And then they woke up.

Obviously the U.S. government was quite successful in importing state capitalism into Iraq, as evidenced by the outbursts of grieved protesters and their now-archetypal counterweights, the riot police. Nothing says quote-unquote-democracy like citizens confronting men in burly black armor.

How many homes go without electricity so these dudes can hide behind big plastic shields?

Ahh, the bourgeois democracy. That is, democracy for the rich, a lifetime of squalor and servitude for most everybody else.

Thank the maker we don't have anything like that here. Oh shit, wrong link. Ahh, nevermind ... what's much more interesting to note is that since Obama got elected, class struggle has been relatively low. Riot cops haven't been quite so necessary, not even at the immigration rights marches I've been to. Those waiters seem to be reserved for parties of 10,000 or more....

And they're curiously absent from the current protests in Madison, Wisconsin, which have occupied the state capitol and seen thousands of people come and go from all over the state and indeed all over the nation.

Solidarity is a curiously effective component of democracy, contrary to how absolute democracy is usually portrayed.

And no riot police (knock on wood). Police officers have been encouraged to sleep among the protesters. They guard doors but for the most part leave the crowds alone. There's been a few arrests, I hear, but despite Walker's swagger and bluster, no crackdown yet.

Today thousands of people are again rallying to Madison. As in Egypt and Tunisia and Iraq, Libya and Bahrain and Yemen, Jordan and Morocco and Algiers (apologies if I've left any of my cuzes out), "the people have lost their fear." There are still divisions and bitter feelings, as the disenfranchised public sector workers feel public unions should be dragged down to their level, rather than restored to the elevation they once enjoyed. (Why you would side with the rhetoric of the people who cheated and defiled you, I'll never understand....)

It's quite affirming to finally see the workers of the United States standing up for themselves. They've done their "patriotic duty" for years - bought products, taken pay cuts, let politicians handle politics. We've just kept our head down and done our job. "Git er done" was the slogan of the American worker and we were proud to do it for the red-white-and-blue. But the politicians kept pushing our buttons, kept looking for the line, kept on pushing down our standard of living while raising the expectations. They picked this fight, not us. It's just the unions who got fed up first this time around ...

... but there are a lot more of us with a bone to pick. March is just around the corner, and when the snow begins to melt (and the rivers begin to flood) the whole upper half of the country will rouse itself, crabby from hibernation. We will pack sand bags and hoist signs and on March 19th we will hold nation-wide anti-war marches against the continued occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. May 1st is May Day, a day for workers and new-agers (a solidarity I approve of). There are always immigrant rights marches then too. May 22nd is Harvey Milk Day, for LGBT rights and there's a lot yet to be done.

The left has been anything but sluggish these last 10 years - the media just hasn't been watching. Now that workers are really moving into action however we are beginning to hit the establishment where it hurts - the wallet. In closing I'm reminded of a few lines of lyrics and prose I feel really speak to this sudden worker's empowerment.

The first is a song, by Suicidal Tendencies:
"And I go 'wait, what are you talking about, WE decided? MY best interests? How do you know what MY best interest is? How can you say what MY best interest is? What are you trying to say? I'M crazy? When I went to YOUR schools, I went to YOUR churches, I went to YOUR institutional learning facilities? So how can you say I'M crazy?'"
- "Institutionalized"

And the second is a bit of a quote from one of the best movies of all time: Fight Club.

"We cook your meals. We haul your trash. We connect your calls. We drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us."

Workers of the world, unite :)

the front lines are everywhere

Here are some scattered articles about American fascism and decline.

• "Beijing isn't playing fair! Why isn't this backwards, uppity country doing what I want? Play American, assholes, or we'll start prying at your world interests!" They even say "Old-fashioned balance-of-power style diplomacy." Well, we internationalists are back on familiar grounds....
• "Hey, you can't go spying on diplomats when we're telling the truth! You have to wait for the canned messages. We're servants of the empire, not some common riffraff you can put on a surveillance camera!"
• First Bush, now Palin. I'm starting to think mis-speak is a conservative tactic to win over the less literate element in society, maybe some kind of linguistic anti-intellectual meme?
• Small business Saturday: little businesses are just baby big-businesses. But of course in today's political environ, the capitalist titans are in turmoil and the aging petty bourgeois, stirred by their decades of mis-education by mass media, are gaining confidence.
• Entrapment: nuff said on the case of the Christmas tree kid. "Mohamud believed he was receiving help from a larger ring of jihadists as he communicated with undercover federal agents, but no foreign terrorist organization was directing him, according to a law-enforcement official." The government is in constant threat of being torn down from all directions. All they need to do is find the group they want lynched and lure out the weirdos. Then its "OH NO SOMALIS." "OH NO, MUSLIMS." When thirty years ago it was "OH NO COMMUNISTS." And thirty years before that, "OH NO FASCISTS." There are so-called patriots in our midst who'd overthrow the government if they thought they could set up a goddamn dictatorship, and throw out all the colored folks.

