http://www.counterpunch.org/nader05142008.html

I like your lofty ideals, but that is all they are. The time for hopeful wishes and goodwill has passed, they had their chance and failed.

Here is the real deal. YOU may be done fighting, and declaring peace all you want . . . but that doesn’t mean your enemy is going to. So while you are declaring peace, they are running over you with a tank.

We are humans. We kill each other. We kill other things. This is what we do, better to just get used to it. Trying to save the world will slowly destroy you.

In light of the terrible economic situation in the US, and the fact that many employees may be salaried, a labor strike may not go down too well.
Something that worked well, from a social movement study course I took, was peaceful ‘anarchy’. On a given day/date, city, many, many people went to Best Buys (this is one of the examples, Home Depot and other stores could be targeted), dressed in a dark blue T-Shirt and Tan shorts and just hung around for hours. This caused a great deal of confusion as each time a customer wanted help, they would go to one of these ‘protestors’ , and find that they were just another customer. The store was in virtual lockdown, yet they could not ask these people to leave simply for wearing dark blue shirts and shorts!
The same could be done with Home Depot, OSH and other places.
With the help from the internet, this can be done worldwide. Even 3-4 hour window is good, a day that is ripe for shopping.

Please give your suggestions and I am looking forward to see your input as soon as possible.

@Brian Koontz & mike wegrzyn

I’m right there with the both of you.

We ended the War on Terror a few days ago by declaring we are not terrified. Up next is instituting world peace by declaring we are not at war. My allegiance is owed to a moral goodness, not a country built on killing Native Americans, Mexicans, blacks and now Muslims. The jig is up America, stop killing people.

What we need is one global government, a new world order and we need to start and implement one before “they” [the current power-elite] beat us to it.

Next week, we’re declaring world peace. Let it be known, if you’re killing human beings, it’s not for us.

US foreign policy is an extension of its sexist/ racist inhumane domestic policies! You need to demand from your government, as a minimum, an immediate and full implementation of the Universal Declarations of the Human Rights in the US! At the same time, you need to campaign for a Mc Kinney/ Nader presidential ticket! ( a Libertarian just entered the race, which means that it is not too late YET! ) The whole planet is suffering!
Justice at home/ Justice abroad NOW!

We’ve all been ‘exposed’ to plenty. We all know what’s going on. Now its time do something. A much better title for the piece would have been. “Why doing the same things we’ve been doing before won’t stop the attack on Iran.”

I started blinking my headlights when overtaking and passing long-haul truckers in the daytime two months ago, because I read somewhere that it was a “Support the Union ” signal. And I tried for several months last year to convince the military obituary department of the Los Angeles Times to include in their obits SOMEthing about whether the deceased had spoken to his/her family about opposition to the Iraq War or had belonged to an organization opposing the war. I approached five of my adjacent neighbors last year with literature about Black Agenda Report, and intended to do a journalistic piece about that experience, but realized journalists have to Know Things in order to get people to be forthcoming. And just last week, I blew a fuse with “my” primary care physician before noticing he’d left the door open, and I passed through a very quiet waiting room of mainly more elderly and ill people than myself on the way out.

Considering the manifest failures of associative endeavors to accomplish anything, I feel almost proud of these totally individualistic efforts and that one loss of temper (among many). And what’s really galling is the realization that — just like there’s a radical story under EVERYthing, which can be discovered, there’s radical potential all around us all the time. MORE radical potential than ever before in many, many years.

All right, folks, I give up. The Israeli tail wags the dog. Or is that not chutzpah in the Nth degree?

All you people calling for “million man marches,” and “massive populist uprisings” – fucking do something, or please just stop talking about it. This idea grows weary, and the empty rhetoric even more so.

Unfortunately, the above contains only a single phrase which indicates that Leupp has given any thought as to what is required to combat, as opposed to merely critique the elite agenda, and it is precisely that which has massively failed: namely the “mobiliz(ation) of mass demonstrations.” As Leupp himself notes, the “millions in the streets, peacefully demonstrating as the system encourages, didn’t prevent the assault on Iraq over five years ago.”

While he bemoans the comatose state of the movement now he seems oblivious to a good part of the explanation for it which is the movement leadership having recommended tactics-street protest and supporting Democratic candidates-which could and should have been predicted in advance to fail. Hence the widespread disillusionment and apathy.

Leupp is surely right that we are not now in a position to do anything about U.S. widening the score of its aggression into Iran. If we don’t begin focussing on the question of what the movement can do to rebuild its effectiveness, it is a sure bet that a Bush, and probably Obama administration will continue on its current catastrophic course.

I would hope that Mr. Leupp turn his formidable powers of analysis to the question of what is to be done to combat and not merely critique the elite agenda.