Today's Stories

February 13 - 15, 2009

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

February 12, 2009

P. Sainath
Neo-Liberal Terrorism in India: The Largest Wave of Suicides in History

Jean Bricmont
French Echoes of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict

Michael Hudson
Trying to Revive the Bubble Economy: Obama's Awful Financial Recovery Plan

Peter Lee
Pakistan, Not Afghanistan, is the Main Event

Dave Lindorff
Judges Nabbed, Jailing Kids for Kickbacks

February 11, 2009

Neve Gordon
Few Peacemakers in the New Israeli Knesset

Peter Morici
Anatomy of a Hemorrhage

Andy Worthington
Who's Running Guantánamo?

Marjorie Cohn
A Call to End All Renditions

Fred Gardner
Change We Can Smoke?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The G & O (Geithner and Obama) Bank

Zoe Blunt
Vancouver Island Hippies: Top Security Threat for 2010?

Belén Fernández
Politics on the Panamericana

Martha Rosenberg
Don't Breathe the Meat

Website of the Day
George Dyson on Project Orion

Blues of the Day
David Vest on the CBC

February 10, 2009

Kathy Kelly
How Do People Keep Going?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Stimulus Imbroglio

Uri Avnery
Dirty Socks

Michael J. Berg
Will South Carolina be the Center of the Nuclear Revival?

Russell Mokhiber
Et Tu, Atul?

Joe Bageant
A Commodity Called Misery

Gareth Porter
Petraeus' Subterfuge

Dave Lindorff
Seek Truth, But Prosecute Liars

Rannie Amiri
The Implications of Recognizing Israel's "Right to Exist"

Harvey Wasserman
Nukes and the Stimulus

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What We Didn't Learn at Obama's Press Conference

Website of the Day
RIAA Takes Over DoJ Under Obama

February 9, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Why Sanjay Gupta is the Wrong Man for Top US Health Job

Paul Craig Roberts
Driving Over the Cliff

Julio Sanchez /
Feliz de Bedout
The Threat of Peace in Colombia: an Interview with Hollman Morris

National Lawyers Guild
Strong Indications of Israeli War Crimes

Jonathan Cook
Israeli University Welcomes "War Crimes" Colonel

Alana Smith
The Nightmarish Case of Fahad Hashmi

Binoy Kampmark
Taking the Bong

Sam Bahour
End the Occupation First

Nicole Colson
Can You Afford College?

Ron Jacobs
Remembering the Second Intifada

Website of the Day
The Legacy of Ed Grothus and the Black Hole

February 6-8, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's First Bad Week

Ishmael Reed
Saint Thelma's Book

James Abourezk
Obama, Mitchell and the Palestinians

William Blum
Obama and the Empire

Patrick Cockburn
Maliki's Triumph

Henry A. Giroux
Educating Obama

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Darwin's Living Legacy

Mouin Rabbani
A New Low on Gaza?

David Yearsley
Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Springsteen!

Saul Landau
The Wrestler: an American Tragedy

Jules Rabin
Israel's Disproportionate Responses

Raymond J. Lawrence
A Country Awash in Money But Going Broke

Janette Habel
Castro's Socialism in Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Economy on a Thread

Missy Beattie
Blackout at the Gaza Zoo Massacre

Dale Gieringer
The Opium Exclusion Act of 1909: Marking 100 Years of Failed Drug Prohibition

John Ross
Davos vs. Belem; Swine vs. Pearls

Richard Rhames
Jobs is a Four Letter Word

Bob Wing
Obama, Race and the Future of U.S. Politics

Robert Bryce
Corn Dog Update: Another Study Exposes Bio-Fuel Scam

David Macaray
AFL-CIO and Change to Win in "Re-Wed" Talks

James L. Secor
Inaugural Questions Nobody Asks: Notes from Kuala Lumpur

Jason Flom /
Anthony Papa
The Scourging of Michael Phelps

Norm Kent
Ten Reasons to Get High About Pot in 2009

Kim Nicolini
When Utopia Crumbles: Why Revolutionary Road was Shut Out of the Oscars

Lorenzo Wolff
Ridiculous Flow: How Cee Lo Green Sells Soul

Poets' Basement
Emily Dickinson (with Commentary by Daniel Wolff)

Website of the Weekend
S.J. Gould: Darwin's Untimely Burial

February 5, 2009

Michael Mandel
Self-Defense Against Peace

Saul Landau /
Philip Brenner
Killing the Monroe Doctrine

Ralph Nader
Tax the Speculators!

