Today, those claiming that We the People have not only a right but a duty to revolt if unalienable rights are not secured would be called "extremists," even "terrorists" and treated accordingly.
BAM: A fundamental shortcoming of the Populists was their excluding blacks. Populist structures and members were often racist. In fact, many who call themselves "Populists" in recent times hold racist beliefs.
LAMB: That’s a sad truth. The radical dream of early Alliance founders in Texas was to create an interracial farmer-labor coalition. Alliance lecturers organized many black Alliances which led to the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance. Nevertheless, internal and external racism impeded social unity, economic cooperation, and electoral victory.
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BAM: The change I speak of today is tied to offering real hope. I believe we can make government better, more responsive to people. We can control special interests and restore faith and trust in public officials. Hillary Clinton believes much the same. Even McCain supported campaign finance reform.
I believe we can make health care universal, increase labor and environmental provisions of NAFTA and other trade agreements, temporarily suspend home foreclosures, begin immediately to bring some troops home from Iraq, and strengthen ethics in government. This is a small part of my progressive change agenda that I can create with the support of voters. Clinton supports many of the same programs.
Other former Democratic Party candidates were even more radical. John Edwards spoke out against corporate power. Dennis Kucinich promoted a single-payer health care system, eliminating the role of insurance corporations all together, and called for undoing NAFTA.
My vision of change will be fueled if economic conditions worsen for Americans.
LAMB: Nothing you or any other Presidential candidate suggests will reduce corporate constitutional rights and powers or promote people’s self-governance.
With due respect, Bam, deep change was never brought about by those in positions of power. It occurs when people act together in insurgent movements. And insurgent movements are not a function of hard times, but of insurgent cultures. Difficult times crush people. Insurgent cultures provide real hope and make possible those processes of organizing, recruiting, educating and politicizing that create and sustain change.11
BAM: How can you say this? My messages of change and hope are drawing record numbers to my campaign. People are inspired, energized, empowered.
LAMB: True. But don’t mistake attraction to your campaign with behaviors necessary for a healthy democracy. As Populism declined, little stood in the way of growing political and economic concentration. Democratic aspirations were replaced by mass resignation and plenty of escape into consumerism, entertainment and drugs.
You and your message fill a void only because people of your time do not know and have never experienced an authentic insurgency movement for self-governance. Not just to end a war, expand civil rights or create environmental protections, but a movement affirming individual and collective self-confidence in seeking real political and economic democracy.
SAM: Bam, missing in your and other presidential candidates’ analysis is the larger issue of how the power and authority of "We the People," as promoted in the Declaration and Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, has been usurped.
LAMB: By the wealthy class and business corporations, I might add. We need changed rules not only changed faces.
SAM: That’s what I thought the Declaration tried to do in 1776.
LAMB: And the Omaha Platform 116 years later, in 1892.
BAM: Do you two realize that 116 years after 1892 is this year, 2008?
LAMB: Rather than working for the adoption of a single national declaration or platform at this time, The Program on Corporation, Law and Democracy (POCLAD) urges decentralized, participatory gatherings to study the Declaration of Independence and Omaha Platform, along with democracy campaigns and cooperative programs from current grassroots organizations. They’ve collected it all in a Democracy Insurgency Movement packet. This will add another seed to those already sown across the country, one that may lead to a "Third Declaration of Independence" and genuine governance by "consent of the governed."
BAM: It sounds like a dream, like my experience tonight.
LAMB: A dream? It all depends on the people and their determination to create real change.
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Greg Coleridge is a POCLAD principal and works for the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee.
To order a Democracy Insurgency Movement packet, contact POCLAD at people@poclad.org or call 508-398-1145.
Endnotes:
1. Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, History of the United States, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949, p. 140.
2. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1980, p. 94.
3. Zinn, p. 73.
4. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 33.
5. Ibid, p. 124.
6. Ibid, p. 88.
7. Ibid, p. 277.
8. The Omaha Platform.
9. Goodwyn, op. cit., p. 93.
10. Ibid., p. 164-5.
11. Ibid., p. 61.
From By What Authority, a publication of the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD) Vol. 10, No. 1 Spring, 2008 www.poclad.org
http://www.poclad.org/bwa/Spring08.htm
Sunday, June 1, 2008
40,000 Year Old Mexicans!
There is now evidence in Mexico that humans were there 40,000 years ago. See
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/32728/title/Footprints_in_the_ash
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