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!

This all started on a regularly slow December evening, ending over a delightful rouge from the affordable Petite Récolte series from “Nicolas.” When you live as I do, with little to no money to your name, you know how to fine treasures at 3 Euros a bottle. For American budget travelers to France: remember the Petite Récolte. Anyways, this night was winding down in much the same fashion as any other: discourse about how the “enlightened” Europeans were being rapidly led into the neo-liberal wastebin by the “ignorant” Americans. Sarkozy, Merkel, Brown and even Sweden had swung to the right! At the time, Italy and Spain were the only significant holdouts, and the former’s fragile lefty coalition was quite clearly falling apart.

So the only hope seemed to be that the French still knew how to take to the streets. They elect horrendous leaders, but they handle their social movement business far better than any other country on Earth.

Before going to bed alongside my goût du moment, I quickly checked my e-mail. And there was a message from the Kucinich for President Campaign, wherein he mentioned their need for interns. I responded, half jokingly.

One week later, I received an e-mail from a juvenile-in-charge, who told me to choose between New Hampshire and Nevada for campaigning purposes. This was the biggest no-brainer of my life, as a few days later I was airborne en route to an all-expense paid for vacation in Vegas.

One could say that it’s a bit peculiar to be campaigning for a progressive-leaning candidate in the city of material greed. The majority hippie contingent in the campaign seemed to find the place quite awful, repeating over and over that they were stuck in the “belly of the beast.” Not me! I adore Vegas, because it’s honest capitalism: it breaks the market system down to its most fundamental and comprehensible components, so that every jerk in the universe can understand that they only have a chance in a million at ever doing anything great with their life.

Besides, where else can you be working on a presidential campaign, find yourself rolling around at night jet-lagged, and then just jump up, walk down the hall and buy a slushie margarita for $2 and start playing video poker?

They put us up at the “Palace Station,” a middle of the road joint on the west side of I-15, made famous by the Juice’s latest incursion with the law. I arrive at four in the afternoon a few days after New Years, only to find that the person at the front desk had never heard of Kucinich despite the fact that dozens of campaigners were staying there. I try unsuccessfully to get a hold of my contacts, and irritated I decide to check into one of the casino bars. I went with the Irish theme establishment, as little would quench the thirst built up over a marathon day of travel better than a few pints of Guinness.

I soaked down the famous stout over Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, his premiere and most revealing novel. He had only just lost his innocence as he recounts the life of Amory Blaine, a child of privilege who ultimately derides the American caste system and hints at a conversion to Socialism. Blaine’s metamorphosis is quite contrived, but perhaps purposely so. I think Fitzgerald is critiquing a bit more than the Princeton elite in this novel; I believe he is also taking a poke at the Gauche Caviar: those who wash their hands of society’s inequalities by artificially cheerleading movements for justice.

While it exists all over the Western world, the American “left” is particularly plagued by this dynamic. Take the Obama campaign for instance: white suburbanites get to feel fuzzy and “open-minded” by voting for this frat boy of a politician. Furthermore, they are inspired into thinking that they are part of an immense moment of change, wherein all the “cool” people are uniting against the forces of evil. Meanwhile, the outside observer scratches his head wondering why this warmonger is any different than all of the other psychopaths in Washington. Vote for Obama and he will open the floodgates to social movements, I’m told, even though he derided the ‘68 movements in his spirituality-laced load of crap entitled The Audacity of Hope.

Unfortunately, this Kucinich campaign was no exception to the rule of the “hip” do-gooder pretending to care. The vast majority of kids involved were so proud of doing something “helpful for humanity” that they lost track of what exactly was going on: they were selling their souls to work for a guy who was part of an imperialist party that excels in selling out votes of the working class to Wall Street.

Dennis and his young English Belle loved the attention: ambitious minds willing to be subservient to their political idols. They could seemingly sense that while still quite young, I am neither ambitious nor subservient, and so Elizabeth, in particular, treated me quite disparagingly from the beginning. I wasn’t there to stroke their ego, and I needed them for nothing. I was doing this because I think that Dennis is the best American legislator, which is far from being any sort of compliment. And I wouldn’t have done it at all if I didn’t get to go to Vegas.

In general, the campaign was made up of kids pasting together their CVs, with hopes of becoming full-fledged political hacks some day. This might explain why Dennis did worse in 2008 than in 2004, and lost nearly 100% of the country’s anti-war sentiment to a Republican (Ron Paul) and an imperialist Democrat (Barack Obama).