Robert Bryce
The Unraveling of the Ethanol Scam

Russell Mokhiber
Occupied Territory

Sameh Habeeb /
Janet Zimmerman
Innocents Lost

Dave Lindorff
Small Change

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Beyond Green Capitalism

George Ochenski
A Blow to Big Coal in Montana

Website of the Day
Putting CEO Pay in Context

February 4, 2009

Arno J. Mayer
On Corruption

Paul Craig Roberts
The War on Terror is a Hoax

Patrick Cockburn
The Iraqi Elections

Jonathan Cook
An IDF Jihad?

Fred Gardner
Obama's Mixed Messages on Marijuana

Stan Cox
Slumwrecking Millionaires: India's Fragile New Temples

Margaret Kimberley
The Deepening Economic Crisis

Lawrence Velvel
Agony & Desperation: Madoff's Victims

Dave Lindorff
A Generals' Revolt?

Doug Giebel
A Helping of Bitter Beltway Baloney

Serge Quadruppani
Student Protests Sweep Italy

Website of the Day
The San Francisco 8

February 3, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency & Anthropology: Roberto Gonzalez on Human Terrain Systems

Bill Moyers
Obama's Wars: an Interview with Pierre Sprey and Marilyn Young

Kirkpatrick Sale
Obama's Lincoln Thing

Conn Hallinan
When Mind Wounds Don't Count

Peter Morici
The Slippery Slope of Stimulus

George Ciccariello-Maher
From Oakland to Santa Rita: "Fired Up, Can't Take It No More"

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
The BBC's Nadir

Allan Nairn
What Does It Take to Get a Meal Here, an Earthquake?

Norman Solomon
Why are We Still at War?

David Macaray
The Late, Great UAW

Website of the Day
The Bloody Cove

February 2, 2009

Uri Avnery
Under the Black Flag: Israeli War Crimes

Ralph Nader
What to Do About Wall Street

Gareth Porter
Generals Move to Obstruct Obama's Iraq Withdrawal Orders

Paul Craig Roberts
The Death of American Leadership

Harvey Wasserman
The Nuclear Industry's Latest Money Grab

Rannie Amiri
Gaza and the Crimes of Mubarak

Cal Winslow
Stern's Gang Seizes UHW Union Hall

Steve Early
Checking Out of Stern's Hotel California

Alan Farago
Superbowl as Panopticon

Diane Farsetta
Banning Domestic Propaganda

January 30 / February 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama and the Oddsmakers

Michael Hudson
Obama's New Bank Giveaway

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
"Too Big to Fail:" a Bailout Hoax

Dave Lindorff
The Ugly Truth: the American Economy is Not Coming Back

Saul Landau
Freedom Fighters, Terrorists or Schlemiels?

Andy Worthington
Blame the Chef: How Cooking for the Taliban Can Get You Life in Gitmo

Subcomandante Marcos
Gaza Will Survive

Robert Jensen
Future Farming: an Interview with Wes Jackson

Ron Jacobs
Return of the Democrats

Gareth Porter
Is Gates Undermining Another Opening to Iran?

Allan Nairn
Hope for the Dump Cities?

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA's Dangerous Security Agenda

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Feelings of a Stranger

Christopher Brauchli
From Gitmo to Supermax?

Jules Rabin
Israel and the Bomb

Col. Dan Smith
Thoughts From an Inauguration Refugee

Missy Beattie
The US Garden of Evil

Tom Barry
Obama's Immigration Challenge

J. Michael Cole
The Downfall of an Academic

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Burning the First Amendment

Dan Bacher
How Dam Removal Can Save the Klamath River

David Rosen
Last Gasp of the Culture Wars?

Don Monkerud
Religion in the American Bedroom

Binoy Kampmark
Updike: Apostle of the Middlebrows

Lorenzo Wolff
Playing Down a Bad Reputation: the Lovin' Spooful's Near Perfect Record

David Yearsley
When Orfeo and Euridice Lived Happily Ever After in Upstate New York

Poets' Basement
Valentine and Rihn

January 29, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Tom Paine's Birthday

Paul Craig Roberts
Is It Time to Bail Out of America?

