It is absolutely confounding how liberals have repeatedly fallen for this president. He has thrived off of vague pronouncements and innuendo, only making concrete political promises on issues with overwhelming popular support, at which point he generally manufactures some semblance of fight before rolling over dead in quick order. How many years of this before the Michael Moores of the world get it? The problem is not that the president’s hands are tied by an overzealous Republican establishment; rather, he is confined to a contrived role in a rigged political act designed to mimic representative democracy. The script goes like this: he postures as the people’s president, while the opposition scolds him as being a liberal elitist. Then, they bicker about all things innocuous, while carrying on unabated with the core business of shredding the constitution, stifling dissent, and maintaining the Empire. Obama’s new vaguely populist rhetoric and seemingly forceful tone is all a bad rerun. The Washington Post declared this to be the emergence of “Obama 2.0,” , but they got it wrong. It’s all the same Hope and Change Pony Show.

With each year of Obama’s successful duping of the liberal establishment, the center-point of accepted political opinion gets driven further to the right. In this address, he bills his two greatest accomplishments as getting Bin Laden and saving GM: an extrajudicial murder and a bailout conditioned with wage and benefit reductions for future employees. He blithely touted his circumvention of international law and due process in the bin Laden killing. Meanwhile, he goes on to trumpet his saber rattling vis-à-vis Iran, and his illegal use of drones in Pakistan and Yemen, while speaking of an “ironclad – and I mean Ironclad” relationship to the contemptible regime in Israel. It is quite disconcerting to know that respected “liberal” commentators could characterize a speech as “populist” despite all of this dastardly retrograde rhetoric.

The praise did not stop with Michael Moore. David Corn from the once respectable Mother Jones had this to say: “Obama is pitching a patriotic, quasi-populist progressivism (while conceding the need for deficit reduction and government cost-efficiencies).:  Either he doesn’t quite get the concept of “quasi” or we can count him in the ranks of the duped. In his coverage on Twitter he said: “Progressives can get too bogged down in critique. Obama showed how to criticize while reaching higher.” While it is difficult to discern from a 140-letter tweet, the thrust of this statement seems to be that far-reaching critiques are not acceptable. His reasoning goes that ideologues are archaic and inherently divisive. Anyone who breaks with the theme of unity is a party pooper. In taking this line, the president and his supporters conflate reasoned dissent with the knee-jerk rejectionist posture of the outrageous Republican establishment. Those that demand “too much” of the president are viewed with equal contempt by the increasingly base liberal establishment.

What these candy-ass liberals fail to understand is that we cannot be united with a 1% whose recklessness and avidity knows no bounds. The super-rich have unequivocally demonstrated that their interests lie elsewhere. They have spent decades lobbying for deregulation and trade “liberalization” that has allowed them to displace millions of American jobs while reducing the quality of millions of others. Meanwhile, they preyed on working Americans with their sub-prime and Adjustable Rate Mortgages, and then shook the whole house of cards by repackaging those lousy investments into fancy financial instruments, thus provoking a recession that is ongoing for most of the 99% of us. The Occupy Movement grew out of rage against these monsters, not out of any desire to move in with them. A responsive and thoughtful president would be railing against them, not tidily talking about a “togetherness” that the 1% has incessantly rejected.

Nonetheless, liberals will argue that the president adequately addressed inequality with his token references to economic fairness and his advocacy of a Buffet Tax. The latter proposal is quite clearly a ploy on his part, as he knows the Republican congress would never seriously consider it. He gets to posture as a liberal without ever having to actually enact a progressive measure, per the norm. If he really had any desire to equalize the tax code, he could have done it during his first two years, when he had a strong party majority in both houses of Congress. Meanwhile, if he had the determination, he could ram through such legislation in the current climate of populist upheaval, despite the current Congress of stooges and charlatans. However, it would be extremely naïve to expect the president to suddenly cease being the servile sort that he is.

One could reasonably argue that the proposal to establish a “Financial Crimes Unit” amounts to a progressive initiative that is praiseworthy. Indeed, one cannot imagine a Republican president bothering with such a measure. However, Obama is merely building on what has been a very minimal response to the financial crisis thus far. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill barely began to scratch the surface: its primary purpose so far being that it provides government with alternative avenues to taxpayer bailouts should banks face liquidity issues in the future. The more far-reaching and prescient reforms, such as resurrection of Glass-Steagall and breaking up the monolithic corporate banks, have not been serious policy considerations by this administration.

That makes two progressive-leaning proposals, delivered in the president’s typically vague form, all set for future abandonment. Meanwhile, you can add his support for fracking and “school choice” to the list of regressive positions in this State of the Union. On the former issue, he calls for an ambitious increase in the refinement of natural gas. Despite widespread documentation of the hazards  posed to drinking water and the preponderance of disease in and around gas fields, Obama decided to tell the nation:

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.

On “school choice,” a moniker for school privatization via charters or vouchers, he elicits inspiration from his home-state’s treasured political icon: “I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States.” Here, he is merely repeating talking points directly from corporate lobbyists that have used school choice as cover for their efforts to attack public schools, break up teachers unions, and to maliciously profit from the newly burgeoning education “industry.” Obama does suggest willingness to “stop teaching to the test,” though this is probably more of his vacuous pandering to common progressive causes.  He might make a half-hearted effort at some aesthetic change, but will do nothing to stave off the ongoing looting of the public schools. With Arne Duncan, the old Chicago Charter School champion, still serving as Secretary of Education, it is tough to imagine any diversion from the current privatization thrust.

The only rational conclusion from this year’s speech is that this is, indeed, the same old Obama. This is the same unrepentant militarist that was elected in 2008, the same prosecutor of illegal wars in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen; the same authoritarian that signed the NDAA, thus codifying his immoral and unconstitutional detention powers; the same murderer of American civilians: the president who has dutifully played his role as supervisor of this descendant and morally decaying power. As this has yet to become a full-fledged dictatorship, the president must appeal to his subjects’ finer sensibilities on occasion. In this, he excels. Even after three years of the same old dog and pony show, he is still proving adept at duping the diffident liberal mainstream.

The legal score came just twelve hours after the mayor ordered a pre-dawn raid of the camp, in which thousands of dollars worth of equipment, including tents, cookware, and personal effects, were destroyed. In a statement after the proceeding, Occupy NOLA attorney Davida Finger said the legal team witnessed this happening: “We watched all the belongings being thrown into trash trucks and (getting) ground up.” The timing of the raid on the morning of the court case was an act of executive trespass that Quigley said he has never seen in his long career: “This has never happened in my thirty years of practice that one side argues we don’t need a TRO today because we are not going to move and then they move anyways.”

Fortunately, the outrage at this singularly disgraceful act was not limited to protesters. The federal judge assigned to the case, Jay Zainey, was also not pleased about the mayor disrespecting the pending federal procedure. He responded to Quigley’s statement by saying: “I am not particularly happy that the mayor did this either.” In a visit to the encampment afterwards, Quigley told protesters that he believed the mayor’s overstep is what won Occupy NOLA the case: “If the mayor hadn’t acted, they probably would have given us 48 hours to vacate.” Mayor Landrieu, known as “Mini Moon” by critics (in reference to father Moon, former mayor himself), shot himself in the foot with his wanton act of aggression.

He did not use rubber bullets, instead opting to conceal his offensive in a cloud of connivance. Like other mayors throughout the country, he played the role of sympathetic “liberal” early on, as he visited the camp and pronounced his support for their first amendment rights. However, suspicions were raised when dozens of new faces joined Occupy in late October, after being displaced from a “homeless encampment” beneath the Pontchartrain Expressway at Calliope Street. While the movement has steadily been open to those with nowhere else to go, a large inundation of society’s most vulnerable has proven to be an overwhelming burden for an encampment that lacks the necessary resources, including medical and psychiatric care.

Whether or not the city intentionally diverted the Calliope “refugees” to Occupy NOLA or not, their presence at the camp has served to refocus local attention on the continued crisis in housing. New Orleans, continues to suffer from an acute homeless epidemic, six years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city’s housing stock. There are currently 10,000 people lacking permanent shelter, according to data provided by UNITY, a local homeless non-profit. Much of this stems from city officials using the storm’s devastation as cover to engage in a historic privatization bonanza, which saw four reparable public housing facilities razed. Meanwhile, 40,000 houses remain battered and vacant, and the current administration has elucidated no plan to rehabilitate them. Instead, the mayor has just issued a “10 year plan to end homelessness,” which leans heavily on an already-tapped non-profit community, and is short on any concrete explanation of how the current bed shortage is going to be addressed.

While the city denies malicious intent in its closing of the Calliope camp, there is no denying their recent machinations. Just two days before his Friday closure announcement, mayoral spokesman Ryan Berni claimed that there were still no plans to shut down Occupy NOLA. In an email to me, he said: “We are closely monitoring the issue in Duncan Plaza and have been working with the group to keep the area safe while they exercise their first amendment rights. Public safety and public health are our priorities. There is no deadline at this time.” Less than 48 hours later, Landrieu pulls an about-face and invokes an immediate deadline. In so doing, he said: “It is a violation of the law to be in Duncan Plaza from 10:30pm to 6:00am. It is unlawful for people to be in Duncan Plaza while they are storing equipment that includes tents, palettes, kitchen supplies or other items.”

This press conference was replete with lies and deception. Firstly, he said that protesters “are aware they are in violation of the law.” This is despite the fact that he had yet to communicate such to the encampment. Meanwhile, the movement naturally questions the legitimacy of any law restricting their right to remain on site. Secondly, he claims that the encampment has encroached on the rights of others to peaceably assemble in the plaza: “There were a couple of other groups that had permits that had to be pulled because Occupy NOLA was using the space.” This statement is ludicrous, as permits for use of Duncan Plaza are generally not granted. Furthermore, the city has not responded to requests to provide proof of this claim. Thirdly, he says that giving protesters notice prior to closing camp is not required: that he is being especially conciliatory in so doing. This further demonstrates the mayor’s narrow grasp of the law, and his duty to make public space regulations clear prior to enforcement. Fourthly, he tells the public that the park’s homeless population will all be provided some form of shelter. In reality, the administration shipped a few dozen homeless individuals off to Exodus House, a local shelter, where director Donald Wilkerson describes available services as such: “It’s probably not going to be a lot of housing. It’s going to be a lot of services. Housing might be available for some people. That’s the end goal. But we’ve got to get that other stuff out of the way.” Many of these individuals will wind up back at Occupy NOLA, which slowly reassembled late Tuesday after word spread of Judge Zainey’s decision.

The camp is now required to play by new rules, including a ban on “open flames,” “animals” and “weapons.” Meanwhile, the gazebo that often housed GA’s is now fenced off. The protesters will also be required to provide their own port-a-lets, which Mr. Quigley arranged for them. As part of his heroics, he also arranged for donors to put up the necessary $5,000 bond.

Through the day Wednesday, the park will begin to resemble the full-fledged Occupy encampment, if only for another six days. Next week, the lawyers will attempt to extend the restraining order indefinitely, as the case gets passed over to Judge Lance Afrik. Attorney Davida Finger warns that Occupy NOLA still faces an “uphill battle.” However, the contest already won is quite significant. Few other Occupy camps have victored in court, with only Occupy Nashville also securing a TRO. The movement needed a little help from a mayor that was ready to encroach on the hallowed domain of a federal judge. With that and a dynamic legal team at their disposal, Occupy NOLA schooled Mini Moon in court on Tuesday.

Given its pre-American history, New Orleans has always been more culturally complex than the country that came to contain it. This city knew Creoles, free people of color (“gens de couleur libre”), quadroons and octoroons, while Americans saw things in terms of white and black. The latter’s dichotomous worldview was ultimately thrust upon the pre-existing system of Creole social gradation, thus threatening social instability. Meanwhile, a linguistic element of cultural cleavage was added, as the new occupiers spoke English. They would ultimately move into “uptown” New Orleans, across Canal from the French Quarter.

The Civil War brought yet another occupation: this time the “Yankee.” Historian Christopher Benfey describes the situation as such: “The precarious status of the Creoles – beaten up by the uptown “Americans” before the Civil War, and by the Northern Yankees during and after it – had another, more troubling result, in their increasingly desperate attempts to restore their lost prestige.”¹ This troubling result was the 1874 “Battle of Liberty Place,” in which the Crescent City White League fought the Metropolitan police, resulting in 30 deaths, over frustration regarding the perceived opportunism of northern politicians and their implementation of the corrupt elections of 1872 (which briefly resulted in an African-American governor.)

In sum, northern efforts at reconstruction exacerbated racial tensions rather than tempering them. The Yankee, like the American occupier before, introduced a more restrictive system of race relations than had previously existed. Historian John Blassingame explains: “Because of their historical intimacy with Negroes, most Louisiana whites manifested far less abhorrence for blacks than did their brothers in the North and far less than their rhetoric often implied.”² This rhetoric, as represented by the White League and other racist organs, was the result of Creole frustration and desperation. The violence of Liberty Place, meanwhile, was born of resentment over another wave of occupation.

The Creoles and their language gradually lost their footing in New Orleans, though the era of northern occupation did not cease with the end of the Civil War. As Josh and Rebecca Tickell elegantly demonstrate in their recently released documentary The Big Fix, the state of Louisiana thereafter became a colony of northern oligarchs, eager to cash in on the state’s natural resources, particularly the oil. While last year’s Deepwater Horizon accident brought global attention to the immediate ecological risks associated with the plunder of this resource in an increasingly unregulated environment, Louisianans have long felt the social and economic consequences thereof (not to mention the long-term ecological consequences wrought via the depletion of the wetlands). The two principal oil companies present in the first decades of the last century were Standard Oil and Texaco: the latter almost as northern as the former, insofar as most of its financial backing came from investors up north. Nonetheless, it was Standard Oil that would come to wield mammoth control over the industry, even after its breakup in 1911 under the Sherman anti-trust law. One result of their unparalleled economic influence and power was, naturally, near monopolistic control of political power in Louisiana.

This was until the political consciousness of Louisiana discovered a means of counter-occupation, in the form of the redoubtable Huey Long. As the social implications of the preceding era of monopoly capitalism began to take hold in the form of economic malaise, Long was swept into the governor’s mansion in 1928 on a populist platform that included loosening the stranglehold of Standard Oil on Louisiana’s political system. Other elements to his populist agenda included vast expenditures on public works projects such as roads, bridges and schools, and, famously, the provision of free textbooks for schoolchildren. In order to help pay for these programs, he introduced a tax on the oil refineries. For his efforts, he was rewarded with an impeachment attempt in 1929, which ultimately failed. Meanwhile, Standard Oil attempted to withhold payment of their obligations under the new tax, thus provoking Long to send in the National Guard to seize their oil fields until payment was made.

In speech, the “King Fish” echoed the sentiments of today’s populist movement. On the two political parties of his day: “They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen.” At the time, northern progressives treated him disparagingly, as his plain-talking southern demeanor repelled their bourgeois sensibilities. This runs parallel to the similar treatment now given by “liberal” commentators to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Nonetheless, he was the first to admit to not being an intellectual, and his rhetoric is just as relevant today. On the imbalance of wealth:

According to the tables which we have assembled, it is our estimate that 4 percent of the American people own 85 percent of the wealth of America, and that over 70 percent of the people of America don’t own enough to pay for the debts that they owe.

Any man with a thimble-full of sense ought to know that if you take 85 percent off of that table and give it to one man that you are bound to have 2/3 the people starving because they haven’t got enough to eat.

How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what’s intended for 9/10th of the people to eat? The only way to be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub that he ain’t got no business with!

Long was assassinated on September 8th, 1935, and politics in Louisiana quickly reverted to the usual Wall Street fare. This was probably most notable in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the natural disaster was used as cover for the implementation of a radical neo-liberal agenda in devastated New Orleans. As in other major cities driven by a reactionary austerity agenda, this commenced with deconstruction of a majority of the city’s public housing units, including St. Bernard, C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper, and Lafitte. One couldn’t imagine a more opportune time to close down housing units than when they are vacant. With public housing went the historic Charity hospital, a public hospital and historic New Orleans fixture. The disrepair of these facilities after the storm provided a convenient pretense for the political class of the state and city to enact a private take-over that their major funders had always dreamt of.