But the problem with Dennis’s presidential run goes deeper than Dennis, and goes to the heart of why there is no real “left” in the United States. I feel silly even referring to the “left,” since it’s rare to find an American under 50 that even understands the left-right distinction with any sort of clarity. So instead I will refer to “progressives,” though sometimes I am unsure that I am progressive myself, given some of the nonsense espoused by people identifying themselves as such. What I ran into with Dennis, as with nearly every progressive non-profit in the country, is a swarm of politically correct droids who really scared me shitless with their remarkable ability to have no sincere emotion and very little original thought. You figure that on occasion you could have a few beers and a real heart-to-heart with someone about what brings them to this candidacy or what they think about the bigger picture and so on, but these campaign goons never lose their plastic façade. It is scarily remarkable! That fake smile I saw plastered over everyone’s young and soulless face had me wanting to bring Dennis into custody for destroying what could have been ambitious, unique and creative people.

But then I realized that this wasn’t Dennis’s fault; this is a societal problem. Americans never learn how to socialize, since there are very few cultural mores directing social behavior. You add to this the grossly consumerist society bombarded with ads on every ounce of public space, and people find it quite normal to pretend to live. It’s rare to find an American, especially among those under about 50 years old, who ever demonstrate the remotest interest in what you think or believe. They will often show this fake, passing interest in what you say, and, for the sake of being politically correct, will over-exaggerate their enthusiasm for your ideas, but rarely anything sincere.

There was never a moment where I felt that the campaign train wasn’t completely derailed. There wasn’t even a day that passed where I felt that I had anything meaningful to do. In a state where Ron Paul’s anti-war candidacy finished 2nd, ahead of John McCain, Kucinich was entirely off the map. When I did finally find the occasion to leaflet and talk to potential voters, I found that almost no one had ever heard of him.

It was announced to campaign staff that the ship had sunk as soon as he was denied entry to the last Vegas debate. Meanwhile, he felt so bad for dragging so many “stellar” interns into this pathetic campaign that he decided to invite us to Cleveland to work on his congressional re-election campaign. Normally by this point I would have taken the next Airbus to Paris, but I had gotten myself romantically entangled. While sipping $2 slushie margaritas at the whirlpool, I met an Alaskan delight who was equally fed up as me with the loser-culture around us. Despite the old saying about what happens in Vegas . . . we decided that we might as well take the free room and board in Cleveland and get to know each other a little better.

Dennis put us up in apartments across from his office on Lorain Avenue in Cleveland Ward 19. These were basic lodgings with basic amenities, though certainly sufficient for their purpose. His part of town, rich in its Irish workingman tradition, has recently become increasingly Middle Eastern in flavor, as markets and restaurants reflecting this trend have popped up throughout. Cleveland, infamous for its inflamed river and rampant poverty, has all sorts of hidden treasures. Furthermore, it is culturally what I am used to, being a native of Chicago: no-nonsense working class Catholics. Because of the early Lenten schedule this year, we were campaigning right in the middle of fish fry time: marching into people’s Friday evening suppers with the famous yellow “Dennis!” placards, stickers and buttons, most often to cheers by his avid supporters.

Dennis is certainly not just another congressman. It is rare in the United States to find an elected official who is so well known and appreciated by his constituency. Almost everyone you would talk to at labor rallies or church picnics would have some touching Dennis story, or know someone who knew one of his brothers or some third degree of connection to Cleveland’s populist hero.

This is to say that for how backwards and absent-minded his presidential campaign was, his local grassroots effort was on track. Much of the reason for this has to do with the work of his labor-friendly campaign staff, including the alpha male and former MUNY Light union head Greg Somerville. Greg’s connection with Dennis goes back to the former Boy Mayor’s unsuccessful attempt to save the public utility system, as the local banking elite forced the city into default to damn his efforts. Among labor leaders and movement makers, Dennis became a hero, and it is this connection that has cemented his seat in the congress as the nation’s most principled legislator.

I was like a pig in shit working with these blue collar Midwesterners. Greg would make fun of the holdovers from the presidential race, calling them “wa-hoos” and “wackos.” He referred to that campaign as “the biggest drum circle on Earth.” He was the first person I had met in weeks who was saying exactly what was on his mind. For the first time since passing customs, I felt like I was in a free country, and that I wouldn’t be hauled into PC Prison for expressing an emotion or heart-felt sentiment.

It is of little surprise that this is the culture that has actually elevated Dennis to power. It is built of real people looking out for their own interest. This isn’t people pretending to care about the world because it’s a la mode. This is a movement of people in the heartland making sure that their man in Washington is, indeed, one of their own.