Riz Khan
The Future of Gaza: an Interview with Jimmy Carter

M. Reza Pirbhai
Pakistan: a New Cambodia?

Wajahat Ali
Obama's Al-Arabiya Interview

Gregory Vickrey
What About the Environment? Cap and Trade and Selling Out

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
Whither the Two State Solution?

Alison Weir
Killing Palestinians Doesn't Count: Fact-Checking Ceasefire Breaches

Alan Farago
Economy Without Escape Routes

Walter Brasch
Taxing a House of Cards

Website of the Day
Madoff Inc.

January 28, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
Behind the Bloodbath in Gaza

Noam Chomsky
Obama's Emerging Policies on Israel, Iraq and the Economic Crisis

Patrick Cockburn
Is Mitchell's Mission Already Doomed?

Rob Larson
The Clinton Foundation Donors

George Wuerthner
Who Will Speak for the Forests?

Allan Nairn
South-East Asian Groups Threaten Retaliation Over Gaza Invasion

M. Junaid
Levesque-Alam
A Muslim's Memo to Obama

Stefan Simanowitz
The Silent Trade

Charles R. Larson
The Autumn of the Patriot

Website of the Day
Veggie Love: PETA's Banned Superbowl Ad

January 27, 2009

Winslow T. Wheeler
Save the Economy by Cutting the Defense Budget

Yigal Bronner /
Neve Gordon
Fueling the Cycle of Hate

Joshua Frank
Obama's Neocon: the Curious Case of Richard Holbrooke

Jordan Flaherty
Torture at a Louisiana Prison

Ralph Nader
Access to Economic Justice

Rev. José M. Tirado
How Iceland Fell: a Hundred Days of (Muted) Rage

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Looking Forward

Russell Mokhiber
What If Israel Were in Your Neighborhood?

Martha Rosenberg
Who Says Technology Transfer Doesn't Pay?

C. G. Estabrook
The Inaugural Address: the Digested Read

Website of the Day
Who Profits From the Occupation?

January 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Speaking the Truth is a Career-Ending Event

Deepak Tripathi
The BBC's Day of Shame

Vijay Prashad
The India Lobby: Drunk with the Sight of Power

Peter Lee
Geithner's Pop Gun Volley at China

Allan Nairn
The Torture Ban That Doesn't Ban Torture

Uri Avnery
On the Wrong Side of History

John Sayen
The Next Shoe to Drop

Dave Lindorff
Afghanistan is No Threat to America

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff

David Macaray
Obama vs. Labor

Roger Burbach
Winds of Change in Cuba

Norman Solomon
The Ghost of LBJ

Website of the Day
Landscapes of Occupation

January 23 / 25, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ghosts at Obama's Side

P. Sainath
The Freefalling Economy

Patrick Cockburn
In Israel, Detachment From Reality is the Norm

Saul Landau
Reasons for War?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Our Current Economic Crisis: the Monks' Cure

Alan Farago
The Problem with the Stimulus

Christopher Brauchli
When Due Diligence is a One-Way Street

Andy Worthington
Return to Law?

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pentagon: Bowing to the Masters of War?

Lawrence Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience (Part Four)

Henry A. Giroux
The Audacity of Educated Hope

David Yearsley
The Music That Wasn't There: Chamber Music for Obama's Masses

Raymond F. Gustavson
Here We Go Again: General Shinseki and Veterans

Dave Lindorff
The Way Forward

Roberto Rodriguez
Fighting for Migrant Justice in the Desert

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
The Struggle of an Un-People

Fidel Castro
Meeting Cristina

J. Michael Cole
Can Obama's Shift on Terror Succeed?

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
It's Time to Free Leonard Peltier

Ramzy Baroud
Breaking Gaza's Will

Mohammad Ali Shabani
The Aftermath of the War on Gaza

Richard Rhames
Panning for Pyrite on a Cold Day at the Mall

Stephen Martin
Voices in the Mirror

Lorenzo Wolff
Jurassic Radio

Kim Nicolini
Katrina's Endless Loop

Poets' Basement
Fleming, Henson, First, Jaramillo and Glendinning

Website of the Weekend
Cartoon Love

January 22, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Another Real Estate Crisis is About to Hit

Kathy Kelly
Worse Than an Earthquake

Allan Nairn
US Intel Nominee Lied About Church Murders

Lawrence Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience (Part Three)

Andy Worthington
Halting the Gitmo Trials

Peter Morici
How to Fix the Banks

Joseph G. Davis
The First MBA Presidency and the Business Academy: a Damage Assessment

Adriana Kojeve
The Democrats on Israel: a Brief Oral History

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Poised for Historic Vote

Website of the Day
Support the Gaza Community Mental Health Program

January 21, 2009

Gabriel Kolko
Understanding Gaza

Harry Browne
Obama's Work Ethic

Michael Colby
Ready. Aim. Organize.