The most striking privatization, meanwhile, has come in the realm of education. While the entirety of the system was vacated in the weeks following the storm, the Emergency Session of the Louisiana legislature used the occasion to pass Act 35, which put the vast majority of the city’s public schools in state hands, under the auspices of the “Recovery School District” (RSD). The RSD existed prior to the hurricane as a mechanism to bring schools deemed as “failing” under state supervision. However, Act 35 changed the guidelines by which a school was deemed “failing,” so that any school below the state average was grabbed. In all, 102 of the city’s schools were transferred to the RSD (bringing the total to 107). Once in the hands of state bureaucracy, the process of transferring the schools to charters was made easier, as the Republican-led state government had long since begun the school charterization/privatization process across the state.

The city is now the nation’s only charter-majority system, with 61 of the 88 open schools being run by state or parish sanctioned charters. The Orleans Parish School Board only directly operates six schools, while the RSD operates 33. To help administer this transformation, the RSD hired Paul Vallas as superintendant in 2007. He had previously proved his worth by commencing the charterization process in Chicago while this author attended school there. At the end of his tenure in 2010, he candidly discussed the impact that charters have had on the composition of the workforce at the city’s schools: “I submit to you that part of the problem in education is, there is not enough turnover. I’m very comfortable. I’m running a district where half of my teachers are the university elites and the college elites from programs like Teach For America, and the other half of my teachers veteran teachers. I think there’s a very healthy balance.”

Indeed, one of the principle objectives of charter school proponents is weakening teachers’ unions. Nowhere is this more vivid than New Orleans, where the United Teachers of New Orleans was essentially busted by this regressive state school grab. Membership in the union prior to the storm stood at about 7,500, and has only recently re-grown to 1,000. As Vallas alludes to in the quote above, the charters have lent more heavily on Teach for America and similar programs designed to bring in recent graduates with no teaching experience. While most of these young people are well-intentioned, their role is effectively that of a scab. Furthermore, there are racial undertones to this union busting, as the UNTO has always been predominantly African-American. Inner-city teachers have long composed an intrinsic part of the black middle class in this country. One source of the recent implosion of that demographic has been the attack on urban teachers’ unions with this widespread politics of “austerity” and privatization. In short, school privatization is one of the principal routes to gentrification, insofar as it functionally replaces large swathes of middle-class black workers with young, predominantly white workers.

From the French imperialists to the neo-liberal capitalists, New Orleans history has been replete with top-down occupations. Meanwhile, its unique cultural dynamism has produced significant counter-occupiers: those that have reclaimed the humanity of the city by producing an unparalleled music tradition. The African-American population that has endured slavery, servitude, political repression and socio-economic persecution has given this country its popular music. By maintaining occupation of the human spirit in spite of the nation-wide encroachment by unfettered capitalism, New Orleans has maintained its status as a rare refuge of creative ingenuity in the Empire.

As part of the vibrant social movement that has sprung up in cities across the country, Occupy NOLA has set up camp in Duncan Plaza. One of the first significant decisions of their General Assembly was to rename said plaza after Avery Alexander, a local civil rights activist who was integral in efforts to resist segregation in the 1960’s by organizing boycotts, sit-ins and marches. They have taken public space bearing the title of a politician from a locally influential family and reclaimed it for the counter-occupiers, the activists, those who recognize the human propensity to enact meaningful social and political change, and those unwilling to accept the narrative of the exploiters in our midst.

Meanwhile, they have eschewed adopting leaders and introducing hierarchy. The movement of the 99% is meant to surpass human limitations. Huey Long was killed and his counter-occupation dissipated immediately thereafter. A superior model of counter-occupation is offered in the city’s music, which endures beyond the death of any single artist. The jazz funeral provides the opportunity to celebrate life while mourning, by appropriately marching from the burial site in a festive and musically-driven march. It recognizes the cultural contribution of the fallen and immediately demonstrates the spirit that carries on.

This movement has already endured over a month: monumental for an encampment in 21st century America. It has also made its mark by addressing political issues marked as taboo by the two corporatist political parties. It has re-occupied a realm of restricted discourse, and promises that “it is not leaving.” As such, it should only be a matter of time before it re-occupies our schools, hospitals, public housing, natural resources, banks and financial institutions. We are finally making the 1% come back with “some of that grub that (it) ain’t got no business with.”

1. Benfey, Christopher. Degas in New Orleans (University of California Press, 1997) pp. 14-15.
2. Blassingame, John. Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), xvi.

This is particularly bothersome because one of the primary grievances of the protestors is the cost of higher education, and the larger role of indebtedness in informing the present precariousness of young people. Education debt, even more than housing debt, plays a repugnant role in this society, insofar as it preys on the young and ambitious, ultimately leaving citizens shackled to the financial industry for the bulk of their adult lives. Before anyone is capable of making sound fiscal decisions in life, they find themselves five-figures in the red, just for doing what they grew up believing to be the “right thing.”

When British students rallied against fee increases last year, professors were present alongside. The same goes for several waves of protests dealing with fees and the precariousness of youth in France, dating back to the CPE protests of 2006. These alliances between students and faculty were integral to the growth and widespread popularity of these movements. Meanwhile, the student-professor alliance has historically explained the affordability of higher education throughout Western Europe.

In the United States, we see no such alliance. Professors will offer themselves as speakers at rallies or teach-ins, maintaining a top-down relationship with students, but will rarely support as brothers-in-arms. This stems from a social authoritarianism in this culture, where the opinions of the credentialed are taken more seriously than the “commoner.” As someone who has experienced living on both sides of the Atlantic, I can say that Americans have a problem trusting your average person. Rather than judging someone based on the merit of their argument, the American tends to ignore the argument and judge based on ceremonial merit (such as whether the person has a PhD or not.) As such, professors have generally only been involved as credibility lending figureheads in American social movements.

I am happy that Dr. West has participated in this protest, but wish that it wasn’t such a breaking story. He possesses no more intrinsic value than the other 99%, and should be busily organizing his colleagues at Princeton to join along on next visit. The same goes for Chomsky and his colleagues at MIT. If this vigorously anti-totalitarian movement is to thrive, we need the academic egos to dissipate and the academic masses to bring numbers to the protests.

For this to occur, they will have to identify their support as a moral imperative rather than mere intellectual exercise. By allowing the present system of higher education to continue without their condemnation, professors become complicit in the overarching moral crisis this country is facing. Since the beginning of the 80s, American wages have been stagnant, while the average cost of a college education has risen over 4-fold (adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile, we have seen nary a peep of moral outrage from faculty.  By excluding Americans of modest means from the enrichment of the university experience, this country is hampering the human potential of millions of young people. By not providing quality higher education to all Americans for free (or a nominal fee), we remain a second-rate society.

Academics are ostensibly progressive in nature: you would expect such of open, intelligent minds. However, they have proven particularly meek in the United States. There are several reasonable explanations for this. For one, we have a climate of repression and anti-intellectualism that is simply not known throughout Western Europe. The recent experiences of Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein are evidence enough of this. Furthermore, large American research institutions tend to be located in small “campus towns” rather than inside major urban hubs, thus dislocating professors from the bulk of the industrial workforce. This design has served to de-radicalize labor through the last century, and also explains the lack of involvement of professors in the ongoing protests (though there are a few notable universities on Manhattan).  Moreover, many professors enjoy tenure and six-figure salaries, thus outpacing their Western European counterparts. This serves to supplement their geographic isolation from labor with added socioeconomic distance.

Nonetheless, this professorial passivity must end: not solely for the aforementioned moral reasons, but also because professors have an important stake in this political moment. As austerity measures have placed an increasing pinch on the higher education system, knowledge is treated as more of a commodity than a social good. Universities are forced to run more like businesses than loci of the grands discours. This commodification of knowledge has resulted in the increasing social alienation of professors. Tight university systems, intent on cutting costs and increasing class sizes, will increasingly see professors as expendable. You compound this with the growing authoritarianism in post 9-11 America and professors will increasingly feel pressured to conform or produce favorable results (a la the University of Chicago Economics Department).

Lastly, professors possess great power to change the financial racket that poses as higher education in this country. They are the mode of production for that industry.  A national professor’s strike committed to the long-haul will force states to close their budget shortfalls through progressive tax measures or sane monetary policy. The latter is just one way to address systemic pre-tax injustices in our economic system: spend money into existence rather than charging the people interest by lending into existence. Either way, forced with a non-compliant faculty at their flagships school, states will have to learn to get innovative, if that is possible with the class of charlatans that governs from both political parties.

Professors largely supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election.  As with most other progressives in this country, they fell into the passivity of hope. At this juncture, we need them to muster the courage for action. It is their moral imperative, and also in their own interest. In order to defend the integrity of the academic profession, the vision of education as a social good and a right to all regardless of class, professors need to join the 99%. When is it going to happen?

They want something concrete. However, this movement will not embrace the “concrete,” for beneath the cement lies the beach, to paraphrase a famous Situationist saying: sous les pavés, la plage.

The “demand” baloney is primarily cover for the union and non-profit leadership, as they attempt to lurch forward and co-opt the movement, throwing it to the hounds of the Democratic Party. Already I have witnessed this effort firsthand, in the New Orleans Occupy movement. In last week’s solidarity march (October 6th) from the Orleans Parish Prison to Lafayette Square, there were several representatives of local unions, most notably SEIU, some of which encouraged a chant of “Vote!” during the post-march rally. There were plenty of people of principle in their midst to drown out such “conventional wisdom” with the obvious retort: “Yeah, that didn’t work out so well for us last time.”

Fortunately the bureaucrats were in a minority in this demonstration, as seems to be the case elsewhere. Instead, we see an encouraging maturity on the part of the protesters, who recognize that our political system is merely an extension of the financial industry: generally useless for addressing the ongoing economic malaise of the many.

Fitting that young people are the forerunners of this prescient social movement. They are the ones that never enjoyed the fruits of the real estate boom or the tech boom before, and instead are ruined by a lifetime of student debt and poor employment prospects. Many were raised in the cozy confines of the suburbs, rooted in a positivist world-view where the sky was the limit, so long as they applied themselves and excelled in school. They were sure that after procuring a degree or three, they would be on their way to six-figure salaries and the same comfortable existence their parents had. While they may have faced mid-life crises, or simply resigned themselves to passing critiques of their staid suburban lives over cocktails with friends (a la Richard Yates’s Frank Wheeler), they surely wouldn’t know economic turmoil.

And yet, that is precisely the condition of significant portions of Generation Y. Real unemployment (U-6) for 18-29 year olds remains above 20%, while the student loan default rate has neared 10% in recent years. However, the statistics risk trivializing the frustration behind the birth of this movement. This simply isn’t about too few jobs with too few benefits and education that is too expensive and bankers that are too greedy. While all of these are component parts to their collective frustration, the overarching theme is “precariousness.” There is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the protestors: a feeling of being stuck. In a nation where most everything has been bureaucratized, and reduced to trivial component parts, these protestors seek space for imagination: an “American Dream” broader than the cliché consumerist suburban life.

As such, this movement has more in line with the French protests against the CPE (cContrat Première Embauche) of 2006 than the Arab Spring earlier this year. While the former dealt with a specific “demand”; i.e., repeal of the new labor law, the movement was spurred on by a much larger redress: the increasing precarité of life in the neo-liberal world. The slogans of the day dealt much more with frustration of the increasing isolation of the citizen from the decision-making process, specifically with regards to economic policy, which is heavily insulated from public opinion by European Union bureaucracy.

I was on the streets of Paris then, and have participated in the New Orleans branch of the Occupy movement today. The similarities are striking, though the latter has a ways to go before it shakes the foundations of power in quite the same way.

Nonetheless, there is potential as long as concrete isn’t poured all over the movement. The Democrats, and their enablers in the union and liberal non-profit world, would love to deflate the movement by converting it into a legislative “demand.” However, American precariousness is too vast and far-reaching to be addressed in one, neat congressional bill. Furthermore, it is futile to ask anything of Congress, as they have almost entirely been elected on the heels of support from the same malicious forces the protests oppose: corporations, hedge-fund managers, and bankers. If we make demands of Congress, the best we will get are vacuous gestures or half-measures. If we ask that they “tax the rich,” we get the Buffet tax, which has multi-billionaires paying only what their secretaries do. If we ask for employment stimulus, we get corporate handouts supposedly designed to encourage hiring, much of which gets spent on CEO bonuses. If we ask for student debt relief, we get a myriad of relief options that all fall far short of what most “first world democracies” offer: higher education that is practically free. Meanwhile, this movement exists as a point of frustration with business-as-usual: an effort to offer an alternative to a political system that is essentially a revolving door between oligarchs, political bureaucrats and the puppets in power.

In resisting the temptation to go the easy route of making specific legislative demands, the Occupy movement is demonstrating a political sophistication not seen in this country in decades. It is more of a throw-back to ’68-‘69 than the anti-war protests of 2002-2004, insofar as there is an embedded critique of the overarching structure of this society. As such, there is greater potential for success. The chance of actually shifting the locus of power from the 1% to the rest is much greater in a spirited, innovative protest of this nature. As long as it remains as imaginative as it is today, the movement will endure. Just don’t pour concrete on it!

They are waiting for a sign of character and charisma out of a man who knows only vacuous platitudes. They want substance, but fail to understand that substance is not a requirement for his current job. His focus, like most others in his profession, is primarily on personal advance. Furthermore, he is a manifestation of a country that begs a careerist demeanor out of its inhabitants. In particular, the American political system is dominated by careerist pushovers, souls consumed from first internship, taught to temper emotion and all notions of sincerity in order to successfully climb the ladder.

For fear of straying into a banal critique of the old “Puritan Work Ethic,” which is undoubtedly behind the careerist posture of the American, I will identify the problem as more broadly rooted in a rampant American psychopathy. That seems like a more sure-fire way to keep people attuned to this article.

Actually, careerism is definitively psychopathic. Depending on the dictionary one uses, it is defined as the practice of advancing one’s career at the expense of integrity and ethics. If we take one’s work to be akin to one’s self in this Puritan culture, then it is safe to conclude that the careerist falls sufficiently under the scope of psychopathy: a range of mental disorders marked by egocentric and anti-social behavior. People tend to picture Dahmer and Gacy upon hearing the word, but psychopaths needn’t be violent. Plenty are “upstanding citizens.” Picture your friendly neighbor, who might be among the 65% of this country that still supports the death penalty. Said neighbor might also support the imperialist bloodbath of the moment, or have cheered the massacre of an aged and frazzled Osama Bin-Laden. Said neighbor may have also “taken comfort” when images of the mutilated remains of Qusay and Uday Hussein were splattered over the news.

Obama, as the anointed leader of this innately imperialist nation, is a psychopath, like Bush and Clinton and Bush and Reagan before. He is waging no less than six wars concurrently, and droning or overseeing special ops engagements in dozens of others. Moreover, he failed to intervene on behalf of Troy Davis, and has demonstrated no willingness to relieve a country steeped in student and housing debt. We are talking about a new lost generation, wherein millions of Americans will never be solvent, as student debt cannot be vacated through bankruptcy. Instead, the afflicted 20 and 30-somethings sit around like stooges collecting their unemployment extensions, wishing they could have a career like their parents did, telling various collection agencies that they don’t have an expendable dime for their racket. Many of these disillusioned Gen. Y’ers (I am one) enthusiastically supported the prez (I wasn’t one), stumped for him, and have since come around to realizing that Obama does not have their back.

To be focused on austerity rather than the frailty in the employment market is inherently psychopathic. Others have described it as a reflection of the entrenched neo-liberal ideology. I agree that neo-liberalism is so deeply embedded that policy wonks have a hard time thinking in any other framework. This doesn’t change the fact that the intention of neo-liberal ideology is inherently psychopathic. To focus on profit and “growth,” regardless of the human expense, renders one insignificantly different from someone with a freezer full of human skulls.

