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May 15, 2006

Beyond Chatter

There are plenty of important news stories out there. The government is spying on us, each and every one of us, and the scariest part is how many citizens are perfectly okay with it.

More people die everyday in Iraq, and no one can remember that Mother's Day is an Anti-War Holiday.

Gas prices aren't going down, oil companies keep getting richer, and the masses continue to struggle to make ends meet.

Republicans and other blowhards fail to connect the dots on immigration - progressives don't bother to point out that the entire reason we have limits on legal immigration is to keep the number of non-whites admitted to the country lower than the white population. It started with quotas for Chinese immigrants, expanded to limit Eastern Euros and Slavs (all considered non-white at the time), and on down the line.

The government and the capitalists crow for days on end about the glories of free trade. That goods and services must flow freely across national boundaries in this age of globalization. I'm extremely unclear why pieces of paper and other constructs of the human mind have more transnational rights than living, breathing human beings.

Rebel fractions from Darfur continue to insist that the peace agreement was not a truly negotiated deal and therefore they should not be expected to stop their uprising against the Sudanese government.

New Israeli Prime Minister Olmert lays out a "convergence" plan for appropriating even more of the arable Palestinian territory, and completing the apartheid wall, and the reaction from the world is muted, and there is no unified rage within the US that he is coming to DC and meeting with every single impt head there is (POTUS, VPOTUS, joint session of Congress, SecDef, and SecState).

What we need is coordinated movement building. The NYT says the CIA is no longer able to do strategic intelligence gathering. Similarly, the left has lost its strategy. We're a thousand voices, unable to frame our issues in a way that easily connects them for outsiders. We spend more time yapping at each other's heels than we doing Building he Movement, Speaking Truth to Power, or Creating Viable Change.

We need to stop simply reacting to the actions of the corporate-political syndicate. We need to create our own actions that do not rely on daily news briefs to move forward. We should be moving forward without the latest bit of bad news. And not just online in domestically-myopic forums like Atrios and Daily Kos. We need to create Social Upheaval.

Posted by cj at May 15, 2006 10:24 PM

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