South of the Border

Director Oliver Stone was on the Tavis Smiley show promoting his movie about the new leftist governments and the social movements behind them in Latin America. As Beak knows,Latin America is no longer under U.S control ( Colombia being our last outpost) and the word empire is used ( as in spit) openly, everywhere. With the neo-liberal project in such tatters, the IMF, WTO and World Bank exposed as the destructive tools they are and other covert capitalist NGO and State Dept. operations ( posing as democracy promoters) such as USAID, NED National Endowment for Democracy, International Republican Institute, Office of Transition Initiatives, Center for International Private Enterprise, etc totally exposed and discredited throughout the region, there is little Hillary Clinton can say or do that is taken seriously.The Arizona debate only intensifies the enmity.

Stone is just articulate, friendly and well informed enough to get away with quoting Noam Chomsky, keeping Tavis off balance and Public Television worried about its Exxon Mobile sponsorship. While I think there is a need for a critique from the Left of Chavez, Morales, Lula and Correa, Stone deserves kudos for threatening the hegemonic, conformist flow of information that keep people like Beak so ill informed and duped.

I hope Tavis can get Charlie Wrangle on next week to find out why it is power corrupts and so many black men are in prison while Obama diddles and hedges and hee haws his way through the first pathetic term. It appears this weeks Donald Rumsfeld Prize will go to Admiral Mullen who said of Wikileaks : "They now have blood on their hands". From a guy with thousands of gallons of blood in his hair, soaking his clothes, a guy drowning in blood. Up is the new down.

On the back page of the latest Shambala Sun magazine is an ad for "mindful investing" through the Abacus Fund. Sorry. "Progressive Buddhists" want their cake but they don't want to be attached to eating it. This wholesale confusion is why all religions are in such turmoil, they can't separate the product from the Peace. The One from the mONEy. Transubstantiation and the Eucharist from profit and value.

Act Locally

I decided to go to a fund raiser for a couple of Democrats running for local state House races on Friday night. The candidates are long time liberal acquaintances of mine and I knew it would be interesting because of the now powerful Tea Party influence and the national dour mood of Dems suckered by Obama and the spill and all the meager reforms.Alterman finally called the Pres a "big disappointment" in the Nation and blamed a "broken system" without actually naming it.

I promised my wife I would hold the anti-capitalist rhetoric to a minimum but what was fascinating was the fact that I didn't have to say a word, cynicism with Kubuki politics was everywhere and the subject of socialist overhaul came up on it's own. There was, to start with, a very small turnout and no young people at all and in fact people seemed EMBARRASSED to even be there making and listening to the same tired old pitches for "change". I don't think anybody can say "change" now without feeling that twinge and the begging for money seemed particularly self-conscious. Hearing Hillary Clinton bitch-scold Chavez "to restore private property and return to a free market", progressives can only drink more micro-beers and look uncomfortable.

Last weekend I went to a Cool Water Hula on the rim of the Berkley Pit in Butte Mt. A ten year anniversary of the first "hula",it drew over a hundred progressive environmentalist dancers but guess what? Ten years later the pit is still filling with toxic sludge, water around the planet is still being polluted at a catastrophic rate and there are no "politics" within liberal democratic capitalism with which an agent can affect any positive change. Amidst the sad speeches about "mourning the devastation" and appealing to a positive spiritual energy, no one had any idea about how to change anything. So they do a stupid dance and get back in their fuel efficient cars to go back to their organic gardens and progressive fund raisers, discouraged, disoriented and conflicted.

I wish someone had just said the one word that might begin opening a process for environmental justice ( and emancipation) but the language has been removed, their vocabulary deleted.