For whatever reason, leftist commentators in the states seem unwilling to broaden their political commentaries to the cultural realm. Part of this is probably rooted in an editorial tendency to spurn hard-hitting cultural critique so as not to promulgate the right’s perception that all leftists hate this country. Furthermore, a number of the big “progressive” periodicals tend toward a bourgeois research methodology that precludes socio-cultural analysis, as every assertion the author makes must be backed by “source material.” You are not going to FOIA your way to a government document explicitly stating that American culture is dysfunctional. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true!

There are many examples of missed opportunities to extend political commentary to denunciations of American culture. When the Abu Ghraib crimes were unveiled, the blame from the left was focused on Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. I am not suggesting that they didn’t deserve it for presiding over a regime of torture. However, much of the evidence suggests that these troops were acting of their own volition. Furthermore, more recent reports have demonstrated that the abuse was more widespread than ever previously imagined. The obvious conclusion, in my view, is that the armed forces are riveted with massive cultural dysfunction. In other words, a large number of our troops are psychopaths. In an all-volunteer army, this should be no surprise.

We saw the same response to the Wikileaked video of an Apache chopper gunning down 19 innocent civilians, including two Reuters reporters, whilst two American soldiers mocked the victims over audio. The reaction across the liberal left was astonishment that the imperial regime would allow our young men to behave so outrageously and with such impunity. There was very little meaningful criticism of those who had their fingers on the trigger, probably owing to a timid liberal elite that is unwilling to make the overwhelmingly obvious assertion that these kids are sadistic little punks. How are their actions significantly different from Ted Bundy breaking into a sorority house in Florida, killing three women, and then violating the corpses with an air mist bottle?

The cultural dysfunction extends far beyond the military. Psychopaths fall under the category of “Antisocial personality disorder,” characterized by “a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others.” Clearly the military perpetrators of torture fit the bill. So too do the knuckleheads that have been populating the viewing audiences at recent Republican debates, cryptically cheering on the thought of someone dying due to lack of health insurance, and demonstrating an avid proclivity for the Texas criminal death machine that Gov. Perry has administered.

To better understand the widespread American psychopathy, one should spend time rummaging through the Internet, a useful tool insofar as it removes the veneer from our culture. Look through comments on Youtube or on newspaper articles dealing with Troy Davis, and witness the wealth of alarming posts of those applauding the death of a fellow human being. The moral compass is lost in America.

Meanwhile, this country now has a youth culture that is excessively self-centered and superficial. Pop culture has overshadowed genuine cultural expression in a way that deteriorates the vibrancy of youth. One is hard-pressed to find a singer-songwriter or rapper that uses their art as a means of engaging in genuine discourse. Instead, there is abundant talk of “bitches” and “hoes,” and the depraved commemoration of inane commodity fetish through an ideology of “pimp-worship.” At an age where one should be capable of condemning the artifice of pop-culture, our youth has proven particularly subservient in the face of it.

As they age, they ultimately morph into “bro-dudes” or “bro-hoes.” Both entirely void of higher mental faculties and incapable of understanding that the world does not revolve around bourgie America, they are as anti-social as one can get. They see thoughtful and elegant people in any of a variety of condescending lights: “nerds, pinheads, fags, idiots,” and so forth. Yes, because I believe in presenting myself elegantly, both in words and attire, I have often been “accused” of being “gay as day,” whatever that means. In America, if you are a heterosexual that wants to be accepted, remember to dress like a slob and keep your vocabulary at 6th grade level.

This race to the bottom has caused such widespread resentment of Americans by other people that often one must go the extra distance to demonstrate that you are a “good American.” A classic example of this comes from within our own shores, Los Angeles, where you are categorically excluded from checking into most of the area’s hostels if you are American (unless you happen to have a foreign passport). I managed to wiggle me way into one and stayed for several weeks, and ultimately asked the management about the rule. The simple response was: “Yeah, Americans generally don’t play nice with others.” She then explained that they check in only Americans they judge have some international travel experience and broadened perspective. Again, this wasn’t just one hostel, but almost all of the area’s hostels. They are nearly unanimous in their belief that Americans are so shallow, self-centered that they are incapable of sharing living quarters for even a weekend.

The common running element among bro-dudes, mainstream “youth culture,” petty careerists, and psycho killers is this: lack of empathy. While not all in this country are afflicted with this ailment, it is sadly widespread. The mainstream American is simply too caught up in their personal pursuits to care about the moral implications of their actions.

Obama rose out of a self-absorbed society in a profession almost entirely composed of the most reprehensible form of careerist. It extends beyond the realm of politicians into the non-profit industrial complex, even in ostensibly “liberal” organizations. I know from my experiences as a “political organizer” that rocking the boat in even the minutest sense will ruin your “career.” Those that make critiques of organizational power structure are deemed “problems,” or accused of not being “team players.” The corporate model of groupthink has been borrowed by the liberal non-profit world.

This has rendered it impossible to have an empathetic president, or principled movement leader. In a heavily bureaucratized country, replete with a psychopathic tendency to focus on oneself, and a discouraging posture toward independent thought and reflection, Obama’s attraction, largely to a white-collar suburban crowd, is of no surprise. He is the very natural manifestation of a petty, careerist nation.

Since then, the enthusiasm has waned, to say the least. While one hears murmurs, some exaggerated, about the use of Twitter in Egypt and Tunisia, Americans have done very little over the last fifteen years. For the most part, the Internet has descended into an incoherent cloud of Facebook posts, tweets, blogs and Youtube clips. The ADHD generation, which grew up on a steady diet of 30-second commercials, now expresses itself in similarly crude and disjoint snippets. Isolationism has reached an apex, as interaction occurs not in a social context, but in a contrived digital universe, wherein genuine human interaction is minimal.

It would be nice to see more of this information synthesized and given some coherency. The question is why the left is not providing the synthesis. Why are we not morphing existing social philosophies into a format that is digestible by the aforementioned ADHD generation? I specifically mean to suggest that we should recognize the Internet’s inherently “rhizomatic” structure, and embrace the democratic potential of this model.

The Rhizome Model

“Rhizome” as a philosophical concept has its roots in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s  Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. A rhizome “has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”  The rhizome model rejects the inherently linear nature of traditional philosophy and history, and insists that culture morphs into available space, with no marked beginning or end.

This model of information flow suits the inherently non-heirarchical and non-linear nature of the Internet.  Oliver Froehling describes this model as such: “No central facility organizes communication; rather, each server is connected to a number of other servers, so connections between two servers are often routed through a number of intermediate computers.” ¹ As there is no general arbiter of information, particularly in the preponderant social networking sites, information flows from a nearly infinite number of sources, and is not dictated by a few perspectives. Linda Carroli describes:

The Internet acts as a terrain in which the public/private distinction is deconstructed and in which those who engage in online social   interactions are not necessarily inscribed according to this set of   oppositions. In questioning the legitimacy of the public/private distinction in Internet-based social groups, the use-value of other relational sets of oppositions is also opened for interrogation: individual/community, subject/object, self/other. ²

The “rhizomatic” structure is inherently at odds with the idea of a global community, because “community” is understood as too fixed an idea for the chaotic flow of information inherent to Internet use. That is unless it is a “community of strangers,” according to Carroli. Because the rhizome is constantly changing direction and conforming to sophisticated situations, it has the propensity to create temporary contacts between strategic acquaintances. She quotes Noelle McAfee:

The foreigner presents an opportunity and not an abyss. By being shaken loose from the “they,” this self sees the radical strangeness of others as the continual possibility for being a subject, a split subject whose mirror is always partial. ³

Within the impersonal context of the Internet, subjects can use each other without the social awkwardness of being strangers. They can overcome the need to assimilate to an overarching cultural norm and combat generic molar qualities as a partially united unit.

In practice, the “community of strangers” amounts to having Facebook “friends” that aren’t truly your friends in the traditional sense; i.e., you have not physically met them before. You might come together with others through a common Facebook “group,” “cause” or “event,” but have not had to navigate the process of actually becoming acquainted with the individual. While seemingly convenient, I would argue that this process negates the important social element to progressive organizing, whilst promulgating the inherently destructive element of social isolation. Meanwhile, this model of social organization also furthers the “identify politics” dilemma, wherein people relate to politics based on concepts of self, rather than rigorously developed sociopolitical constructs.

Some would argue that we have entered an era where the traditional sociological cleavages of class and religion are less significant than identity politics of race, gender, sexual orientation and so forth. The class-orientated left is often viewed to be anachronistic and simplistic in their analysis. The argument goes that we should embrace the Internet’s rhizomatic model because it best reflects the inherently fractured and complex nature of modern society.

This analysis misses the point. As liberal society has opened its doors to an increasing array of identities and permitted the expression of a greater set of minority rights, class has not passed into irrelevance. In fact, class is as significant a determinant of one’s social and cultural status as ever. In a country where the top 1% possesses greater than 95% of the wealth, I do not see how one can reasonably argue otherwise.

The problem is that the left is shying away from any mention of class. We shouldn’t pit a class-based analysis of society against a more holistic approach. Instead, we should embrace the “rhizomatic:” nature of the Internet for its inherently democratic potential, whilst injecting a class-based analysis into the discussion.

Talk About Class

For one, I believe that this requires moving away from a dialectical, deterministic analysis of class in favor of one that suits the free-flowing model of modern communications’ technology. Let us admit that we do not know exactly where we are going, or what the ideal political model might look like, but not let this uncertainty cause us to shy away from addressing the grave injustices of modern society.

I also believe that it is pertinent to personalize these matters a bit. I come from a generation, the babies of the baby boomers, which will never be solvent. We average greater than $30,000 in student debt before entering the work force, if we are ever able to do that. Real unemployment for my age range is still upwards of 20%, though this number rises dramatically if you count people in short term contracts, or those who can be terminated at will. Throw in those that lack any form of health insurance and I suspect that we are nearing half of all workers in the 18-35 year old range. I am suggesting that we should see more Facebook posts along the lines of “I am royally screwed. I am currently on unemployment, which ends in two months, have defaulted on my student loans, have no health insurance, and have had a nagging cough for the last three months.”

Instead, Americans are stricken with an unwillingness to admit to the decrepit nature of their existence. Admitting defeat is the last thing Americans are apt to do: this is akin to announcing to the world that you are a wimp or a pushover. The reality is that by not addressing our harsh and unfortunate realities, we are becoming a nation of subservient wimps.

I lived in France during their historic and successful fight against the Contrat Première Embauche (“First Employment Contract”), and witnessed street action that far exceeded anything I can imagine ever occurring in the United States. While your typically smug and macho American might disparage the French as sissies or wimps, this is clearly not the case. It is the American, enslaved to a lifetime of debt by the banksters, lacking anything more than two measly weeks of vacation a year, living in the western world’s most unequal society, that are the wimps.

If we can man up and talk about class, maybe this will change. If we can recognize the potential for the Internet to expedite this change, maybe we will see our actions in Madison spread throughout this country. If we are frustrated by being bombarded with inane and disjoint information flows, let us produce flows that spell out the class elements to our malaise. Let us encourage our friends, be they genuine or digital, to discuss their economic conditions. Let us build a broader understanding of the class dynamics to the great banking and real estate racket that led to the current stage of Capitalism: the Era of Bastardized Finance Capital.

Class never stopped being relevant, so whatever you do: don’t stop talking about class.

1. Froehling, Oliver. “War of Ink and Internet in Chiapas.” Geographical Review. Vol. 87, no.2.
2. Carroli. Linda. Virtual Encounters: Community or Collaboration on the Internet? Leonardo ; vol.30 ; no.5, 1997, pp.359-363.. »
3. Ibid. p.362

22-year mayor Short Shanks Dick Daley II was off hiding in the British Virgin Islands in exile: a vestige of a political establishment that is now extinct. Am I adding a somber note to an occasion that ought not be so somber? Well, I am a Chicagoan by birth, so he is like my father.

But doesn’t Rahm just continue the machine lineage?

No!

While Daley did gave Rahm Emanuel the nod to run for Congress back in ’02 when Blago was elected Governor, the two are from distinct political establishments, with their intersection being the commonality of Chicago. Daley is a south-sider, part of the dying breed of the Chicago Irish political racket. Meanwhile, Rahm is a Jew from the North: one whom many in the old machine would have considered some “fucking liberal.”

I won’t sidestep into discussion about how he isn’t liberal. In fact, he is quite “liberal” in the more commonly used sense of the word through the world: someone who opposes any interference in the market, even if your aim is merely socioeconomic justice. In the Land of the Free, sadly, almost everyone is hostile to such notions, even the majority that would benefit from social-democratic policies. So if everyone is a liberal, what’s the point in using the word?

A far more prescient term is “googoo”: the yuppie that thinks all will be Good as long as Government is in the hands of one of their own. I will give credit to the googoos for not holding some of the biases of yesteryear, as they did anoint this country’s first black President. In fact, some would argue that the googoo prefers a little color, for it serves to cloak the systemic biases of the liberalism they espouse.

I once saw Rahm on tape complaining about “gooogoos” and their lack of political organization. He rolled his eyes and muttered that which I have muttered many times before: “Fuckin’ googoos!” They aren’t adept campaigners, because they can’t stand in one place for more than a half hour passing out palm cards: they are far too important for that. For these purposes, Rahm prefers the “knuckle dragger,” which Daley has always provided a steady stream of.

Nonetheless, his core voter is still a “googoo,” as with former boss Barack, and most of the Democratic Party establishment. They have just anointed him to be the new Mayor of Chicago, thus ending a century of Machine rule. What little remained of the machine was out campaigning for Gery Chico, the old Chicago Public School boss, whose influence was largely contained to the rolling bungalows of the northwest side.

The only candidate resembling a progressive, City Clerk Miguel Del Valle, limped home with 9% of the vote: a sad reminder that populism is entirely dead in Chicago. He did inspire a fairly impressive ground game, but these don’t amount to votes in the era of the “googoo,” because these foul creatures demand that you have the endorsement of the daily rag for their approval. They will mock your leaflet, spite your populist rhetoric, disparage you for questioning the status quo, and flock to support anyone given the nod by the Trib or Sun Times

Here we see ourselves mourning the death of the machine, for it has been replaced with something even worse. We have gone from blue-collar semi-populist sensibilities to the singular class: the amorphous class of supposedly well-intentioned yuppies. While the machine diverted union interests to the corporate-laded Democratic Party to no one’s benefit, at least their organization required that support. On occasion, the unions could still flex their muscle in this old game. Nowadays, Rahm managed to win despite airing commercials dissing public sector workers, and calling for an era where they work on a purely contractual basis.

I spent the day campaigning for del Valle and myself in a vanity Green Party run for alderman in an abundantly “googoo” ward. Without much time and money, I primarily used my campaign as a chance to stump for Mr. Del Valle. In this ward, the corporate press manufactured an “upset,” by endorsing a nonentity of a googoo over the anointed machine hack (I did not participate in the corporate press endorsement process.) The victor, Ameya Pawar, is a 30-year old with no meaningful political background or coherent political philosophy. This is quite possibly the greatest political upset I have ever witnessed, as he knew little about the dynamics of campaigning, evidenced by the lack of “union bugs” on his material, and the absence of any visible ground game. The “corporate press” now possesses the unencumbered capacity to anoint victors. The unimaginative populace has almost no ability to think on their own, beyond trivial dichotomies. Both corporate newspapers painted this as an “us vs. them” race of a “David vs. Goliath” nature, wherein the longshot got their approval, in large part because he was a harmless googoo running against a machine charlatan.

I spent nearly the whole of Election Day striking up conversation with machine goons at polling places. We stood out in the cold, passing palm cards to voters as they trickled in. One yuppie googoo, en passant, refused both of our palm cards, declaring: “You’re the machine hack, and you’re a left-wing nut! Don’t bother me!” That was the microcosm of our day.

One of the goons I talked to for a while said “We like you better than that Indian, because at least you’re pro-union.”

I responded : “Well, you know, both my parents were union. I was actually born and raised in the city, not off in the suburbs.”

He continued: “Yeah, this guy is a fuckin’ jackass.”

I replied: “Well, he’s just a googoo”

Another goon chimed in: “Yep!”

So there I spent 15 hours on the sinking ship of Chicago’s machine, bonding with goons in the frigid temperatures, sensing that the sun was setting on a fabled era of Chicago history.

