The Country Was Saved. Now It’s Time for a Revolution.

courtesy www.barackobama.com

The country was saved. Barely. From our vantage point in the liberal Bay Area, it is difficult to understand how half the country could vote for someone who, as I have said before, was basically a brown shirt in a rep tie. Or, at least, was advocating extreme right-wing madness. Sometimes it seems so complicated that I turn off and go back to listening to Leonard Cohen. Let’s go live on a Greek Island with a mistress of one kind or another for a while.

But basically it is the end of the hegemonic order and the unchecked power of the one percent. Citizens United meant that rich folks without values could run around doing whatever they wanted. That is, until a bloody revolution stopped it all. But that is not the preferred outcome. Almost every country with any kind of economic strength has a jumbled-up combination of socialism and capitalism. The question is, how much does the government check greed, and how? Large countries that said they embraced socialism, like China and the USSR, didn’t. And when they embraced capitalism, it became government-sanctioned thievery. Most of Europe has embraced socialism and allows capitalism to flourish as long as the basic needs of the citizens are met. Of course, that is no longer true in the US; the standard of living in several countries is better than ours. (Not that ours should be the best.)

We are confronted with a radically changing demographic. The era of the white man is almost over. Although minorities of all kinds are still oppressed by the right and the religions that cater to the right, the long arc of justice that Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about will happen. But the few straight white men who control the levers of capitalism are not going to give up without a fight. These few people outspent the Democrats and told lies and more lies in every possible media channel they could think of. There are reports that they tried to disrupt the voting process. The outcome of this election is so important because the Supreme Court will change its makeup in the next four years, and now the new justices will say no to the wreckage that the one percent has caused in the financial and oil industries.

courtesy www.ownieu.owni.fr 

But there are two tracks. There is the political track and the in-the-streets track. The Republicans will still control the House and will keep taking their kind of bribes. This is why we voted for Obama and will be in the streets in the coming years. We will see precious little happen in the political realm, because the Republicans and their corporations will pour their resources into resisting humane progress at every turn. And that’s why Occupy will be back. Next time it won’t be quite as ragtag and stinky. It will be slightly less democratic and slightly more organized. And it will push Wall Street into the gutter. When oil is no longer the blood of the economy and bankers are accountable, we can rebuild a country that is based on human dignity and the idea of service. It can’t happen under a Republican administration. What remains to be seen is whether it can happen under a Democratic one. As the political scientist Jodi Dean said the other day, it only takes ten percent of the population to start a revolution. So, ten to one it is. Good odds, even if the one percent has most of the money.

courtesy www.latimesphoto.files.wordpress.com

Vote McGovern

A few days ago, I watched the 2005 documentary One Bright Shining Moment about George McGovern’s run for the presidency in 1972. I was 13 turning 14 at the time and was excited about the possibility of a liberal antiwar candidate being elected president. I later heard a story that when New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael woke up the morning after the landslide victory for Nixon, she couldn’t believe it. She didn’t know a single person who voted for Nixon. That’s how I felt.

I pasted a bumper sticker for McGovern/Shriver on my mother’s pristine Rambler. (She made me clean it off after the election, of course.) My father took us to a rally at Richmond High School, where we got to see the vice presidential candidate Sargent Shriver in person. And I handed out literature at the local market where we lived. I still believe now what I believed then. George McGovern wanted to turn this country towards compassion and away from greed and violence. His dramatic loss will be understood as a turning point in history. Roosevelt saved capitalism from itself, and the line of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and the Bushes will be seen as having let it choke itself to death. McGovern might have stopped this juggernaut.

George McGovern visits Cesar Chavez
in the hospital

The documentary itself is too long. As much as I love Gore Vidal, he becomes pedantic. But the film tells an important moment in American history that is worth understanding.

Barack Obama is not like George McGovern. For one thing, he got elected! He is master of a much better organized and well-fueled machine. His vice president is an old hand, who talks too much, but doesn’t suffer the stigma of mental illness that Tom Eagleton—McGovern’s first choice for vice president—did. In the age of Citizens United, Obama has to play to the corporate kingpins, as much as he may not like them. He advocates for an endless expansion of an economy that seems based on waste and pointless consumerism. He has not closed Guantanamo Bay, and apparently innocent people are still dying there. And then there are the drones. But he has tried to institute some kind of healthcare system that will help the middle class and the poor. He has come out for equal rights for gay people. When Ruth Ginsburg and other older Supreme Court justices retire, he will nominate justices who are not hateful or stupid. Whatever objections those on the left may have, we must reelect him. Romney and the Republicans have moved so far right that they will try to repeal civil rights and focus on what the last several Republicans have focused on—redistribution of the wealth to the one percent, using war as an excuse and oil as the catalyst. While this might speed what I see as an inevitable revolution, it will be bloody, and many innocent people will die. Make no mistake, Republicans are (light) brown shirts in white shirts and rep ties.

Even as we support Obama, we must continue to protest capitalism’s excesses. The Occupy movement showed that discontent is real and rising. I think that the violence that a few of the Occupy protestors exhibited was not so much revolutionary fervor as it was mental illness. The democratic nature of the movement and its willingness to feed anyone attracted a number of homeless and mentally ill people who had nowhere else to go. Another surprise gift to the left from the antigovernment, antitax, pro-rich Republicans. Eliminate services for the mentally ill, and be sure they go help the pro-democratic demonstrators!

Richard Serra's print is part of a group of prints
 by Gemini GEL artists to raise money for Obama.

The truth is, Republicans actually love socialism. They see government as a source of funding for the private sector. As long as the spigot flows money upward, they have what they want. What we learned from Reagan was that “trickle down” really means “flow up.” Nobody loves government subsidy, aka corporate welfare, as much as the Republicans.

At this juncture, there are at least two related questions facing the country. First, can we tax the rich enough to provide a balance to their excesses, and will they retaliate? The type of police action we saw less than a mile from our home here in Oakland, Romney’s off-shore tax havens, and Apple’s hideous manufacturing practices in China (as I type this on a Mac) are all ways the one percent can react to challenges to their hegemony. Second, can this country begin to see that endless pursuit of profit is killing us? Profit in and of itself is just an updated version of trading beads. This intense focus on profit over service is an environmental and political disaster.

I wonder if there is a relationship between the growth of excess profit and the expansion of extremist brands of several faiths? Is this because so many people lack basic necessities, or because people are angry that what little they have will be taken from them? Talk about false prophets (see the late Christopher Hitchens on that!).

We may not see the end of capitalism in my lifetime. But we could see people begin to turn towards compassion and service as more important than profit. That was what George McGovern promised. And deep down, I think that is what Obama also wants.