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience

Audrey Stewart
Starting Over in Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Obama and the Muslims

Binoy Kampmark
The Marketing of Hope

David Kεr Thomson
Abolition

John Ross
In My Own Bones

Allan Nairn
Killer in Chief: Will This President Murder Civilians?

Sheldon Richman
The Peaceful Transfer of Violent Power

Website of the Day
Globistan

January 20, 2009

Chuck Spinney
Hosing Obama Israeli Style

Kathy Kelly
The Strongest Weapon of All

Raymond Deane
The EU, Gaza and the Lisbon Treaty

Ralph Nader
State Terrorism Against Gaza

Audrey Stewart
Why I am in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Doctrine of Destruction

Harvey Wasserman
A Ten-Point Solar Agenda for Obama

Christopher Ketcham
Inauguration Ad Nauseam

Robert Jensen
A Citizen's Oath of Office

Dave Lindorff
Commie Chorus on the Mall: This Land Really is Made for You and Me

David Macaray
SAG Watches It All Slip Away

Weekend Edition
February 13 - 15, 2009

Our Choice, Our Future

Four Freedoms, Four Changes

By TOM STEPHENS

Everywhere one looks today there’s crisis.  Economic collapse, war, environmental degradation, health, poverty, mis-education and corruption, all at the same time, with common roots and fruits.  What’s a poor boy/girl-man/woman to do in such insane and chaotic times?  Study history.  Learn more about the present, ourselves and others.  Channel anger, creativity, love and whatever else we’ve got into action.  Take advantage of the extremely rare opportunity, at such tipping points, to make history by telling our own stories, and create our future.

This essay connects three points of relatively modern history – including the present intense moment.  In today’s American Idol, bail-out-the-toilet-bowl nation, let’s revisit a few previous experiences of politics and activism, and start laying a foundation for organizing and struggle thru the present emergency.  

Winter 1941

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt needs no introduction.  His January 6, 1941 “Four Freedoms” State of the Union Speech was a classic rhetorical call for democratic resistance to tyranny and terror, pretty much a 20th century Gettysburg Address. 

The Great Depression that’s been so in vogue lately was still hanging on, after nearly a decade of major policy reforms trying to get Americans back to work.  But new challenges threatened from Europe and Asia, especially since the September 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland 16 months before, and the resulting Hitler/Stalin non-aggression pact.  Some people today justifiably fear both long-term climate catastrophe, and a potential authoritarian reaction against the imminent collapse of The American Way of Life.  Like us, in 1941 our so-called “greatest generation” would soon learn that even massive economic breakdown might not be the very worst thing that could happen.

The greatest President of The American Century began his constitutionally required State of the Union message to Congress that year by referring to simultaneous challenges of foreign and domestic policy emergencies:  The “democratic way of life” was mortally threatened by “the new order of tyranny.”  Therefore he said “this Annual Message to the Congress is unique in our history.”   Explicitly basing our national policies on the “rights and dignity of all,” and “the justice of morality,” FDR made the following major points:   

“The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are:”

• Equality of opportunity for youth and others
• Jobs for those who can work
• Security for those who need it
• The ending of special privilege for the few
• The preservation of civil liberties for all
• The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living

[and he gave some specific examples of things calling for immediate improvement:]

• Bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance

• Widen the opportunities for adequate medical care

• Plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it

“No person should try, or be allowed, to get rich out of this [crash national war preparations] program; and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.”

“We look forward to a world founded on four essential human freedoms:”

• Freedom of speech and expression
• Freedom of every person to worship God in their own way;
• Freedom from want, which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants; and
• Freedom from fear, a world-wide reduction of armaments to the point where no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.

Much like the above (pretty amazingly still current!) thoughts, the President’s conclusion drew on historical ideas and emotions we need today: “Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual peaceful revolution … Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.”

Hold that thought.  Please (turn off the damn TV and) hold on to ALL those thoughts tight.  I want to introduce you to another perspective.  Amazing how this works, ain’t it?