I then cozied into the comfort of O’Shaughnessy’s for a nip and pint, followed by several more, and watched Rahmbo give his victory speech. I had my epiphany: the new boss is not the same as the old boss. The culture has changed, the relevance of organized labor has waned, and the city has become a mob of narrow-minded yuppies that share and embody Rahm’s hostility to populism.

Most importantly, the corporate press enthusiastically trumpeted Rahm’s candidacy. They manufactured this consent, paid no attention to the field’s one progressive (and Miguel was no Hugo Chavez), and turned this narrative into the completion of a dream for a Chicago political hero.

Many in the neighborhood were enthused that the mayor will live amongst us in Ravenswood. The home he famously leased out whilst in Washington is literally blocks from where I sit typing. The current resident, Rob Halpin, refused to break his lease when Rahm returned to run for mayor, thus sparking Rahm’s residency-question debacle. My message to Rob on this somber occasion: “Trash the fuckin’ place!”

The narrative has come full circle. I initially returned to this city to run for Rahm’s old Congressional seat as a Green in the 2009 special election. He is now back and I will be gone. I have regretted the decision to return for most of the last year, as I have grown tired of Chicago’s “Second city complex.” Always beware the people a notch or two below the Jones’s, for they are the most arrogantly hostile people on Earth. Chicago has never been a worldly cosmopolitan city a la New York or Paris, nor did it develop a uniquely vibrant identity a la L.A. with Hollywood.

With the sun setting on the machine, so it has set on us, the children of it. I am off to warmer and more fertile pastures. See you in New Orleans.

But not before making another toast to the memory of the Chicago Machine.

To be an anti-war activist at this moment in American history is to be at an all time low. Never did genuine activists for non-violence have it so bad. Never has a progressive movement ever neutered itself so thoroughly, severed its own fuel source, and engineered its own irrelevance as much as the American anti-war movement between 2003 and now.

The success of the movement in early 2003 seemed destined to significantly alter the course of history. Bush and the neo-con puppeteers faced certain domestic turmoil in the “other superpower”: the dynamic grassroots movements whose lineage ran through Seattle and Chiapas, and now descended upon New York, Chicago and small towns throughout the heartland. Meanwhile, we had Lula in Brazil (before Lula became synonymous with traitor), Chavez in Venezuela, and millions of people emptying out into the streets throughout the world. American social movements were uniting with international grassroots forces to upend the heinous American Empire.

Or so I thought as I finished my undergrad at the University of Illinois-Urbana in 2003. Upon graduation I warily took a position at Peace Action as a “Field Outreach Coordinator” (if you have never worked at a non-profit before, the name of your position means practically nothing). My duties included, among other things, delegitimizing the genuine grassroots elements of the anti-war movement in favor of a bureaucratic, compromised, legislative/electoral approach to “fighting the man.” While Peace Action takes more principled stands than, say, Moveon.org, it is governed by the same logic that sank the whole ship in 2004.

However, most of the blame needs to be placed squarely on two men, whose “movements” completely demobilized this nation’s last great grassroots movement: John Kerry and Barack Obama.

The ascent of these two overlapped. Obama rose from his position in an obscure state congressional seat to become U.S. Senator at the same time that Mr. Kerry swift-boated the anti-war movement into oblivion.

Obama was young, articulate, handsome, well-composed, charming: all of those things we aren’t accustomed to in Chicago. Meanwhile, the rest of the country was equally overwhelmed. We had grown so used to our male specimen being overweight slobs that just the site of Obama made us believe that yes, we could join the civilized world.

Unfortunately, the route to the Promised Land doth not lie through the ballot box. I am not entirely negating the importance of casting a vote, but merely stating that genuinely progressive candidates don’t just pop out of the ether and get elected. Instead, they spring forth from grassroots movements and thus represent the collective consciousness.

In 2004 and 2008, the American liberal left repeated the same mistake by going the easy route of standing on the sidelines and “hoping.” This was an incredible phenomenon: a people, which are willing to be slave-driven in the workplace more so than any other in the Western World, lazed out on their civic responsibility. Instead of maintaining the requisite pressure and momentum, the American progressive fizzled out into irrelevance.

Even in its darkest hour, the American conservative doesn’t dare fizzle. They stick to their guns. So what is wrong with the American progressive?

My answer is that the baby boomers still control too much of the movement. I repeat: the progressive left is STILL organized and orchestrated by cliche P.C., baby booming liberals. They are the enablers of defeatism in American progressivism: those that seek to compromise war with peace, commercialism with socialism, liberty with tyranny. Their over-arching logic is that the status quo is too ingrained to budge. They enter the negotiation process under the precept that victory is unfeasible, and compromise is inevitable. As such, mainstream progressives believe that we must begin with a compromise, and continue to perpetually, until our vaunted “change” is even worse than the status quo.

I am on a few health care reform (single-payer) lists where people have been arguing over whether we should advocate defeat of the current bill in the Congress. I am unable to see how there is any question that we should. People are so steeped in the defeatist logic of unending compromises that they can’t see this ploy for what it is: a bailout of the insurance companies masquerading as “health care reform.” All of this comes after the President and several high ranking congresspersons admitted “Single Payer is probably the best solution, but …” But what!? We Americans are so used to failure, we may as well just keep failing!? Why be as good as the rest of the civilized world!? Let’s just continue to suck ass!

And to keep American minds off of the fact that our shitty health system will continue unabated and freshly charged, Obama announced his long-held plans to deepen our imperial adventure in Afghanistan. Progressives responded with mighty protests: in Chicago, a whole 150 people showed up last Wednesday to stick it to the commander-in-chief. Another rally was held on Saturday, which fared slightly better: that one may have attracted around 200.

And it is the same damn 150-200 people that show up to everything. The rest of the city is still hanging out in the trenches, “hoping” for something to go right. I am sure this is repeated verbatim throughout the country. The anti-war movement is down to its nuts and bolts: just the hard -core activists.

So how do we energize the grassroots again? How do we turn the clock back to 2003, while this country is so devastated and demoralized?

My answer is that the focus needs to shift to the banks: those insidious institutions of avidity and fraud that created our economic recession and then ran away with trillions of dollars in bailout guarantees. The big, corporate banks finance wars and war-makers, steal from working communities, prey on vulnerable members of the working and middle-classes, and have no sense of social responsibility or civic duty.

Socialism for the rich, Capitalism for the poor. The CEO’s get their bonuses, the working people get ATM fees and overdraft fees. The billionaire swindlers get TARP funds, the working men and women get bad mortgages, a dissolution of their retirement portfolios, decreasing medical coverage and increasing education costs.

Meanwhile, my generation, the baby boomers’ children of 30 years or younger, have seen their unemployment rate rise to nearly 25%. This rate is much higher if you count those who have ceased looking for work, or those that are partially employed or perpetually stuck in a temp agency.

I had the latter problem while in Seattle last year. I was hired by Nintendo of America as a French Customer Service rep through an intermediary known as Parker Services. These are the same bastards that run the “temp agency” racket at Microsoft, down the street in Redmond (suburb of Seattle). The idea is that you will never work directly for the company you pretend to represent on the phone, unless you gleefully slave away under precarious conditions for a few years with no benefits, leave time or health insurance. I couldn’t even realistically take a sick day without putting my job in jeopardy, and eventually stormed out in an angry rampage when told that I had to work with a 102 degree fever.

A majority of under 30 year olds are living in a state of utter despair: the baby boomers left us no health care, no decent employment, no living wage, no comprehensive system of free higher education, no ethic of brotherhood and sisterhood: a country in absolute ruin. Our older siblings and cousins were labeled “Generation X,” us “Generation Y” or “Generation ADHD,” but it may as well be “Generation Screwed.”

Socialism for the rich, Capitalism for the poor. Handouts, big trillion dollar handouts for the criminal business elite, and savage, barbaric Capitalism for the rest of us. We battle over scarce resources, and play trivial, insipid games so as to obtain frivolous employment, with no guarantees of security and health coverage. Our grandparents had good union jobs, and provided our parents with high quality education and health care at an affordable rate. We were never so lucky.

The war in the Middle East is the external manifestation of the war on young adults here at home. The relationship between the baby boomers and their children has always been antagonistic. The former has never wanted to grow up, while the latter has strived to mature. To quote the late George Carlin, the baby boomers “went from cocaine to Rogaine,” refusing ever to age and seriously confront the great responsibility of running a country. Their record, across the political spectrum, has been disastrous. From right wing zealots to imperialists posing as “peoples’ candidates” to left-wing movements weighted down by the baggage of “cultural revolution.” In the baby boomers world, “left” and “right” became inane cultural points of reference, as political discourse made like an Amtrak and de-railed.

This unraveled as our presidents and congress-people drifted steadily rightward. There once was smattering of populists in the Congress, and the occasional bone thrown at progressives by even Republican presidents. However, our posture gradually descended to the point that “we” have the White House, “60 seats in the Senate,” and a strong majority in the Congress, and right wing America still runs the damn country!

This dire state is unsustainable. As such, I ask fellow members of Generation Screwed to join me in taking charge of the despair before us. Let us reconstruct an America that is built on the principles of brotherhood and sisterhood: an understanding that we have a debt to our fellow American. The creation of these monolithic criminal banks and their corporate doppelgangers is entirely the doing of the baby boomers, who supported the Reagans and Clintons that deregulated like mad animals. They took any progressive tendency in this country and demeaned and disparaged it, leaving us with Kennedys, Kerrys, and, at best, Kucinichs. We can do much better.

We, the members of Generation Screwed, have no room for compromise. Our life depends on great progressive victory and it begins with taking the banks head on.

Some might say I sound like a demagogue. When you are used to insipid soundbytes and P.C.-fluff, the truth starts sounding like demagoguery. The fact of the matter is that the truth is extraordinarily painful in this country ruled by a peculiar Victorian fetish of the marketplace. Nowhere in the civilized world could one imagine civic leaders fear mongering the populace about the evils of “socialized medicine” without getting laughed out of the country. Unfortunately, these goons of capitalist oppression seem to have been collectively laughed out of the civilized world and into Land of the Free.

Nonetheless, the problem is not this visceral minority. The problem lies in those that pretend to befriend progress: that grand, archaic organ of political oppression called the Democratic Party. This increasingly irrelevant union of crooks, hucksters and swindlers has betrayed the American people beyond recognition. Their failure to enact meaningful health care reform must be the last straw.

From the beginning of the current “health reform” debacle, the game was rigged. Immediately, the only meaningful reform, “single payer,” was taken off the table, and progressives were told to rally behind a “strong public option” by Democratic front groups like Moveon.org and Health Care for America Now (HCAN). These two NGO’s organized numerous “rallies” in order to command a feeble subservience to the Democratic leadership ahead of their caving to corporate interests on the issue.

Meanwhile, single-payer activists were placed in the precarious position of having to advocate against the meaningless and amorphous “strong public option” and the tea-baggers all at once. In a country so dominated by trivial soundbytes, you have to be either “for or against” everything: no shades of gray, no third way. Unfortunately, many progressives got caught in the trap and started rallying behind a bill (Obama’s Health Care Bill HR 3200) that no one knew anything about. This clever catch all was meant to accomplish exactly that: institute no meaningful reform while tricking a significant portion of progressives into thinking that we were now seeing “The change we can believe in.”

Nonetheless, single-payer activists were thrown a couple bones. One was a promise of a vote on the “Weiner Amendment” on the house floor. This amendment would have replaced the current bill with HR 676: the single-payer bill. The other, more meaningful bone was the “Kucinich Amendment,” which would have lifted loopholes that prevent individual states from enacting single-payer legislation. This approach seemed more tactically sound than expecting much of an up-down vote on single-payer on the house floor. The Canadian health system was enacted province-by-province, and it seemed reasonable to expect the same here: the more “enlightened” states lead the way, attract a significant spike in businesses fleeing other states so as to cut health expenses, and gradually the states fall like dominoes.

Kucinich told a crowd in Aurora, IL this summer to focus on his amendment. He informed us that the Single-Payer vote (Weiner Amendment) was a smoke screen doomed to failure because of the lack of adequate time to organize sufficiently for the vote.

I then attended several organizing meetings and stressed the need to emphasize the Kucinich Amendment as the most tactically prescient step forward for single-payer activists. I suggested that people not bite the Weiner amendment bait. As a veteran of the NGO industrial complex, I saw the Weiner Amendment for what it was: a chance for progressive Democrats and single-payer NGO’s to claim victory (just by bringing the issue to a vote), and to thus muster some fund-raising. I could picture the fund-raising letter: “Dear Single-Payer Activist, today we scored a major victory in the House of Representatives by bringing Single Payer Health Care to a vote for the first time. But there remains a lot of work to be done in order to win the vote in the future. Please help us in this mission by donating today.”

Unfortunately, many activists bit the bait. Action alert after action alert instructed people to call their reps and urge them on the Weiner Amendment.

In the end, both the Kucinich and Weiner amendments were removed from consideration by house leadership this past week. Meanwhile, Democratic cheerleaders have been trumpeting the success at instituting a “public option” in both the House and Senate versions of the health reform bill. The proposed public option will cover about 3% of the population, while roughly 33% of Americans are un- or under-insured. Many progressive democrats inform me that this is the best we can realistically do given the conservative dynamics of the American populace. I don’t understand what American populace they are talking about. As someone who goes out to the bungalow belt of Chicago to knock on doors practically everyday, I can say with full confidence that only an insignificant wacko minority is repelled by the thought of “Medicare for all.” Perhaps we can figure out a way to leave those few people out when we finally do institute a single-payer system.

Progressive leaders have fallen to the right of the American people. Americans crave and need meaningful health care reform in line with the remainder of the civilized world. They crave and need leadership in Washington that stands for the interests of their constituents: leaders that aren’t fearful of lifting their heads above the fray, pounding their fists on the podium and declaring “It is time we shut this racket down. Let us throw the insurance companies into the dustbin of history once and for all, and end this domestic terrorism that kills 45,000 Americans a year!”

Unfortunately, to get to this point, we are going to have to purge the Congress of almost every last one of its members, and stop thinking that the Democrats or the NGO industrial complex will ever bring Americans their cherished Medicare-for-all.

The criticisms I have received are that often I can come off as too negative or angry. In reviewing video and images from the campaign earlier this year, I must admit that I have given off a negative aura on several occasions. I whole-heartedly agree that it is important that I don’t allow my valid criticisms of mainstream politics affect my personal demeanor: that I don’t let my anger at greedy bankers affect my overall composure.

Another criticism is that I get too caught up in the individual issues and fail to package them into a coherent vision for the future of this country. In this realm, I must admit that I too often assume that people know where I am coming from. Many activists in my midst have read many of the same authors and tend to get their news from similar sources and have generally supported similar candidates and political movements. However, in running for Congress, it is necessary that I reach outside of my base and appeal to the vast majority of Americans who are not political junkies.

Rather than merely trash mainstream politicians for being shills for banks, insurance companies and military contractors, I should explain precisely what sets me apart, and what values I will espouse as an elected member of Congress:

First and foremost, I will stand for liberty and democracy, those two heralded values of the western liberal tradition. I do not believe that the western tradition was built purely around empire and conquest. While the preeminent powers most certainly committed heinous crimes in the developing world and elsewhere, I also believe they invaluable contributed social, cultural and political ideals. I believe the former was inconsistent with the latter.

In this spirit, I will stand as an ambassador of peace. I believe that it is inconsistent with the Western liberal tradition to take peoples’ lives as part of our foreign policy. I am also appalled by the seeming lack of appreciation for human life in our political elite, and increasingly throughout society. Martin Luther King Jr correctly observed that “my country is the greatest perpetrator of violence in the world.” For making this observation, he was vilified and branded a “radical.” In my mind, there is no clearer demonstration that our country suffers from a serious ailment of violence than when a great leader is disparaged for admonishing his country for its violent ways.

We must recognize violence as the great American epidemic. From the streets of Baghdad to the streets of Chicago, violence is a problem that is tearing this nation apart at the seams. If we do not usher in a new generation of leadership ready and willing to tackle this epidemic, we will rapidly descend into a state of thorough irrelevance.

I ask that we all take the time to reflect on this problem and internalize it: to address the inner violence, that desire to bring emotional or physical harm to others regardless of any provocation, and to conquer it, so that together we can overcome the overarching problem of our nation’s domestic and military violence.