Official lies are in full-swing this week, my friends.

1300 Miles to Mexico

Many a terrible thing's been going on lately (when doesn't it?), but the immigration debate, perhaps, bothers me the most.

Maybe it strikes close to home because I'm from California. I went to a high school where the Latino students outnumbered the whites at least 2:1. In my lifetime I saw the population of California turn to 51% "minority." (And what a stink it caused!)

It also hits close to home for me today, where "home" means the Twin Cities. Recently the tiny Minnesotan city of Lino Lakes passed a controversial resolution in its city council, to the effect of not spending city money on translating city documents into languages other than English.

Lino Lakes, however, is some dinky-ass quasi-suburb on the outskirts of the metro area. In 2000, it was at least 95% English-speaking. Even if things have changed, there seems to be no need for such a measure. There are no expenses to printing said documents, probably because the majority of Lino Lakes is as whitebread as they come.

It's a conservative test. If they can pass it somewhere, they have an example to point to when it comes time to expand their English-only movement. The stakes have been raised.

It's part of a larger battle, to oppress, exploit, tyrannize, and generally destroy the hated brown-skins. I've seen it all before. "Why do we have billboards in Spanish?" "Why can't they learn to speak English?" "They take all our jobs!" "They're all having babies on welfare!"

I'm sure most people are aware of the Arizona law SB1070 that recently went into effect (with some federal injunctions - the proverbial 3" of knife pulled out). What most people may not be aware of is that there is an arm to this law that essentially attacks day laborers, making it a crime to hire or be hired from a vehicle that is in any way impeding traffic. So, right there, you have an economic front.

It's also illegal to "conceal, harbor, or shield" an illegal immigrant, which strikes me as awfully familiar, but maybe that's only because I had a "liberal" education.

Oh, that reminds me - there are attacks, again in Arizona, on "ethnic studies" in school.

Really the point the right-wing populists are making is that it is not ok to be in America and describe yourself as anything but an American. "We only want you if you jump through our hoops, submit to our re-education, and live according to our customs."

What is it Malcom X said? “History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.”

It's clear how conservatives think of Latinos. There is a refusal to treat them like equals, to allow them their own history and culture. A refusal even to allow them to scrape by through working on the fringe of society - ironic, considering this is a country wherein we are "supposed" to "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps." Supposedly our white grandfathers did everything necessary to help our families pull through, but the old Mexican man selling oranges at the side of the road doesn't count for that, he's "stealing" a job, he's ahistorical, he's inhuman, even. And shit on the kids who depend on this man for support.

Arizona is even looking to ban such children from citizenship. That hard-line right-wing that so insists on the sacred immutability of the United States Constitution is willing to look the other way so long as they can attack the enemy they so detest.

It's pathetic. I still remember the mother of an ex-girlfriend of mine, back in California, a woman so loving and willing to take me into her own home, working overnights at the Swanson packaging plant. Her husband, gruff but no less open-hearted, crippled with arthritis after a lifetime of labor. They crossed illegally, contributed their share, raised three brilliant children, all of whom are college graduated (one at least from an ivy league) or at least college-bound. These are parents who are devoted to family and to God - ostensibly the same God that the right-wing supposedly worships.

But if it were up to this right-wing - and I'm not even talking about the extreme right, now, you understand - this family would have been split up, or deported, years ago. The world would indeed be a darker place if not for this family of immigrants.

It would seem, indeed, that the border does cross us.