It should also be of no surprise that the best legislator in the country comes from the Midwest and not from one of the trendy west coast cities. Instead, the west coast has given us this tragic culture of politically correct, which destroys any semblance of intelligent debate in the Land of the Free. The PC industry has grown to silly proportions. Rather than attack societal ills with actual change in the direction of racial and class equality, we pretend to by watching what we say and keeping data on what races are applying for what jobs.

That is what these bourgeois movements for “change” have produced in the United States: “nonsense upon stilts.” These are the words used by Jeremy Bentham to describe a similar phenomenon of his day: giving people “rights” rather than guaranteeing them liberty and equality. The Rights discourse and the culture of politically correct are both adaptations made for idiot societies in order that the government can continue to persecute with only a small minority realizing it. You convince everybody that they live in a free country by telling them that they have the right to free speech, whilst you do everything in your power to treat the words of dissenters as disparagingly as possible. This is easy to do when only the top .1% of the wealth has access to the airwaves.

In the end, March 4th, the Ohio primary came with expectations of victory by the incumbent over the pro-business punk of an Alderman, Mr. Joe Cimperman. In the end, the vote total for Dennis was a bit worrisome, as he barely eclipsed the 50% threshold in a five-way race (there were three small candidacies in addition to Dennis and Cimperman). Nonetheless, he hung on to his seat for another two years, fending off the fate faced by his friend Cynthia McKinney on two occasions.

I wobbled out of Cleveland alongside my new goût du moment, still caught in Vegas mode, and headed to her abode in Alaska. On the outskirts of Fairbanks, I was able to only passively listen to the ongoing charade of an election. Friends and family throughout the nation were caught in heated discussion over the Obama vs. Clinton drama. Me? I could care less if Obama wins in November, or if Hillary found a way to steal the Democratic nomination. It’s of little consequence to anybody. Until we build a movement, get out of the paralysis of politically correct thinking, and take to the streets like our brothers and sisters in France, Americans will continue to live as droids. People need to stop blinding themselves with the fog of this damn election and start taking their country back from the pits of this neo-liberal hell.

One of the most common tendencies popping up is Cops Gone Wild With Tasers. This controversial method of subduing “criminals” has entered university police stations, where officers can take out all of their pent up rage against people with brains.

At the University of Florida, John Kerry watched in complete subservience to a group of rent-a-cops who arrested and tased a student attempting to press the former presidential candidate on why he didn’t challenge the 2004 election results. Of course, in a functioning democracy with a functioning civil society, the crowd watching would have risen to his defense, and the distinguished senator most certainly would have commanded down the officers. At least, the cops should be relieved of their duty and thrown in jail for assaulting and electrocuting an innocent student, and the senator should be immediately relieved of duty for not standing up for democracy. Kerry took an oath to the constitution in becoming senator, and here we have footage of him circumventing that oath.

Meanwhile, an Iranian-American student at UCLA was tased and arrested in a computer lab for not presenting his ID in what appeared to be a profiled check. At worst, this student was doing what I have done for years because I am a cheapskate: sneaking into university computer labs to get Internet for free. Lucky for me, I haven’t been tased yet for minor and non-violent crimes.

A classic example of this runs after midnight on MSNBC under the header To Catch a Predator. The concept is simple: bait and entrap a bunch of harmless pushovers into supposedly soliciting a minor for sex on the Internet. In none of these cases are the people guilty of the charge, because they in fact chatted with of-age decoys: pretty little 19 year olds prostituting themselves for the pigs. Nonetheless, the “predators” are normally shown being tackled and forcibly restrained as if they were in Al Qaeda. On at least one occasion, the supposed predator was tased before being thrown to the ground, despite video evidence of him not resisting arrest.

In all of these cases, imagined charges are used as an excuse for cops fetishizing a chance to brutalize and humiliate people. Yes, I would surmise that the real sexual deviants in To Catch a Predator are the men in blue, long known as closet cases with repressed sexual desires stemming from a totalitarian household in their childhood. The host, Chris Hanson, also likely suffers from a sexual disorder where humiliating desperate men helps make him feel better about his own inadequacies.

Nonetheless, the sexual disorders present in police officers aren’t sufficient to explain the third tendency to be discussed in this article: “Cops Gone Wild in Airports.” Any cop on this planet would dream of working in a post-9/11 American airport, where the Gestapo runs free. Because of the irrational hysteria that hit the mainstream of the country after 9/11, the cops can use security as a trump card to get away with anything, including murder.