I reiterate: violence is the great American epidemic. Violence is the problem behind so many of our other problems. Violence was the problem when we attempted to repress Communism by fighting doomed proxy wars throughout the globe. Violence was so vividly the problem when we thoroughly devastated Vietnam and lost over 50,000 of our own in a useless war of aggression and Empire. Violence, too, was the problem when we attempted to expand that ill by invading Cambodia and Laos.

Violence was the problem when we decided to dictate the future of Latin America by installing murderous dictators in Chile and Guatemala, while fighting and funding violent civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Columbia. Violence has been the American mark left on Latin America: a tradition of violence rooted in this misguided sense of superiority by our political and economic Elite.

Violence, too, was the problem on 9-11, when authoritarian religious zealots brought their backward sense of vengeance down on 3,000 innocent civilians. This act continued a cycle of violence in our relationship to the Arab world, with whom the American Empire had intertwined in dangerously injurious military and economic relations for decades. In the weeks after that horrific moment in American history, we could have risen to a new level of clarity and given power to a new movement to rescind violence in all of its forms.

Instead, the cycle continued and it perpetuates today. In 2001, we were told that the terrorists would have been defeated by now, and that we would be basking in the serenity of a perpetual peace. This is the same lie that war propagandists have shuffled around for time immemorial: that once we fight this last war, an era of peace will arrive. I see no difference between this sickly way of thinking and that of an alcoholic who assures his loved ones that tonight will be his final drink.

In order to rid our society of this malady, we must see the primary function of our lives as peace-makers. Surely, everyone must work to pay the bills, and they should undoubtedly be content in their careers. However, your prime human function on this planet is not as a paid servant of this or that employer. Your primary function is as a fellow ambassador of peace. Your essential duty is to wage peace at all opportunities, to expose and reprimand the war-makers, and to remain confident and adamant in even the most trying times. As a peace maker, you will be almost perpetually challenged: like Martin Luther King Jr, being branded a radical, you will be accused of anti-American sentiment, you will be called a coward or a Communist, and you will be disparaged and belittled.

This is why I suggested that we all cleanse the inner violence before attempting to address the outer violence. It is essential that you demonstrate your capacity to remain non-violent even when violently provoked. I have often struggled with this myself, and continue to work to overcome the internal angst.

As Congressman, I will not only oppose all wars of aggression and Empire, but will also address the causes of our domestic violence. Depending on where one resides on the political spectrum, everyone has their hypothesis as to the cause of our society‘s violence: guns, video games, movies, poverty, drug use and so on. All of these enablers more so than causes. For the primary cause, again we must look inward. We must ask ourselves where the vicious cycle originates, so that we can gradually put the brakes on this violence with time.

Just as a kid who was abused is more likely to become an abuser, so too will an abused people be more likely to abuse in turn. I am suggesting that our society is violently provoked. I am saying that our country has developed a loathsome attraction to violent control and domination. We have police officers that are hired solely to run a muck in our poor communities: to flex the muscle of the state and throw the population into a state of shock, fear and despair. The rule of the street becomes violence, and so the most backward and violent elements in society take undisputed control of the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, we have an education system geared towards teaching subservience and a narrow view of morality rather than the great Western values of freedom and democracy. As a small “d” democrat first and foremost, I always look forward to dissent in my ranks. I have great admiration for those that are willing to challenge my convictions with intelligent and rigorous argument. This should be the desire of all Americans, and these values should be instilled from an early age. Instead, we wage war on youth by attempting to control what they wear, they hear and what they should fear. We attempt to mold them into “good Americans” by ignoring the core western values and instead emphasizing the malady that is ripping this nation apart.

If the relative freedom of the University years ever makes an American too upright, then surely the career years will send them hunched over again. Among developed Western nations, we are the worst, or near the worst, in all of the following indicators: amount of vacation time, health coverage, life expectancy, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, poverty and inequality. While other nations have progressed to be more healthy, affluent, equal and free, we have been pummeled into regression by the ever-violent ruling elite, whose determination to control the masses is absolutely relentless.

In order to survive, one must work. Unfortunately, in order to work in this country, one must be shackled. In some cases, one is granted reasonable and affordable health care. In others, one is dumped square into the racket that is the dastard American health insurance market. Often, one must work a year without vacation or sick time, without any union representation or recourse to file complaint, before one is “rewarded” with inadequate health insurance. Of course, the CEOs, bankers and violent militarists who manage this country wouldn’t know: most of them have never had to toil through the wreckage like the rest of us.

People are made to toil so that they will remain feebly dependent and subservient. They won’t dare question because questioning might lead to retribution and bastardization. While not physical violence necessarily, this amounts to a severe emotional violence. People’s soul, their human essence, is savagely beaten to the point that all of their precious human faculties quit functioning: their ambition, their confidence, their rationality.

Unfortunately, people replicate this behavior in their interactions with others. They seek to control and dominate, to belittle and conquer, to be the king or queen: not through merit, but by pure emotional force.

Instead of conquering others, we should all conquer the need to conquer. Instead of installing our metaphorical flag anywhere and everywhere, let us be guided by principle and reason. Let us discover those vanquished traits of ambition, confidence, and rationality, and use them to help navigate this nation back in the direction of greatness.

I believe we can stop failing by most demographic measures and instead institute a culture of success. I know that once we have overcome the epidemic of violence, we will be as capable as any of the great civilizations through time.

What separates me from the sitting Congressman, the Honorable Mike Quigley, is that I am an activist. I am not entering the electoral arena as a career move: I am doing it so as to give voice to my belief in the power of non-violence and in the valor of this fantastic Western tradition that we have inherited. I met Mike several times during the last campaign, and sincerely believe that he is an amicable person and an appreciable political leader. What’s more, he is a considerable improvement over his predecessor. However, he has not demonstrated that he is going to address the principal problem of violence in this nation. He had two chances to vote against continued war funding for these illegal and immoral wars, and he voted for the funding both times. He has had several months to rise on the floor of the Congress, or at a rally or public forum, and rally this nation to an end to these monstrous wars, but instead he has been silent. He has also been silent or near-silent on the other major issues facing the working majority of this country: ending the banker bailouts and reforming our monetary system, auditing and ultimately abolishing the federal reserve, instituting a single-payer national health care system (the only workable system), and instituting a new Workers’ Bill of Rights, to guarantee the right to unionize and collective bargain and to secure protection from out-sourcing and other ill effects’ of the neo-liberal trade regime.

I am not running to be a nice guy that might give you a listen once in a while. This campaign is about defending the core values at the backbone of this country from encroachment by the inane, objectionable and violent ruling elite.

This nation’s prime dysfunction is the lack of a genuine social movement for anything substantive. The last movement died somewhere in 2003-2004: drowned in a sea of Democratic propaganda about changing the Emperor’s clothes. I was busily organizing the peace movement throughout Illinois at the time. We were turning out thousands of protestors on a regular basis, and backing the street manifestations with a frontal grassroots blitz of letters and calls to congresspeople, followed by the occasional sit-ins at their offices. To all involved, it was clear that the anti-war movement would shut down the war after a few years of persistence.

But alas, the movement completely discombobulated right before us. I watched willing volunteers start spending their time working for an “exciting” new senate candidate in Illinois, and others join the Howard Dean campaign and ultimately the John Kerry campaign. By the time the “exciting” Illinois senator rose to national prominence, based primarily on his capacity to string multiple coherent sentences together in a forceful manner (what low standards we have come to possess), the social movement had become the man himself. When this happens, the social movement stops existing: it is trumped by the ambitions of one man and the party that supports him. Wall Street, the banking industry, the health insurance racket, and the military industrial complex had not-so-cleverly beaten this nation’s last great movement.

According to many sociologists, the Frenchman Alain Touraine prime among them, a society is defined by conflict among social movements. As such, a nation without social movements is also void of society. As in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and other authoritarian systems, society has become thoroughly entrenched by the ruling elite in the Land of the (buy one get one) Free. The uniquely American brand of government is particularly trying and burdensome insofar as a significant portion of the population is convinced that we have a functioning democracy.

I would argue that we are governed by a bureaucratic plutocracy: a system that intentionally drowns the populace in trivial details so as to guard against independent thought. Social interaction is frequently driven by promotion rather than genuine amicability. Since no one in my generation seems to be gainfully employed, everyone is an independent contractor: peddling some sort of pseudo-art or music, or their graphic design or website design “business,” and so on. Even those supposedly working for grassroots political movements operate on a business model of consuming all who stand in their path. To them, you are a name on a list and a potential donor. The message becomes nothing but a tool to procure sustenance for the organization: to the point that the movement gets engulfed in the organization.

For six years, we have been functioning as a nation without society. We have the skeletons of society: people bustling around doing stuff, newspapers printing stuff, televisions broadcasting stuff, and a couple political parties advocating stuff. But the stuff is primarily noise and irrelevant sound bytes.

The closest thing to a genuine social movement today is the inspiring conservative anti-war movement, as evidenced in the appreciable success of the Ron Paul presidential campaign and the succeeding Campaign for Liberty movement. In addition to offering a principled opposition to war, this movement raises prescient criticisms of this nation’s monetary system and an essential reform: abolishing the Federal Reserve.

Unfortunately the Left has been more hesitant than the right to critique its mainstream party, though there are notable exceptions. Two of them are right here in Illinois. Firstly, the sit-in at Republic Windows last winter demonstrated that Chicago might still be the labor movement capital of the universe, and that not all workers have been consumed by the ravenous Democratic Party. Secondly, the Illinois Green Party, through persistent and painstaking grassroots work, has become an established party on par with the two corporate parties. Their Gubernatorial candidate, Rich Whitney, won greater than 10% of the vote in 2006 and looks to build on that atop an eclectic slate of seasoned activists in 2010.

Nonetheless, a significant portion of the largely dormant left has been looking to the president for guidance. He is undoubtedly a brilliant man insofar as he navigated the confusing legal, bureaucratic jungle that is our political system and achieved a historic feat last November. However, his accomplishment was not, as is widely regarded, the result of some social movement. In fact, he shunned the remaining minute traces of social movements at every opportunity. He said he would fight to end the war, and then expanded it, said he would fight to restore civil liberties and take a principled stand against warrantless wiretapping, and then reversed his decision. And most recently he said he was for “universal health care,” and yet echoes the same drivel of bygone years.

People must stop looking to the president for solutions to this nation’s numerous problems: unending wars of empire, avarice throughout the banking industry, a political class that is a mere shill for said banking industry, and a national discourse that has become incredibly trivialized by the saturation of corporate-controlled media. Addressing these deficiencies, re-instituting a democracy and reconstructing civil society will require arduous labor over the course of many years. I invite all concerned citizens to join a local anti-war group, or create one if there isn’t one already, and be as visible and intelligently provocative as possible. Do the same with alternative political parties that build off of local involvement, such as the Greens or Libertarians. Join one of the local movements for single-payer health care, or any other movement built upon substance rather than noise. We need people of courage to take on the duty of lifting Americans above this feeble reverence of Wall Street’s latest White House implant.

This was the first of several millionaires to be anointed to the president’s team: Rahm’s fortunes made largely in the same real estate and banking interests that are responsible for destroying the country.

I hadn’t been permanently back in the district in some time, but it was my boyhood mandate: remembering the glory days of Rostenkowski sent a certain chill down my spine, as I sat there contemplating how the Chicago machine was going to fill the seat With the Blago circus clearly on its way and Mayor Daley concurrently teetering on edge, maintaining power only to ice his legacy with the 2016 Olympic games, I thought that the machine might sit this one out.

In the end, the ward bosses failed to unite behind one goon, though State Rep John Fritchey, a real thug-looking persona in charge of everything from Bucktown to the lakefront, came the closest. He was able to inspire the bulk of his fellow goons in the party to work the polls for him on Primary Day, and he effectively littered the district with his signs. In the end, this didn’t translate into victory for Fritchey, who lost to the recently sworn-in Mike Quigley, former Cook County Commissioner and supposed “reformer” (whatever the hell that means).

I entered the race as a long shot, hoping to inject fiery populist rhetoric into the forums. I initially filed as a Democrat, but was ultimately recruited by the Greens. For me, the party affiliation is a moot point in America: you have two parties of Wall Street and a smattering of minority parties that have no real political power. I don’t get behind any too enthusiastically, though “ecological sustainability” and “making war obsolete” are two worthy endeavors.

The lot of 23 candidates from the Dems, Repubs and Greens participated in about a dozen forums leading up to the March 3rd primary. There was no shortage of outsiders, ranging from the populist labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan, who riled up the progressive netroots (whatever the hell that is) to the nutty Econ professor from the University of Chicago, Charlie Wheelan. I can’t think of any one thing that would disqualify someone for elected office more so than teaching in the Chicago Economics School, and luckily the voters agreed with me.

Illinois held a public Green primary for this election, owing to the party having obtained ballot access on the heels of Rich Whitney’s 10% showing state-wide against Blago in 2006.

This means I had to compete against three others in order to secure a spot on the April 7th general election ballot. I staved off my closest competitor in the March 3rd primary by a mere 11 votes, in what was a late night at the campaign victory party at the Hopleaf on Clark and Foster.

I must admit that the electioneering was fun: traveling around talking to voters, explaining the meaning of “single payer health care,” trying to be witty and charismatic even when I really didn’t feel like it.

“Why are you running, Matt?”

“Because my generation will be the one shouldering this $20 trillion in debt and navigating the world fractured by our imperial foreign policy!”

You see how fun that is?

For all the yack about how “the press” hates the left, I managed to attract an impressive amount of attention despite all of my downside: my staff consisted of two full time volunteers, one of which slept on an inflatable air mattress in the office (also my apartment), I raised a grand total of $4,500 dollars in two election cycles, enough to barely register as existent, and there were plenty of incriminating things I’d written in various online journals and blogs. A little googling of my name would unveil everything from my desire to divorce from the Land of the Free permanently (still remains a long term goal) to various rants against the Green Party, Ralph Nader and the inept nature of the American left in general.

My ranting and raving about how the left needs to get its act together hardly hurt my candidacy, as the majority of door-knockers and petitioners came from the Ron Paul movement (case in point).

Upon securing the Green Party nomination on March 3rd and declaring that voters were now faced with a decision to “Go Green or Go Machine,” the party offered me absolutely zilch to run an effective campaign. While the rank and file helped the best they could, the party gave no money and was reluctant to provide organizational support. Furthermore, I had to engage in the email version of a shouting match with National Green Party Political Director Brent McMillan in order to place a campaign link on the party website. Brent obviously comes from the cooky strand of Greens that believes all resources should be dispensed on local races, because somehow we are going to “make war obsolete” as alderman of the middle of nowhere. Here there is one congressional race occurring in the entire nation, a high profile district en plus, and the party leadership was too worried about the mayoral races in Racine, Wisconsin and Urbana Il to pay attention to me and my tight, though under-funded, campaign.

I pattered on, nonetheless. Six days to Election Day and the high profile public television talk show, “Chicago Tonight,” invited me to debate eventual Democratic winner, Mike Quigley, and the Republican nut-job Rosanna Pulido. The latter was a gem of an imbecile for the Republicans, who was exposed as a blogger on the Free Republic website. Among other things, she scribed: “I would rather live in a meat packing town than a fudge-packing town. . . . Fudge-packing should be banned.” When not mouthing off homophobic hate speech, Ms. Pulido stuck to old-fashioned immigrant bashing, befitting her credentials as the founder of the Illinois Minutemen. To her credit, she was quite a nice lady in person, when not discussing politics.

Quigley, on the Democratic side, sold himself as a “reformer,” and it is no secret that he Cook County President John Stroger don’t get along. However, Quigs got his start working for ward boss Bernie Hansen, who was by-and-large responsible for starting the mammoth gentrification of the city we’ve seen over the last 20 years. He also expressed blanket support for Obama’s imperialist foreign policy, opposition to single payer health care, and support for the crook bailouts. In short, it was easy to oppose him from the left.

