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BelgianMadCow

(5,379 posts)
Mon Nov 11, 2013, 05:59 PM Nov 2013

A rational response

Last edited Mon Nov 11, 2013, 06:30 PM - Edit history (1)

The state was quite rattled by the Occupy movement and is determined not to allow a movement, a mass movement like that to rise up again. And yet, you know, you read Paul Krugman's columns in The New York Times, where he constantly calls for a rational response to the economic crisis, and a rational response would be a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions, a forgiveness of student debt, a massive jobs program, rebuilding infrastructure, especially targeted people under the age of 25. That would be rational. But the state doesn't respond rationally, because there are no mechanisms, counter-mechanisms now to make piecemeal or incremental reform possible, which was the role of the traditional liberal class. And I spend a long time in The death of the Liberal Class laying this out.

And so they keep pushing and pushing and pushing. You're seeing unemployment benefits being taken away. You're seeing Head Start programs being shut down. You're seeing an assault on public education. The Congress can't even cap the student debt at 3 percent. It's now risen to 6 percent, while at the same time the Fed is lending trillions of dollars to corporations like Goldman Sachs at virtually zero percent interest. And then these financial corporations, especially if you're late on your credit card, are charging us upwards to 30 percent. I don't know what that is. It's not capitalism. It's, you know, extortion. And that's the system that we live under.

So, because there are no self-imposed limits, there will be a response. It may not look like Occupy, it may not call itself Occupy. Indeed, I don't think that it will. But I've covered movements all over the world. I covered the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania. I covered both of the Palestinian uprisings or intifadas. I covered the street demonstrations that brought down Milosevic. And you know as a reporter that the tinder is there. So having spent two years writing Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt out of the very poorest pockets of the country with Joe Sacco and having been, you know, in cities like Camden, which per capita is the poorest city in the United States and not surprisingly the most dangerous, something's coming. What will trigger it, it will be benign. It will be a seemingly innocuous event.


That's from Chris Hedges on the Real News Network, clip below. Full series here.



It's not like you need a PhD to figure out what a rational response (to the crisis) would have been. And yet, in the US, the UK, continental Europe, we see everything BUT that rational response. What to conclude about our governments? That they are not responsive to whom they owe allegiance and from whose consent they derive their power.

Organized, non-violent resistance is the most powerful weapon that oppressed people can use in breaking loose from the bondage of oppression (MLK).

Such resistance doesn't have to take the form of demonstrations and other "against"-activities. All energy you spend (positively!) in promoting, no make that being a part of alternatives, in being a critical consumer (see: Barilla) or a non-consumer is resistance as well. Even smiling at strangers is an act of resistance now. So is community gardening.
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