Fortunately, we have Youtube. Here is footage of a young woman getting thrown around by cops at Reagan Airport in D.C. And here is coverage of an extraordinary case of an Iraq War veteran getting brutally beaten at McCarron Airport in Vegas.

However, neither of these amounted to the cruel and unusual punishment seen at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX) on September 28th, where Carol Anne Gotbaum, wife of an influential labor advocate in New York, was restrained and ultimately killed.

The report officially handed down from the Goon Party of PHX was that Mrs. Gotbaum died while shackled and handcuffed in a holding cell at the airport. They claim that she was checked on every 15 minutes, until a 10-minute period elapsed wherein she stopped making noise. At this point, security spokespeople claim that she was found dead, with the handcuffs pulled around her neck, thus causing her suffocation.

Right. And so we should probably recruit Fox Mulder to handle the case, because short of witchcraft or black magic, this story can’t possibly be true.

Becky Ackers on LewRockwell.com has suggested another possibility: perhaps Gotbaum just so happened to be a contortionist. One out of every several thousand humans have the rare gift of extraordinary flexibility, where they can remove their shoulders from their sockets voluntarily, with little to no pain. So this could possibly explain how she was able to wrap handcuffs around her neck when they started around her wrists and behind her back.

More likely, she was killed when one of the coppers pinned her to the floor in response to her outrage at U.S. Airways’ mishandling of the departure process. A privileged Manhattan-ite, Gotbaum wasn’t used to having mindless bureaucrats push her around. But that’s what she had: idiots at an airport refusing to let her on a plane that was sitting out on the tarmac. The reason airport officials gave was that since 9/11 they can’t let people board a plane after the gate is closed, even before the departure time. She was also likely irate because the goons running the security checkpoint were responsible for the delay that caused her to miss her plane. She probably pleaded, as I would, in saying “How can you let me check in for a flight and go through security but then not let me on the plane!!!?”

I imagine that the rent-a-cops on hand were all obese or nearing it, as that is certainly the norm nowadays. Thus, a 250 lb. cop told to treat everyone as a possible terrorist meets a 120 lb. woman having a typical run in with airport workers, and he accidentally strangles her in his attempt to unjustly arrest her.

Then the cop, realizing that he killed her, panics and invents a story with the help of colleagues and supervisors, and they attempt to sell it to the public. The corporate press, as is also the modern day norm, then buys the story and only reluctantly reports conflicting accounts coming from the mouths of bystanders: some who claim that Gotbaum was unconscious before even making it to the holding cell.

What we have here is a continuation of the abuse of power by police officers that has been the norm since day one in the Land of the Free. What’s significantly new is that the abuse is no longer focused against racial and ethnic minorities, hippies, anarchists, communists and activists. Instead, in most of these cases, the victims were just white people with big mouths.

This probably means that I am wise to keep my main residence in Paris’ 12th arrondissement, as my living days in the states would be severely numbered.

However, civil society ought pipe up and start a public crusade against the growing Gestapo tendency in the United States. The other alternative is well predicted by 20th century history: you allow enough people with big mouths to be killed off, and there will soon be no one left to protect the remainder of the population.

The problem is that home ownership represents an extreme commodity fetish that is rapidly driving the economy into the tank. The current crisis is far more serious than the busting of the tech sector seven years ago because it goes to the core of what makes capitalism work: confidence in the market. Investment banks and lenders have lost confidence in the American debt system because Adjustable Rate Mortgages were dished out with reckless abandon to thousands of unqualified applicants over a five-year span that coincided with the so-called “housing boom.”

Many economists will come to the defense of the American juggernaut, and note that recently released growth indicators have the economy chugging along at a greater than 4% clip in the second trimester of 2007. The expected 3.4% rating was exceeded largely thanks to efforts to shorten up trade in-balance in the commercial sector, with exports going up 7.6% and imports going down 3.2%. This has opened up enough capital for enterprises to increase investment by 11.1%.

Of course, growth is not so awesome a measure of human well-being. In fact, it is largely decided by demand and consumption of goods and services, so that, if anything, high growth confirms that a society is materialistic more so than “well off.” It is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts: countries with an assured degree of wealth and material desire will continue to grow because they continue to desire to show off their wealth. This has an entire society focused on the upward slope: the stocks go up, the GNP goes up, and we all go up!!!