The video from Chicago Tonight is available here. While I addressed the issues, and talked of the importance of electing an activist congressman in these dire times, Quigley talked about his favorite movies, which emphasize the themes of hope and redemption, such as “Dave” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

I’m not making this stuff up. All of this actually happened.

This performance on Chicago Tonight, together with numerous other appearances on local television and the entirety of the Chicago radio news circuit, saw the campaign explode in the final week. Our volunteer core easily doubled, our fundraising picked up dramatically, and more and more news media wanted a piece of the action. We put Matt Reichel signs up in people’s yards throughout the district, Ah the existential crisis, and showed up everywhere we needed to be in order to maximize exposure.

The movement really took off, but unfortunately it was all too little, too late. Running a third party campaign in just 5 weeks in the heart of the machine is no easy task. In the end, we registered an impressive 7.3% across the inner-city part of the district. In three full wards we passed 10% and even beat the Republican in two of them.

If one ranting and raving peace activist with a campaign manager asleep on an inflatable air mattress alongside piles of campaign literature can register over 7% of the vote in just five weeks, imagine what could happen if the party had a little organization to it. Imagine if instead of hating the media, we learned to mingle a little with the corporate news hotshots and convinced them that Green is the future! Imagine if instead of always being negative, we were occasionally positive: if we smiled and said, “history is on our side!”

As the economic crisis continues to deepen, jobs continue to vanish, and public health continues to diminish, the people are desperately looking for a populist movement to rise to the fore.

We face numerous challenges in organizing a genuine leftist movement: weak unions, archaic labor laws, rampant anti-intellectualism, 50% of the country can’t find Iraq on a map, nor can they tell you the difference between the political left and right, and so on. Nonetheless, more difficult tasks have been accomplished by strident men and women. If the Left can get off their egotistical high-horse, do something in life rather than complain, and put in the countless hours of necessary organizing, there is little standing in the way of progress.

The first and most cogent response is: We’d be better off with a 435-long pack of hounds than what we currently have. I am insulted that anyone would dear compare my moral fabric to the corrupt lawyers and businessmen who pretend to represent us in Washington. To even reduce my credentials to the point of uttering my name in the same breathe as these foul and disingenuous people is demeaning and unsettling.

The “Other America” has been rapidly gravitating to my campaign: everyone from Progressives to Paleos knows that it’s not worth a second of their time to consider the usual establishment crooks. When I challenged the other candidates to rise to a level of moral decency by refusing checks from corporate interests, they all sloughed me off as crazy. Luckily, from an early age, my dear parents prepared me for the plight faced by functioning minds in the United States, so I am quite used to being considered crazy for my rational pursuits. I thought I would at least convince one of the other minor candidates, or someone posturing as a progressive, to take up the cause. But, alas, it will be just Matt Reichel refusing those corporate donors.

My next step is to make the other candidates, 19 and counting, commit to cutting off aid to Israel.

Oops! Did I just say that? I should probably be sent off to the nearest nut house and loaded full of big pharma drugs, sucked of all ambition, and planted in front of a television. Maybe then, after a few months of visual bombardment by Murdoch’s pawns, I’ll come around to understanding why the American taxpayer need fund Israeli atrocities year in and year out.

Instead, I gave AIPAC their couple hours of lobby action a few weeks before Christmas. I can imagine that it would be one hellish nightmare for the organization to go from Rahm Emanuel to me, so I at least wanted them to see that I am a real, breathing ambitious human being.

We met at a Starbucks downstairs from their office on LaSalle St in Chicago, just upwind from the brooding Board of Trade. The place was packed with important looking people, as we sat there leisurely chatting about the recent history of Israeli murder and the military benefits brought thus to the United States.

My rapidly moving eyeballs bounced back and forth between Vladimir’s eyes and his lapel pin (the one with the Israeli and American flags in union). I pressed him on what he thought of the numerous UN resolutions condemning Israel that have been singly stamped out by American vetoes. Firstly, he explained, you have to understand that the United Nations General Assembly is made up of people who are a small step above pirates on the evolutionary latter. There is a reason that the Security Council exists, he assured me, and it is to give a heightened voice to the respectful people of the world.

I responded: “I can’t believe you think so highly of Stalin!”

Vladimir continued (I paraphrase): “The other thing you have to remember is that France would veto those stupid resolutions as well, but they prefer to have the U.S. take the lead so as to not disturb their leverage in the Arab world.”

I couldn’t come up with any quick witticism, because I had just heard one of the most ridiculous assertions ever from someone sitting in a Starbuck’s next to a bunch of important looking people.

We then stopped shootin’ the bull and started moving on to business. Actually, I would have been content to continue chewin’ the ol’ rag all day, but AIPAC came to accomplish something. And that something, accompanied by an attractive glossy brochure, was convincing me of all of the benefits that come to Americans as a result of our investment in Israel.

One example is the Bradley Reactive Armor Tile, currently being used by American tanks in Iraq. Unsurprisingly, Israel is at the forefront of the development of military hardware, and, thanks to their experience in bulldozing through civilian neighborhoods in the occupied territories, they have made it safer for American troops doing the same in Iraq.

They are also particularly skilled in the domain of security and law enforcement, a fetish they hold in common with the United States. Increasingly since 9/11, various state, federal and municipal law enforcement bodies have regularly visited Israel to gain priceless tutelage on how to manage an Apartheid state. Among other things, this training has focused on “urban combat,” which has paid enormous dividends in our efforts to target civilians in our convoluted Empire building in Iraq.

American aid to Israel is an investment that just keeps paying off. Since they don’t accept any of that wasteful, socialistic humanitarian aid, and instead take only military handouts, the money comes boomeranging back to Americans in the form of contracts for our wonderful merchants of death i.e. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

Meanwhile, voting against aid to Israel is made purposely difficult by our friends in Washington. The Congress stuffs this figure into the larger foreign aid bill, so that you have to vote against real humanitarian aid in order to vote against military support to Israel. Even if you were a man or woman of principle on Capital Hill, the crooked lawyers and bankers who run the Big House would never make life simple on you.

However, they prefer to not let you get there at all by rigging the electoral charade. The easiest and most time tested way to get elected is to convince all of your investment banker friends to shoot you a quick 2 g-notes, while your boys involved in the big media swindle trumpet your run as something monumental.

So say you don’t have any wealthy and powerful friends? Your interest is running a campaign rooted in principles of peace, internationalism and workers’ rights. You seek to re-frame the nation’s understanding of the American dream by re-focusing our cultural energies on communing with the world, re-committing ourselves to a liberal arts based education so as to re-invigorate the national discourse, while urging the citizenry to respect and live foreign cultures and languages. In this case, your only option is to challenge the other candidates on their moral credentials until they crack.

Despite living in an era where our political system is in shambles due mostly to the disastrous effects of corporate lobbies, none of the other candidates in Illinois’s 5th district are interested in raising the moral bar. Absolutely none of them expressed any readiness to pledge with me against the acceptance of corporate donations.

And despite living through another humanitarian crisis brought on by an over-zealous outpost to the American empire, I’m sure that I will be the only candidate in this race ready to rise to the challenge of ending these crimes being committed in our names with our tax dollar.

Anyone in the Congress with a moral backbone should be pledging to immediately cease American aid to Israel. Likewise, anyone running for federal office at this hour should do the same. You can call me insane all you want, but I call myself the only man running in this primary that is willing to question Israel and corporate financed elections.

With a little luck and a lot of public pressure, we can get the mainstream crooks to crack.

As fraudsters and hustlers from Bernard Madoff to Rod Blagojevich fall like dominoes, in the footsteps of Bernie Ebbers, Kenneth Lay and Dan Rostenkowski, one can say that confidence in the good old American way is beginning to wane. While apathy towards politics has been a mainstay of the American consciousness for decades, the overall sense of despair in the air is probably at record highs.

Those who believed in the American political system framed this a fall of hope, but unfortunately winter arrived early and relentlessly. In Chicago, multiple snow and ice storms coupled with vicious winds brought the mid-western metropolis its most unbearable December in recent memory. When winter officially began on Sunday, wind chills dipped as low as –30 F: that brand of cold that is determined to slice through all defenses you throw at it. Meanwhile, the Blago circus came to town: the over-charismatic executive, teetering through the worst approval rating in Illinois gubernatorial history, failed to heed warnings of when enough was enough.

Reports indicate that he thought $1.5 million was a just price for Obama’s senate seat: a relative bargain in these days of neo-liberal hegemony. One could hardly get elected to the U.S. House with that kind of cash. In fact, the seat that used to be Blago’s, currently occupied by incoming Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, could very well cost around $1.5 million for the Chicago machinist most intent on calling it theirs. Emanuel himself spent $1.88 million getting re-elected this last time around, despite the lack of any viable opposition in either round.

In the coming special election, still yet to be officially announced because Emanuel hasn’t resigned, the total number of announced candidates is 18 and climbing. Every interested state rep, senator and alderman in the Chicago area has begun flexing their muscle, organizing their political apparatus, and using corporate press clout to promote their candidacies. The talk around town is not where the candidates stand on the issues, or where they lie along the political spectrum, but rather who’s got the goods to win the race.

And last I checked it isn’t only in Chicago where political livelihood is entirely dependent on support from corporate crooks. Despite all of the euphoria of early November, Obama is a prime representation of the fact that one can never win the White House by challenging the reprehensible actions of the nation’s largest banks, investors and lenders. Instead you have to allow them to donate generously to your campaign and then to dictate your economic policies.

While Obama was giving his spiel about hope and change repeatedly for two years, he was concurrently amassing an unprecedented war chest, thrust along by at least $2 million from entities directly involved in the sub-prime swindle: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS and Lehman Brothers. Despite Obama framing his candidacy as the one closer to the interests of the people, his rake from all of the above was considerably greater than McCain’s.

Corporate America realized early that Obama was the likely victor and that they had to move to ensure that he was thoroughly corrupted, and wouldn’t use the economic malaise as an excuse to begin regulating the financial sector. In following Obama’s purse strings, it is clear that he will likely do nothing to protect Americans from crony Capitalism. Citibank, currently under investigation for its involvement in derivative fraud and managing to make $1.2 trillion disappear from its balance sheets, was one of Obama’s biggest donors: with nearly $400,000 being given from its employees to the Senator in the first half of 2008 alone.

At just the time when the country needs to forcibly remove these crooked corporations from the political arena, they are as deeply ingrained as ever. Just when the congress must absolutely restore monetary sanity by re-instituting the Glass-Steagall act and reversing decades of rampant deregulation and privatization, the president will be doing the bidding of the same investment banks that gave us the housing bubble. And just as the American public begins to digest the enormity of said bubble, “our president” will assuredly be another loyal servant of Wall Street.

The foundations will only tremble when Americans pledge to support no candidate who accepts donations of any kind from corporations. When we can be sure that our public servants are clean of the crud of monied interests, we can then begin to have a grand discourse about hope and change.

The place to begin is right in Blago’s backyard, where the governor’s godchildren are busily positioning themselves to be the chosen successor to the seat once held by the man himself. This post won’t be sold, surely enough, but it probably will be bought. Given the district’s history of electing illicit political criminals, there’s no reason to think that the hounds won’t be let loose on the candidates.

Will any of them pledge to refuse corporate donations this time around? Will they rise above the easy route of accepting large sums of money from those interests intent on preying on the poor, de-unionizing workers, and instituting a perpetual culture of indebtedness?

I hereby demand it of them. I demand that each of the candidates sign onto this pledge to refuse all corporate donations. I ask that they run on the issues, and win by talking to constituents about their concerns, desires and wishes. In so doing, I dream that the victor will be “our congressperson” and not another soul-less pawn of big business.

I have thrown my hat into the ring of candidates because I would like to see my dream of a clean political system become reality. I have grown frustrated over years of dwindling social movements and increased state coercion of civil society. The dictatorship of corporate America, which is currently in shambles, must be swept away and replaced by a respectful liberal democracy. The first step is getting the fraudsters and hustlers out of politics, and replacing them with public servants who pledge to represent the interest of the working majority.

Will any of the other candidates in this special election rise to the occasion and work with me towards creating a more just nation?

For the health of our democracy, it is what must be done.

The million or so who hung out in the cold to watch Obama’s historic acceptance speech were a manifestation of that certain euphoria that takes hold of a city that has attracted the limelight. For the first time since the reign of Michael Jordan, Chicagoans had a reason to party together in the streets.

Now that the world understands what Chicago is capable of, I would like to add a little color to people’s understanding of the Second City: the capital of the heartland, the glue of the country, and the birth place of the freshwater people.

In order to understand what Chicago is and what its place is in the world, one must understand the “Other Chicago”: the Chicago that the political and business elite of the city would rather ignore than cherish.

The Other Chicago is the majority Chicago: the artists and writers, the revolutionaries and anarchists, the laborers and immigrants, the actors and musicians, the citizens of substance and the people of principle.

These are the people who are disparaged by the corporate press, and who are ignored by the politicians that the press coronate. In his oratory at the scaffold, October 1886, Chicagoan Albert Parsons denounced the same corporate press that plagues our democracy today. He said:

I hold that you cannot dispute the charge which I make, that this trial has been submerged, immersed in passion from its inception to its close, and even to this hour, standing here upon the scaffold as I do, with the hangman awaiting me with his halter, there are those who claim to represent public sentiment in this city, and I now speak of the capitalistic press-that vile and infamous organ of monopoly of hired liars, the people’s oppressor-even to this day these papers, standing where I do, with my seven condemned colleagues, are clamoring for our blood in the heat and violence of passion.

Albert Parsons was murdered by the state: convicted on trumped up charges of disturbing the peace and inciting riot. This is despite the fact that the historical records demonstrate clearly that the riot was initiated by police, who fired into the crowd of workers so as to provoke a bloody response. Parsons was chosen as a scapegoat because he was a leader: actively organizing for the 40-hour work week that would put the brakes on the rate at which wealth was accelerated upwards from workers to capitalists.

Ultimately, his grand cause prevailed, as the United States became the first country on earth to institute the 40-hour work week. This legislation became an international norm, and is now considered inherent to the international body of human rights. It is an indispensable part of any democratic society, and yet this man was murdered for his fight to make it happen. We, the people, owe this Chicagoan a debt of gratitude, for he gave his life to make the lives of all humanity more just and equitable.

And yet today, the crooked ruling elite of the country have figured out every way imaginable to circumvent the 40-hour work week. The number one way is paying a wage that does not produce minimum living standards. Even the government’s own poverty line, which is far below the just standard of a living wage, shows more than one in ten Americans living in poverty. Many of these people must work multiple jobs to make ends meet and to obtain minimal benefits for themselves and their family.

The level of precariousness in this country is unsustainable. The people are un- and under-employed, un- and under-insured, and indebted to banks who paid for their college in exchange for a life of debt servitude. It is especially bad amongst my fellow young adults: those who have been given a country where we dogfight to get ahead instead of march in solidarity for a better and more just Republic.

We are told that our vital functions are production and competition, we are made to meddle in menial tasks in our schooling years and then brought into empty office jobs in our adult life: never encouraged to be an individual or a creative member of society. You are to never question your teacher, never demand answers of your elected representatives, and are made to be subservient numskulls by the prison-police state.

If you question the status quo, you are treated as foolish and weak, even though we know that it takes great courage and strength to stand up to tyranny.

We know that Albert Parsons had to take his life to question the crippling working conditions of the late 19th century. We know that the Other Chicago has been sidelined and beaten down by the media and political machine of this city.

We remember when Daley I sent the goons after peaceful anti-war demonstrators outside of the Democratic Convention of 1968. We remember justice being served by a show trial, which made a mockery of democracy and illustrated to the world what a bunch of crooks run this city.

The Other Chicago has had to endure the goon state, the heavy handed weight of our dictatorial law enforcement community, the criminally corrupt nature of Chicago’s mob political elite, and the cold and windy winters to boot.

The crooks-in-charge originally decided to memorialize the Haymarket riot by constructing a statue at the site for the policemen who died that day. They perpetuated the re-writing of history by treating the goons as heroes and the heroes as provocateurs. And what happened? The Weather Underground blew the statue up. Then the city re-constructed it, and the Weather Underground blew it up again.