Immigration reform isn't enough. We need an immigration revolution - we need a solution that shows just how obsolete the idea of national borders has become. Continues to become. This is going to be a turbulent becoming, because it will at the same time destroy what we see as the stability of our status quo. The immigration debate is a part of that, a part that proves how quick we are to blame people whose circumstances are forced on them. Forced by our lawmakers, who have pushed a one-sided agenda of globalization and free-market slavery. "Illegal" immigrants are victims of the same bureaucracy that entangles us all, strangles our livelihoods, keeps us from good jobs, and destroys our potential. A little equalization - scholarships for the children of immigrants, for example - can go a long way, but for every single gain the right-wing hollers and howls and tries to drag in average-joe workers.

It works. Why? Because we want some solution to the economic crisis (created, may I remind you, by our politicians and businessmen). We want jobs, we want less crime, we want a stable and dependable society.

Racism, however, is not the solution we seek.

I got your "Après moi, le déluge" right here, motherfucker.

Well, well, well. I had hardly even just spoken of the devil and it has to drop in to make sure I got it's fucking evil record totally straight.

If you've seen Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story," this particular leak from Sachs might seem in the same bitter flavor as the now-infamous Citibank Memo. (Which, of course, warrants its own discussion.) Or, if you've ever seen the documentary "The Corporation," which makes a brilliant case that corporations themselves are sociopathic in relation to humanity, you might remember the bit with the employees at Enron. (Incidentally I think "The Corporation" makes its case, and makes its case well. If you're not read up on corporate personhood and the 14th Amendment I suggest you do so quickly.)

It ought not come as any sort of surprise. If anything, it ought to come as a clear sign that the citizens of New Jersey should rally outside the Goldman Sachs building and not let any of those bloodsucking sonsofbitches work another day at their sad parasitic excuse for a job.

But then again the implications for this are immense. If one gigantic financial institution - and 6 such institutions have assets equaling 60% of our GNP, so you have to wonder what their influence is like - is parasitic and bloodsucking and essentially a danger to humanity, how many of the other 500 biggest corporations issue memos like this on a daily basis?

You know that the profit you make for your boss at work is just used to invest in machinery that eventually will replace you. Your boss - not the dude just above you making a buck more an hour but the celestial tool in some office a thousand miles away making decisions that will make or break your life - knows it too. It's an idea behind every word and phrase that bastard issues "to" you (more like "at" you) but is hideously clear in the internal correspondence that is passed to and fro from day to day without ever seeing the light of the public.

Such is the insulation that private (read: undemocratic) corporations provide their scheming bureaucratic despots.

This is an age in which Capitalism is king. In which money buys and sells us on a labor market. In which loans and interest rates make or break families. This is a system whose highest echelons are so removed from reality that humanity appears to them only as red ink in the expenses columns of their accounting books. These are the tyrants we allow to set policy and buy and sell entire neighborhoods, if not whole counties and states.

What this leads me to ask of you is precisely this: Question the free market.

Question who it defends, and who defends it. Question the logic of selling your power to work on a market. Question our basis of ownership in this society. Question your conceptions of the people, past and present, who have stood up against this system. But most of all: Question your complacency with it.

Because it's all well and good that The Establishment is beating the war-drums and going after Gold Man-Sacks. The Establishment always finds someone to call naughty and slap on the wrist just to alleviate public discontent. It has to maintain some facade of objectivity or the whole goddamn thing goes to pot, right?

Sure The Establishment will pursue, from time to time, the occasional torture case, or some specific member of the CIA. And the media will call attention to it for a little while, and somebody might get fired, but the whole intent is to Restore Credibility. (Which, let's face it, our government today lacks - whether you're looking from the left or the right.) The United States government has always walked an insanely thin line. And to boot, it's always kept a really firm heel over all its discontent. But increasingly, it's running out of wiggle-room. The late twentieth-century showed some incredibly deft maneuvers. Obama himself was from the outset a wondrously smart choice to nudge towards Presidency.

But reviling Golddigger Sacks to rile support for the financial reform bill (standing at 80% polled support as of this afternoon, I believe) is only going to do so much. The retail property market continues to look shaky, unemployment isn't poised to shrink, and even in the best-case economic scenario climate change is going to render our best laid plans awry.

This is just The Establishment giving the masses another installment of Justice Theater.

How much longer will we suffer it?

EDIT: "Dresden," some of you have asked me, "don't you have a position on SB1070 to share with us?"

"My brothers and sisters and siblings," I have said, "I know nothing better to say than those who have gotten up in the ugly face of capitalist power and spoken themselves."