Summer 1969

28 years later, dancing on Mr. Roosevelt’s shoulders in the midst of Woodstock Nation, meet Gary Snyder.  The model for the fictional protagonist “Japhy Ryder” from Jack Kerouac’s second-most famous novel Dharma Bums, young timber jack, Buddhist seeker, nature poet, more recently author of immensely valuable essays in The Practice of the Wild.  In the summer of 1969, with a small gaggle of countercultural collaborators, he wrote a poetic political essay called “Four Changes.” 

A very different, obscenely unjust American war was chemically burning Asia.  The civil rights revolution, riots in city streets, and a new youth generation’s visions of freedom had crested in the past decade (like the New Deal  before FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech).  The tumultuous year of 1968 lay just behind in the mind’s rear view mirror, smoking a lot like the tumultuous year of 2008 reeks today.  Che Guevara had been dead for about a year and a half – roughly the time period between the beginning of WWII in Europe and FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech.  “Four Changes” concluded with a section captioned “TRANSFORMATION,” closely paraphrased here:

We have it within our deepest powers not only to change our “selves” but to change our culture.  If humans are to remain on earth we must transform the five-millenia-long urbanizing civilization tradition into a new ecologically-sensitive harmony-oriented wild-minded scientific-spiritual culture.  “Wildness is the state of complete awareness.  That’s why we need it.”

Nothing short of total transformation will do much good.  A basic cultural outlook and social organization that inhibits power and property-seeking while encouraging exploration and challenge in things like music, meditation, mathematics, mountaineering, magic, and all other ways of authentic being-in-the-world.  Women totally free and equal.  A new kind of family – responsible, but more festive and relaxed – is implicit.

Since it doesn’t seem practical or even desirable to think that direct bloody force will achieve much, it would be best to consider this a continuing “revolution of consciousness” which will be won not by guns but by seizing the key images, myths, archetypes, eschatologies, and ecstasies so that life won’t seem worth living unless one’s on the transforming energy’s side.  We must take over “science and technology” and release its real possibilities and powers in the service of this planet – which, after all produced us and it.

[More concretely: no transformation without our feet on the ground.  Stewardship means, for most of us, find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there – the tiresome but tangible work of school boards, county supervisors, local foresters – local politics.  Even while holding in mind the largest scale of potential change.  Get a sense of workable territory, learn about it, and start acting point by point.  On all levels from national to local the need to move toward steady state economy-equilibrium, dynamic balance, inner-growth stressed – must be taught.  Maturity/diversity climax/ creativity.]

We are the first human beings in history to have so much of human culture and previous experience available to our study, and to be free enough of the weight of traditional cultures to seek out a larger identity; the first members of a civilized society since the Neolithic to wish to look clearly into the eyes of the wild and see our self-hood, our family, there.  We have these advantages to set off the obvious disadvantages of being as screwed up as we are – which gives us a fair chance to penetrate some of the riddles of ourselves and the universe, and to go beyond the idea of “humanity’s survival” or “survival of the biosphere” and to draw our strength from the realization that at the heart of things is some kind of serene and ecstatic process which is beyond qualities and beyond birth-and-death.

Whoa!  In 28 years of revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary Cold War) social change, leading American male thinkers have gone from defending the nation state against foreign enemies, to inner-directed ecstatic personal liberation, and total ecological transformation of industrial civilization – absolutely essential for survival today, through comprehensive, relentless and non-violent social action as a way of life!  NO WONDER we had that mind-numbing, money-grubbing, torture-loving backlash in the ‘70s and after!  Too damn many people taking democracy entirely too seriously… 

As Gil-Scott Heron put it: “Godammit! First one wants freedom, then the whole world wants freedom.”  All that neoliberal claptrap about “greed is good” and letting “The Market” (holy, holy Market – we are not worthy!) decide everything, until we landed in this pile of crap behind our very own war criminal tyrants George W. Bush and his smirking henchman Cheney… But I digress.

Winter 2009

Professor Henry Giroux of McMaster University in Canada is an educational and cultural expert, and a semi-frequent contributor to the Counterpunch.org web site, which I personally have to visit at least several times a week to avoid [even more] severe psychological/emotional damage from living in the 21st century.  His erudite February 6 essay, entitled “Educating Obama,” surveys the present consequences of the last three decades’ neoliberalism.  He explores some of the intellectual contours of a new hope that is taking shape.  He shows, among many other things, how timely and critical the past insights of both FDR and Gary Snyder are to our present crises of survival and freedom.