Today at the Haymarket site stands a statue that gives mention to the movement, and at least tries to be somewhat balanced in the commemoration of those sacred events in Chicago’s history. It’s a sign that we have taken baby steps. Much like with the election of Obama, we have taken baby steps.

Nonetheless, the majority of this country lives in a state of precariousness. Median income is currently at $32,1403, a figure that fails to keep up with the disastrous increase in the cost of basic necessities such as food produce, heat and electricity. Meanwhile, Americans are shackled by student debt through much of their professional life, preyed on by credit cards, real estate companies and other lenders, provided poor alternatives for cheap and efficient public transportation on the average, and offered little if any job security.

In order to get a job, the average American is increasingly employed through an intermediary for the first several months or years, in order that the workers’ subservience is evidenced before the company or organization risks giving them real employment. People in situations like these, where they lack health care, where they lack humane sick and leave time, where they lack just job security, are not rightfully employed. They are enslaved by a society that has been run by crooks within the Capitalist class for far too long.

I sense this feeling coming from the Other Chicago, especially from my fellow young adults: that we cannot sit idly by any longer and allow the thieves on Wall Street together with the criminal political class to decide the direction of our city and our country. While Obama may amount to some amount of change, he is not the whole-hearted manifestation of the Other Chicago. He is an attractive and intelligent man amongst thieves and the morally backward. He is a well-spoken gentleman in a political class that generally produces imbeciles and charlatans. He is change, but not the change we can all believe in.

Americans voted for peace in 2006 and 2008; they voted to stop having their substance eaten out by the military industrial complex. Dwight Eisenhower once commented: “I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”4 We have arrived at that hour: the hour where the government stops starving its citizenry in order to pay for perpetual war, and the perpetual construction of armaments that we don’t need. Even the Pentagon is asking for its own budget to be cut: when will a sense of reason return to Washington’s ruling elite!?

I have decided to launch a campaign to steal Rahm Emanuel’s soon-to-be vacated seat away from the crooks that have called it home for time immemorial. This is a district that covers the heart of Chicago’s north and northwest side: a district that is nearly half immigrant, that is a majority working and middle class, and that has been pummeled by years of war and decreasing social protection. They are a manifestation of the Other Chicago, of Upton Sinclair’s Chicago of enduring workers and immigrants made to navigate a treacherous political and environmental landscape.

In the words of Upton Sinclair, let us give voice to the Other Chicago: “we shall organize them for the victory! We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us-and Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!”

Rahm accepted the offer, thus abandoning a district as soon as it had renewed his mandate at the handsome cost of $1.88 million: a pretty hefty campaign coffer given the lack of any viable opposition in either round of election. And so it goes in the American Congress, where 90% of elections amount to a check mark next to the guy with the right party next to his name, though somehow millions of dollars get shuffled around each time.

Emanuel continued the 5th district tradition of being a dirty scoundrel: preceded in time by current Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and Dan “the felon” Rostenkowski prior to that. To date, the grassroots has been unable to pierce through and at least claim the district for a decent congressman a la the other Chicago reps Jesse Jackson Jr., Danny Davis, Bobby Rush, Luis Gutierrez and Jan Schakowsky.

Emanuel was groomed by the Clinton crowd, where he worked to trumpet welfare reform, the Crime bill, the continued Apartheid in Israel, and the American-led massacre in the Balkans. Upon taking control of the 5th district, he picked up where Rockin’ Rod left off with the Iraq War: Blagojevich voted to authorize it and Emanuel was one of its biggest supporters among Democrats. He continuously voted to fund this imperial crusade that has bankrupted the American worker, in spite of the fact that his district is a classic midwestern amalgamation of workers and immigrants.

When Emanuel was announced as the recipient of Obama’s first political prize, I was sitting in the Wolf Trap Motel in Vienna, Virginia on the outskirts of the Washington, DC sprawl. I was in town visiting friends and doing a little freelance translation work while taking in the insider’s insight to the election. Just two days prior, I drove to Manassas and watched Obama’s last rally before the election: the “Yes we can” chants were still ringing in my head as I watched Wolf Blitzer babble on about how Emanuel was a dangerously partisan choice by Obama. The corporate spin machine was bouncing off the walls of the motel room and intermingling with the headache from the rally chants.

My mind was beginning to numb, and so I shut the tube off and walked to the adjacent Mexican restaurant for dinner with my Alaskan belle. We split an order of steak fajitas and chatted about the direction of the country: I imagine we weren’t the only people chewing on steak and chatting about politics on this beautiful fall afternoon in the beltway.

I then decided to casually announce: “You know what? I think I need to go back and show Obama-Emanuel what we can do! I got people on the north side of Chicago! Lots of them! And I am pretty sure they want some substantive change that we can all believe in.”

A few phone calls later and the campaign to elect Matt Reichel to replace Rahm Emanuel in Illinois’ 5th district had begun. Before leaving town, I filed with the FEC and began combing my friends and associates in the political world for people that are ready to push forward with a grassroots campaign in Chicago. We then spent a few weeks ironing out details, and “testing the waters,” as they say in beltway parlance.

After surveying the district and the list of party hacks likely to vie for this seat, I can say with a marked enthusiasm that we are ready for the challenge posed by the election. In visiting churches and community centers in the district, I have talked to numerous people who delivered essentially this message: “The good news is we got rid of the bastard!”

However, this will only remain a good thing if the 5th district’s revolving door of crooks, liars and creeps is jammed shut.

Rahm might try to slate someone, and I would say that the early favorite is state rep. Sara Feigenholtz, who has begun raising money with an online candidate announcement. Another possibility is machine alderman Patrick O’Connor: the man who served me through the boyhood years and has submissively sat at Daley’s right hand all the while. Other names being thrown around include Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley and Deb Mell, the daughter of the legendary machine aldermen: the man whose first name is Alderman and last name is Mell.

This is all fantastic news: the more the merrier! Let the hacks divide the establishment endorsements and money, while my grassroots campaign pushes forward door-by-door all the way to victory in 2009. We will be vigorous in our operation: not leaving any stone unturned as we gather petition signatures, canvass the district, visit community functions and dinners, and ask the people of the 5th district to get behind the democratic wing of the Democratic party.

Some will find this announcement a bit surprising, given my penchant for criticizing the Democrats in particular and electoral politics more broadly. I tend to be more of a social movement type, not easily attracted to a Democratic Party that has readily sold off its constituents to big business.

However, I’ve also grown a bit fatigued of being told that progressives must wait on the sidelines while all power is given to the “pragmatic and centrist” among our ranks. For most of the last five years, peace activism has been relegated to the backburners as the imperial bloodbath has gained ground: the massacre deepening in Iraq and Afghanistan while spreading steadily into Pakistan. All the while, progressives have been working for the single biggest monolith of a candidacy ever, ultimately winning one for the trendier of the Wall Street candidates.

Aesthetic change has now arrived in Washington, but little of any substantive value will come of it unless we can amp up the chorus of opposition in the Congress and on the streets. We absolutely must give a voice to those who have been silenced: the champions of peace living in the Empire, the defenders of liberty facing an increasingly totalitarian society, and those who need to be bailed out, but instead have had to watch corporate criminals rob us of all the funny money that the treasury dreams of printing up.

After nearly five years of relatively movement-free politics in the U.S., I couldn’t endure sitting by and letting this seat be swallowed up by the DLC/Chicago machine monster that has called it home since the districts were re-drawn in ’90. I could not bear seeing some Chicago crook start calling his or herself a “progressive” in order to get elected! This appears to be what Feigenholtz is doing, and was most certainly the stunt pulled by Emanuel and Blagojevich when they were initially elected: “Oh don’t worry! I’m a progressive aka I believe in abortion!”

Instead, we shall offer a genuine progressive voice: a voice for an end to the greater Middle East war and occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, a voice for an end to the offensive saber rattling towards the Iranian government, a voice for universal single payer health care, and a voice for the repeal of the Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act and FISA.

When we gain some steam, the machine candidates will undoubtedly decide to fight dirty against our campaign of principle. They will denigrate me as a peace activist nut and try to convince the district that they must support someone who is willing to drop cluster bombs on Afghani schoolchildren in the name of freedom. They’ll use their friends at the Tribune and Sun-Times to paint me as a crazy Leninist who needs to be taken down for his radical views about providing government funded universal health care just like the rest of the developed world. They will say I am too inexperienced because I haven’t yet held any position where I was required to compromise my values in order to support a machine of war and imperialism.

They might even criticize me for living in Paris for nearly 4 years: to which I will say that international experience might possibly be a good thing for a congress that seems to have no qualms about allowing the president to murder innocent civilians throughout the globe with little to no congressional oversight. Maybe what we need is someone who has interacted with the world, learned another language and culture, and is ready to bring the United States back into the world community.

One thing is for sure: the nation needs more principled people in positions of power. The Dems once soothed the ailing masses with talk of a “New Deal,” but these days progressives have been stuck with a raw deal. They are disparaged in the mainstream press, treated as uncompromising fools by the party hacks, and made to sacrifice their belief system to vote for substance-free candidates in the name of aesthetic change.

And so let’s show up at the ballot box one more time, in a place where our efforts will sting the establishment in a particularly prescient fashion! Together, I know we will prevail in stealing this seat away from the crooks that have called it home for far too long. The machine candidates are going to divide the established endorsements and money. Meanwhile, we will march along as a candidacy of principle, securing the votes of those who refuse to be bought or bossed by the Clinton/Daley/Emanuel wing of the Democratic Party. As progressives, I know we can hold our head high and secure victory in Illinois’ 5th district.

Even those in charge of the international political system seem a bit confused.

John McCain was most certainly perplexed when he said “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” Huh?

Obama, meanwhile, was also a bit confused. His reaction was this: “No matter how this conflict started, Russia has escalated it well beyond the dispute over South Ossetia and invaded another country. Russia has escalated its military campaign through strategic bombing and the movement of its ground forces into the heart of Georgia. There is no possible justification for these attacks.” This is more elegant than his opponent’s reaction, but no great departure from the still prevalent foreign policy philosophy of “American Exceptionalism.” In the 21st century, just like the 20th, Americans and their mercenaries can drop bombs everywhere they want, and no one else has the right to defend themselves and their citizenry.

This is all pretty confusing to those people who thought the Cold War was over.

Many Americans are just as confused as me. They wonder “If the Cold War is really over, what ever happened to the peace dividend?”

In fact, matters seem to have gotten worse for Americans pushing for a social democratic state. The coffers of the military industrial complex continue to be fed at increasingly record rates, as public infrastructure programs from dams and levees to schools and community centers continue their savage decline.

On the other issue currently widening the diplomatic cleavage between the Americans and Russia, there are all sorts of confusing facts for anyone who believed the Cold War was over. This issue has to do with Missile Defense, or the Missile Shield, or however you’d like to call it. In this article, I am going to avoid any confusion by calling it Star Wars II. This way we are thinking about Ronald Reagan, the beloved 80’s, and the fictional capacity of humans to shoot down missiles in space. I believe it is important for journalists to strive for the truth, and, as such, calling this program a “missile shield” would lower me to the level of the New York Times et al.

If this system was actually meant to be used for defense, then now might be a good time to mention that it was never proven to work as such. The currently deployed mechanism over the Pacific Ocean passed its second test this June, but this only serves to counter against an overall failure rate of roughly 70% going back to Reagan’s Star Wars. Furthermore, these are unrealistic scenarios wherein the missile launch isn’t hidden behind a decoy system. The chances are basically zero that the system could ever successfully shoot down an incoming missile accompanied by the dozens of decoys that are common to any launch. This is what top scientists have been warning since the beginning days of Star Wars II, which saw it’s birth during Clinton’s final year (though Clinton did pretend to leave the decision to the next administration, his failure to cut funding for continual testing essentially left the system open for Bush Jr.). As recently as 2003, the Union of Concerned Scientists released the following statement with regards to the scientific feasibility of the Star Wars system: it has “no demonstrated defensive capability and will be ineffective against a real attack by long-range ballistic missiles”

Meanwhile, neither of the two major presidential candidates offers any hope of dismantling the project. McCain, predictably, wants full throttle ahead, while Obama’s position is: “If we can responsibly deploy missile defenses that would protect us and our allies we should – but only when the system works. We need to make sure any missile defense system would be effective before deployment.” As I already mentioned, the military has succeeded in a rigged test as recently as June, and will gladly oblige an Obama administration with further passed tests, as long as the purse strings are opened for their mercenaries at Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

As I’ve already foreshadowed, the system isn’t even meant to work for the reason given: defense against missiles. In fact, calling it “missile defense” is a lot like calling the U.S. military’s prime organ the “Department of Defense” or saying “In the 21st Century, no nation invades another nation.”

The Orwellian Doublespeak is so common these days that nobody believes what they are told. The foundations of the international diplomatic system are resting on shaky ground as the empty and insipid rhetoric escalates out of control.

The Bush administration claims that the missiles in Poland are there to protect the U.S. and it’s European allies from attacks by “Rogue States,” such as Iran. So are you going to expect the Russians to believe this? The Americans are spending all of this money to deploy a system that no one believes will ever work for the advertised purpose to protect against missiles that don’t exist and are unlikely to ever exist!? When Russia claims that the recently brokered Star Wars deal with Poland has more to do with stationing military hardware near its borders so as to obtain a strategic advantage, this is because it’s the only explanation that makes any scientific and political sense! And yet we are supposed to get whipped into a patriotic fervor against the Russians because their government is capable of seeing through this thin cloud of smoke!? And people say that the Cold War ended nearly two decades ago!?

Meanwhile, it’s worth mentioning that there are still thousands of nuclear weapons lying around: the vast majority in the United States and Russia.

In the early days of Bush 2, the American President met with then-President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, for the purpose of reaching a handshake agreement on nuclear warhead reduction. Rather than formalizing nuclear disarmament commitments in line with their obligation under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, they agreed to an un-formalized reduction in their respective nuclear arsenals by two-thirds. With no enforcement mechanism put into place, the treaty was merely a means of squelching perceived dissent from the grassroots, which has traditionally been very hostile towards nuclear weapons.

The United States and Russia maintain roughly 10,000 of these city-destroying bombs each, with enough firepower in either country to easily destroy all life on Earth. As such, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists currently has the Doomsday Clock at 5 minutes to Midnight, which is its closest point since the mid 80’s. For those unfamiliar with this mechanism, Midnight means annihilation of humankind. If relations between the two primary nuclear powers continue to corrode any further, we should expect to see the clock slide a minute or two closer. The longer these relics of the 20th century remain, hundreds of them on hair trigger alert, the closer we come to the reality of Mutually Assured Destruction.

The madness of the Cold War continues! What was, after all, the defining characteristic of the Cold War? It was the extensive use of visceral propaganda in order to justify the exorbitant funding of a military industrial complex and police state paid for by your tax dollar with absolutely no corners cut.

And one thing is clear: no government is going to ever voluntarily put an end to this arrangement since almost everyone holding national elected office are buddies with the war profiteers.

However, Dwight Eisenhower, the same man that warned Americans of the impending rise of the military industrial complex, also left us with a little wisdom on how we can finally put an end to this insanity. He was once quoted as saying: “I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

One of these days, the grassroots will have to finally put an end to all manifestations of the Cold War: be it an ongoing propaganda war against Communists or Terrorists or Russians or Grenadians or the French or what have you.

It is time we stop treating our leaders like great statesmen, and start realizing them as the truly disgusting people that they are. The late, great Kurt Vonnegut once wrote in the Nation that world leaders were addicted to war preparations in the same way that alcoholics are addicted to alcohol. He recommended: “From now on, when a national leader, or even just a neighbor, starts talking about some new weapons system which is going to cost us a mere $29 billion, we should speak up. We should say something on the order of, ‘Honest to God, I couldn’t be sorrier for you if I’d seen you wash down a fistful of black, beauties with a pint of Southern Comfort.’”

He wrote that piece back during the height of the Reagan Cold War in 1983. The advice remains just as prevalent today.

When traveling abroad, the state of distress becomes abundantly apparent upon return to the states: you can see the stress and discomfort steaming off of people. They are worried about everything from their job security to avoiding foreclosure on their house to paying to get to work as gas prices rise closer to the international norm. They are distressed because they are forced to live in a world of savage competition, wherein their well-being brutally hinges on the success of the market.