In fact, Americans are not well off, and haven’t been well off since the destruction of all forms of social democracy in the country. The poverty rate remains above 12%, dwarfing those of all of the major Western European powers. Meanwhile, 47 million Americans, about 18%, are without health insurance. And, as Michael Moore elegantly demonstrated, the other 82% are grossly under-insured.

Furthermore, as I have seen during my summer holiday to visit family and friends, the country is not culturally healthy. After one has spent enough time in Europe, it becomes difficult to return home. One is transported into a culture of capitalistic simplicities, where people have entire telephone conversations about their new car and flat-screen televisions. They carry on about their rich and satisfied life, as if they were all little princes and princesses spattered throughout the empire, believing themselves to be gorgeous in spite of their sub-par attire and bloated belly.

Even Johnny Depp went running, raising his family in southern France alongside Belle pop star Vanessa Paradis. His slam, not quite stated so elegantly, went as thus: “America is dumb, is something like a dumb puppy that has big teeth — that can bite and hurt you, aggressive … like it’s a kind a toy — a broken toy maybe. Investigate a little bit, check it out, get this feeling and then get out.” This cuts to the important theme of the aggressive nature of Americans: a constructive criticism offered by many of the most respectful European intellectuals who have spent time in the states. It’s as if the critics of the aggressive and cocky America, once plentiful in earlier epochs, have been locked up and penned somewhere. Perhaps they are just afraid to critique out of fear of sounding anti-American in a time of “national emergency.” Or maybe they find it taboo to lash out at the great American Dream.

I, for one, find it revealing that the president has spoken of protecting the “American Dream of home ownership.” This is a moment of truth for the empire, as even the emperor has admitted that the American dream has nothing to do with liberty and justice. And, of course, it would be tough for him to toot the horn of these greater ideals during a summer in which they were jubilantly signed away by congress, who has invited the Gestapo into our private phone conversations and emails. And sure my language can be shunned as irrationally strong, but I have spent years away only to recently return to experience first hand the horrible state of affairs in the Land of the Free.

People are paranoid: a paranoia fed by irrational illusions of grandeur, wherein every last citizen finds him and herself so important that they most certainly will be the next attacked. This is despite the fact that plenty of innocent Americans are attacked everyday: 4,000 troops have come back in body-bags, over 2 million Americans are sitting behind bars as I type, and nearly 300 million together are made to actively participate in the destruction of the planet through an irrational dependence on the automobile. Of all the reasons to be paranoid in this country, from overly aggressive cops, to lack of social protections, to a congress ready to unleash the hounds on its own citizens, people are fearful of Arabs blowing up buildings. They got two of our buildings, and we got them back with two of their countries.

Many more buildings in the U.S. will rest vacant or see the wrecking ball as the foreclosures continue to mount. Eventually, banks will tighten mortgage-lending practices, perhaps requiring that applicants have no outstanding student debt: a requirement that would preclude, what, 99.9% of Americans? As the defaults continue to pour in and the wrangling over asset value terrorizes international markets, the next great victim will be the almighty dollar. Already at record lows, the American currency will lose another half of its value in the next year, thus deepening the stock market crisis and trashing the value of American goods and services. Then, one great thing will change. Americans will see what the rest of the world has already perceived for years: they are living in a “third world country.” The terminology is not so nice, but it was American economic and political leaders who invented the phraseology, so I find it quite appropriate in this case. In my mind, “first world countries” are those that have developed the economic and social sophistication to provide all of their citizens with health care and a free system of high quality education. If you haven’t developed these two great social institutions, you have no right to make claims to first world grandeur. Americans have made this claim because of their cute Hollywood pizzazz that has left the impression that great wealth lingers here. Surely, there is wealth to be found, but the “American dream” has consistently prevented it from enriching the entire populace.

So when George W Bush calls for the protection of the American dream in his vain effort to save the American economy, the left should reply by re-defining the American dream. I think there is a left here somewhere hidden behind a rock. I used to know some people, usually on the payroll of an organization getting the bulk of its funding from folks like the Macarthur foundation. Perhaps they have been so chained by the orthodoxy of the not-for-profit left that they forgot about how to think for themselves and take a stand for the America they love. Take a Stand for Mark Twain’s America, Eugene Debs’ America, Albert Parsons’ America, Mario Savos’ America, Kurt Vonnegut’s America, Upton Sinclair’s America, and Martin Luther King Jr’s America! Let’s start talking about the Other American Dream: the dream of providing life, liberty and happiness for all, even if a big suburban abode can’t be part of the equation.