Professor Giroux’s essay struggles courageously against many progressives’ perfectly understandable negative reactions to the tax cheat/bankster-dominated beginning of Obama-time:

either a deep sense of despair in light of  his increasing political shift to the center, or a doom-and-gloom cynicism in the face of economic crisis.

Giroux doesn’t stop there:

At stake is the need for a new politics of resistance and hope, one that mounts a collective challenge to a ruthless market fundamentalism that for the last thirty years has spearheaded the accumulation of capital and wealth at all costs, the commodification of young people, and the usurpation of democratic modes of sovereignty.  In the depths of massive human suffering, a financial Katrina,  millions of displaced lives, a weakened social state and a failing democracy made all the more ominous by the dumbing down of public discourse and the emptying out of critical public spheres, democracy is about neither the sovereignty of the market nor a form of state governance based largely on fear, manipulation, and deceit. 

It’s about, among many other things, defending ourselves against tyranny, following our deepest dreams and highest visions, and liberating ourselves from internal and external oppressions, even while getting the required economic, political and human work done right.  Like fascism, global warming and the draft, these are important and necessary things we really can’t escape, even if we want to. 

Professor Giroux continues:

Democracy is not simply about people wanting to improve their lives; it is more importantly about their willingness to struggle to protect their right to self-determination and self-government in the interest of the common good.  The militarized corporate state and the sovereign market reduce democracy to either an overcrowded prison or a shopping mall, both of which are vulnerable to totalitarianism. The fundamental institutional and educational conditions of social, political, and personal rights have been under attack for the last thirty years, and now face a moment of crisis as severe as the current economic crisis.   Corporate culture reigns unchallenged as the most powerful force in the country, while democracy becomes dangerously empty.  We need more than bailouts; we need a politics that reinvents the concept of the social, while providing a language of critique and hope forged not in isolation but in collective struggle that takes social responsibility, commitment, and justice seriously. 

Looking back at FDR’s inspiring words and Gary Snyder’s visionary ideas synthesizing east with west and inner with outer realities, we can see with Professor Giroux that The Good Society and The Good Life are all about reinventing “the democratic way of life” in our world and time, making it real and relevant in our lives, and applying it to the pursuit of sustainability as the basis for happiness.  The “hope” of the Obama era lies in our struggle, and his and our growth, toward real democracy,  FDR’s “rights and dignity of all,” “the justice of morality,” and the supremacy of human rights everywhere.  Living in a democratic society means changing our “selves” and our culture, and in this mess nothing short of total transformation will do the trick.  In short, we have to love and fight and create and work and organize and dance, so that life won’t seem worth living unless one’s on the transforming energy’s side, on our side.  Our very lives depend on it.    
Again, according to Professor Giroux:

We live at a time when social bonds are crumbling and institutions that provide collective help are disappearing.  Reclaiming these social bonds and the protections of the social state, in part, means developing a new mode of politics and education in which a critically educated public is as central to this struggle as the future of the democratic society it once symbolized. At the heart of this struggle for both young people and adults is the pressing problem of organizing and energizing a vibrant cultural politics to counter the conditions of political apathy, distrust, and social disengagement so pervasive under the politics of neoliberalism. For this we need a new vocabulary, social movements and modes of collective resistance that are democratic in nature and global in reach.  This is a moment in which education becomes the foundation not simply for collective change but also for a rewriting of the social contract, an expansion of the meaning of social responsibility, and a renewed struggle to take democracy back from the dark times that have inched us so close to an unimaginable authoritarianism. 

Militarism, racism, empire, peak oil, climate catastrophe and authoritarian responses to  the crises of our time will kill us.  Dead.  We can either fight back, following the light from the past, when people fought other destructive forces and injustices for a future worth living in, or we can wish to go back to “normal,” roll over and give it up to corporate rule.  Because we’ve gotten used to not thinking or seeing, and comfortable doing things the same way things have been done to get us into this fix. 

Positive attitude and vision, or passive acceptance of a world gone crazy and terribly wrong.  We have to find other ways to live in this world, for human rights, for balance with nature, for survival.  Learn from both the good and the bad things in our past.  Our choice.  Our future. 

Tom Stephens is a lawyer in Detroit. He can be reached at: jail4banksters@yahoo.com

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