They look and look for work and finally find some gig where an intermediary hires them for a “trial period” that can last up to a full year, after which they might get lucky and obtain health care and start accruing some measly vacation time. Then they are told to contact “human resources” if they have any questions.

It’s amazing how the self-confidence of individuals is destroyed when they are treated as a mere object, rewarded for a year of good behavior with health care: generally considered a human right throughout the civilized world.

So I can understand the stressed and moody nature of Americans: this is quite expected from people seen as little more than a number in the extremely mechanistic economy that has been constructed since the dawn of Reaganism.

But this barely scratches the surface of the problem.

People are afraid to dissent even in the most mundane manner. What passes for the left of the American spectrum is anyone who awakens to the idea that indiscriminate bombing of millions of people in all corners of the globe might be morally problematic. This is the “send in a check” crowd: their big idea for how to fight the man is by joining a bureaucratic non-profit. They don’t realize that all they’re doing with said donation is adding their name to a list so that they will continue to be solicited in the future.

Sure it’s become a la mode to hate on the president! But rarely does anyone launch anything resembling a complete criticism of the overarching problem: the violence of Americana.

By Americana, I mean the culture of manifest destiny and American exceptional-ism: the idea that the globe is ours to rule, and that violence is an acceptable means of doing it.

In the end, this violence has been our biggest problem.

It was the problem on September 11th, 2001 when 3,000 people were indiscriminately killed by religious zealots.

The zealotry continued and the violence escalated as the United States wasted no time in responding by indiscriminately bombing men, women and children in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Violence continued to be the problem as the American imperial media machine launched a full frontal assault against reason, diplomacy and democracy: shutting out anyone dissenting against the American fetish for violence.

Let us not forget history!

Violence has always been the problem.

Violence was the problem when over 50,000 Americans died while our armed forces murdered over 1,000,000 Vietnamese in the Great Holy War against “Communism.”

Violence was the problem when greater than 200,000 Japanese civilians were instantly incinerated by the Great Bomb, despite the fact that Japanese forces were in full retreat. The Americans felt the need to show off their toy to scare the Communists, and two cities on the globe was a small price to pay to attain that great Freudian glory.

And let us not forget that the nation was founded upon the concept of violence. The Puritans, no longer fit to live in an increasingly Enlightened Europe, had to find somewhere to rest their heads at night. Of course, the native inhabitants of the New World wanted nothing to do with them, but they were never asked their opinion. They were just terrorized, moved and killed.

The same went for the laborers, stolen from Africa and not remunerated for providing nearly all of the wealth in the New World. The violence of the whip and rifle was brought upon these people in order that the white man could live as comfortably, nay more comfortably, than they did in their native country.

The great genocide of the native peoples of the Americas and the African slaves imported to work the land stands as the single greatest crime against humanity over the last 500 years. And it was upon this brutal crime that Americana was founded. It was this violence that started the cycle that continues unabated today.

You can see this violence in American cities, which are often on par with the least developed regions of the world for the utter despair inside of them. Offered little incentive for success, citizens of the urban ghetto are forced to fail: the only hope they see is via the brotherhood of gang warfare.

My boyhood home, Chicago, saw over 30 students killed on public school property during the last calendar year, 24 of them as a result of gunfire. While the murder rate has gone down throughout the city, it has gone up amongst the young, who have rapidly become the most marginalized sector of American society. The old are still clinging onto the paltry social safety net that once existed, from social security to decent pensions and the occasional medical care for good measure.

The young, meanwhile, understand that they are done. What do people my age (27) and under have to look forward to? – A rapidly declining currency and stock market, a vanishing social security system, the greatest stagnation of wages since the 1930’s, and the fantastic implosion of the oil empire that has maintained American well-being since the end of the 2nd world war.

The young are done, put a fork in them, because they can’t find a job that pays anything unless they have a degree, and then they have a job that can’t pay off their enormous student debt. And the college degree, after all, is nothing but proof that they have been socialized into perfect subservient citizens, as few Americans are capable of pulling off a truly liberal arts education.

But many, when faced with the choice between debt and a free ride, will choose a tour in the American armed forces. They will choose the route of violence rather than the route of hope. They will choose the route of Hollywood with its guns and explosions, only to find out that Hollywood had them good and duped. They will find that there is no glory in violence, especially when it’s violence for the benefit of a small elite portion of society.

This is why it is time to declare our independence from the violence of Americana.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

These rights are not unique to Americans, but belong to all members of the human family. And yet we continue to bring our epidemic of violence onto humans all over the world, from Latin America to the Balkans to the Middle East.

And obviously these rights are meant to extend to all Americans, and not be limited by race, religion and income. And yet the United States continues to dwarf the prison population of the remainder of the developed world: exposing huge portions of its minority population to a state violence that turns them into professional criminals rather than productive members of society. The Puritan roots have quite predictably developed into a surveillance society, where anything outside of the white, prudish norm is considered unacceptable.

And yet those outside of the white, prudish norm are in the majority! So let us declare our independence!

Let us declare our independence once and for all from the wretched rule of the Puritan business elite. Let us declare our independence from the violence of Americana, and put an end to her internal and external violence.

Let us ignore Barack Obama and listen to his preacher when he says “God Damn America.” Those words were not meant to divide but rather to unite. The vast majority of the population can come together beneath the words “God Damn America!,” because what has the violence of the American empire done for us?? What has being the most powerful nation on earth done for your average American?? What has all this bullying of innocent people throughout the world and in our own country done for anybody??

Doodley Squat!

And so now is the time to declare our independence!

A true patriot knows the teaching of Thomas Jefferson, that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

We know that recent history, especially under the autocratic control of the current King George, has been one of repeated abuses and usurpations. “Let facts be submitted to a candid world:

1) “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

2) He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

3) He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

4) He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

5) He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

6) He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.

7) For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury.

8) He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.”

We cannot endure any longer the horrific nightmare of our current state. People from all walks of life agree, and I know this because the Internet has brought us together. Any time I publish an article of dissent, I am joined in a chorus of support of people from all regions and all backgrounds. I know that we have the capacity to defeat the violence of Americana in favor of a peaceful land of plenty.

It will not be easy and it will not be quick, but we can take some pleasure in making the first step. And this step is appropriately done on the fourth of July; it is the step taken by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin in 1776. We have to begin by declaring our independence. We have to begin by saying “America! We don’t need you anymore! You have not been good to us, and for my health and security, we must divorce!” You wouldn’t stay with an abusive spouse and so you shouldn’t stay with a violent nation.

As the Empire falls along with its currency and its respect in the civilized world, so should its government. The dusk of the American empire should be a joyous moment for Americans, for at last we can declare our independence from the violence of Americana.

Every four years it seems like an awful idea no matter where you live, whether it be a “swing state” or not.

Every four years the usual imbeciles line up behind the Dems: from Eric Alterman to Todd Gitlin, and the majority of those congregating around fluff sites like Moveon.org.

During these periods, the movements go into shut down mode, our armed forces murder thousands of innocent civilians each month, and the most absentminded of the peace activists blabber on about the need to support the troops.

Meanwhile, times get progressively tougher for your average dissenter, already pushed to the farthest margins of American society. A subservient culture has arisen in the Land of the Free, wherein truth telling and critical discussion are seen as signs of mental and physical weakness. You are told to suck it up and stop complaining: just accept the hardships of life and work 60 hours a week with no health care whilst being treated disparagingly because you have a clue.

This mass media culture rewards idiots. One thing that separates the United States from its European counterparts is the fact that the bourgeois culture in the former isn’t remotely appreciable. It was always foul and has merely gotten worse as my wretched generation has come to the fore. It’s a generation of insipid frat boys: rising through the ranks of corporate America not through their cunning and intellect, but rather via their ability to manipulate the show that passes for American culture. The louder and more demonstrative you are of your clueless-ness, the richer and more powerful you get. Is it any wonder that we ended up with the president we have?

Is it any wonder that our next president will probably be Barack Obama? For all intents and purposes, he was groomed by the morally-void University of Chicago, where he taught in the law school just prior to entering politics. What a record the UC has! They have already produced several members of the Bush cabal, including Paul Wolfowitz and John Ashcroft. I needn’t go in great detail about what they teach you at the University of Chicago, as my old friend at the University of Illinois, Dr. Francis Boyle, has already done so.

Now take it from someone born and raised in Chicago. What do Chicagoans think of the University thereof? For the most part, they find the campus to be an island of snobbish assholes fenced off from its surrounding ghetto. The culture of the Hyde Park neighborhood that it occupies is typical high brow progressivism: people showing off their worldliness by living in an urban environment and studying at a world-renown campus, conveniently forgetting that it’s world renown for spearheading the Manhattan project and introducing the underpinnings to neo-liberal economics and neo-conservative politics. With its eerily gothic architecture and its positioning in a tragically unequal part of Chicago, the University is like hell on earth. And its contributions to the world have gone a long way into turning the entire planet into a fiery inferno.

Their latest contribution to the world? Barack Obama!

There are numerous problems with this man, many of which have been rather thoroughly covered by any progressive thinking news site. As soon as he finally secured the nomination, he went and ass kissed the totalitarian AIPAC lobby to ensure these sponsors of terror that the U.S. would remain the world’s largest perpetrator of violence once he enters office. Prior to that, he built his entire presidential campaign on lies.

Two fibs, in particular, helped catapult him to predominance in the primary game. The first one is that he has won hard political battles before and will continue to in November. This millionaire graduate of one of the world’s premiere law programs was virtually handed his senatorial seat after the crippled Illinois Republican party had to ship Alan Keyes in from Maryland to fill the shoes left by Jack Ryan, a man whose divorce records were pried open by shifty goons from the Obama campaign aiming to find dirt. And what they found is the kind of stuff that sinks an American politician: evidence of sexual patterns deviating from the Puritan norm whilst touring Paris with his former wife.

And prior to that Obama was a state Senator in a district where there’s only one party: one infamously corrupt and spiteful party. If you are the Democrat chosen to win, then you win; the election is a moot point. Then, there was 2000, when Obama attempted to un-seat incumbent Congressman Bobby Rush from the right, and lost by a margin of 2 to 1. In other words, Obama had won jack shit prior to this presidential election.

The second errant claim made by the Obama camp is that he was against the war from the beginning. Now can someone explain to me how an impassioned opponent of war entering the U.S. Senate could possibly vote repeatedly to fund the war he was supposedly against from the beginning? Where was he when the Democrats took over the Congress and the anti-war American public was waiting for a leader in Washington to take charge of getting it done? One would expect a supposedly progressive and popular senator to do just that. Instead, he just went babbling on about how Iran should be wiped off the map if real evidence were found to demonstrate their intent to develop one measly nuclear warhead in a world plagued by the peril of 20,000 American nukes.

While the grassroots gave Obama and the Democrats everything they needed to run this administration and its wars out of Washington, Obama was too busy stumping for the annihilation of Hamas, voting for the appointment of Condoleeza Rice, and calling out fellow Illinois Senator Richard Durbin for making the obvious comparison of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and a Nazi concentration camp.

All that I have learned from Obama’s brief tenure in the Senate is that he isn’t even the more progressive of Illinois’ two senators, and he most certainly is not a skilled leader. During a time when a good leader would be like Dennis Kucinich in the house and demand a debate on impeachment, organize members of Congress to vote against war funding, and spearhead a movement for a cabinet level Department of Peace, Obama was out writing books in preparation for his presidential bid.

He was out praising Ronald Reagan and denouncing the ’68 movements for being naïve and divisive. Ronald Reagan is his man: the architect of the Latin American holocaust of the ‘80’s, wherein the United States dropped bombs everywhere from Nicaragua to El Salvador and Grenada. Ronald Reagan, the man who alongside his wife Nancy told Americans to stop bitching and go to work. The man who began the reversal of the paltry social system that once existed in the United States. Ronald Reagan: the man who made sure that my generation would be one of idiots, unable to think critically, and un-interested at being global citizens.

Meanwhile, the last major social revolution, wherein social movements throughout the world shocked the prevailing social superstructure, is derided as naïve and short-sighted. That moment where students and workers together tore down the state apparatus in Paris, challenged the political elite of the University system in California, and were beaten down by police violence in Chicago, is seen as foolishness by this man. The last time that society functioned in the United States, wherein people had the nerve to demand structural shifts and a bridging of great sociological cleavages, was a stupid era.

Just to clarify. Ronald Reagan, the political architect of the destruction of the American social state and the dumbing down of society, is an admirable man. Meanwhile, the 1968 revolution, the underpinning of the European social democratic state and of New Social Movements from Seattle to Chiapas, is naïve and stupid.

Obama is essentially the American answer to the Extreme Center. You combine right wing economic policy with politically correct social policy, the worst of all worlds, and what you get is this horrific political tendency. L’extrême centre was a term invented by the French to describe the movement by François Bayrou in last year’s presidential elections. The idea behind it is that the old left-right discourse is dated, and what is needed is a time of coming together and happy fuzziness.

It’s the same ideology that drives the Europhiles, intent on creating a super-state despite repeated protest from the pesky people. These high and mighty extremists don’t care what the actual workers and toilers beneath them think, for they are backwards and haven’t progressed to the point of realizing that there are no more questions to be asked: we need to all accept neo-liberal economics and be cute and PC about it.

If you question a neo-liberal European super state or a two party plutocracy in the United States, you are derided as naïve and foolish. Your voice doesn’t count, despite the fact that you are clearly in the majority. The European Constitution/Treaty of Lisbon has squarely lost its last three public referenda. Meanwhile, in the United States, the vast majority of people don’t bother ever voting, because they have nothing to do with either choice offered in any election. It’s only the elitist minority that has any thing to gain from the extreme center.

So we are told to unite under “one United States of America,” as if that will automatically make everything swell. This is a disgusting lie, since the United States is in a state of absolute disrepair. There is a crisis ongoing basically anywhere a crisis could possibly exist. There is a public health crisis, as 100 million Americans are either un- or under-insured. There is a public infrastructure crisis, as people from New Orleans up through the heartland have found themselves dangerously vulnerable to nature’s occasional attack. There is an education crisis, as the United States has to continuously ship its engineers, doctors and professors in from other countries in order to compete. Meanwhile, the average American worker enters the work force $30-40,000 in debt, forced to dump a hearty chunk of their monthly income on paying off their exorbitant university fees.

Oh, and I almost forgot that there is that little problem with the Dollar. The currency that once made the world go around has been traded in for Euros by Jay-Z, as the real bling has jumped the pond. Who wants to hustle in a currency that’s running on par with the Swiss Franc and Canadian Dollar!?

Meanwhile, there is an ongoing cultural crisis. Anything resembling real cultural pursuit in the arts, literature and philosophy has been almost entirely trivialized by Hollywood. Southern California is, for all practical purposes, the center of the Empire. American power has always hinged on the American capacity to market its mediocre film and music industry to the world, thus re-enforcing the predominance of the English language and the strength of the imperial armies present on every continent. Hollywood has spent a great deal of its time and energy in glorifying war and warriors, treating the thoughtful and effeminate male disparagingly, while romancing the putrid characters played by the likes of Bruce Willis and the Governator.

Furthermore, your average citizen feels only as important as his financial worth. Any other value, be it intellectual, creative, or emotional, is of little importance in the Land of the Free, which, of course, would be a lot better known as the Land of the Cheap. People are made to be in bargain mode, falling down the cultural slippery slope via Walmart shopping sprees and fast food dining.

On Sunday, we lost a man who had a lot of insight on the decay of American culture and its fetish with cheap commodity. George Carlin also had advice for what to do with this election and all American elections. In his honor, I am going to sit home on Election Day rather than face the disgusting choice between two Reaganites and a token vote on the egomaniac Ralph Nader or the inept American Green party.

If you want change you can believe in, you’re best off convincing 10,000 of your best friends to take to the streets and fight the pigs. It’s only these movements, from Berkeley to Seattle to Chicago, that have ever changed the social tides. Electing a president has given us some fair entertainment, from the tragedies of Camelot to the precious days of Monica Mania. However, the American politician is too focused on his career to do anything of any good for the American people. Hope is in the streets, not at the ballot box!