Elections? Get Real and Do Something

Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are not direct threats to anything or anyone, but threats they do represent, by making fascism the liberal, acceptable alternative to insanity. 

As Hedges and Nader argue, people with real hope are not begging Obama to do something but, rather, they are acting and planning actions that undermine the oppressive system, from education to the market to energy to the work place.  The elections?  The same quality of entertainment as professional wrestling.

Forty years ago a handful of oversexed, privileged white boys and girls like Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dorn were bombing banks and government offices as attention-getting acts they called revolutionary.  Today they host teas for corporate-owned politicians.

Present and future efforts to undermine the military industrial educational complex, methinks, will not be so visible, violent, or personality driven as in the silly days of the Weather Underground.  But they will be much more effective in bleeding out and gutting the corporations that think they can turn us all into slaves.

A clip (my bolds):

Investing emotional and intellectual energy in electoral politics is a waste of time. Resistance means a radical break with the formal structures of American society. We must cut as many ties with consumer society and corporations as possible. We must build a new political and economic consciousness centered on the tangible issues of sustainable agriculture, self-sufficiency and radical environmental reform. The democratic system, and the liberal institutions that once made piecemeal reform possible, is dead. It exists only in name. It is no longer a viable mechanism for change. And the longer we play our scripted and absurd role in this charade the worse it will get. Do not pity Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. They will get what they deserve. They sold the citizens out for cash and power. They lied. They manipulated and deceived the public, from the bailouts to the abandonment of universal health care, to serve corporate interests. They refused to halt the wanton corporate destruction of the ecosystem on which all life depends. They betrayed the most basic ideals of democracy.  And they, as much as the Republicans, are the problem.

“It is like being in a pit,” Ralph Nader told me when we spoke on Saturday. “If you are four feet in the pit you have a chance to grab the top and hoist yourself up. If you are 30 feet in the pit you have to start on a different scale.”

All resistance will take place outside the arena of electoral politics. The more we expand community credit unions, community health clinics and food cooperatives and build alternative energy systems, the more empowered we will become.

“To the extent that these organizations expand and get into communities where they do not exist, we will weaken the multinational goliath, from the banks to the agribusinesses to the HMO giants and hospital chains,” Nader said.  

The failure of liberals to defend the interests of working men and women as our manufacturing sector was dismantled, labor unions were destroyed and social services were slashed has proved to be a disastrous and fatal misjudgment. Liberals, who betrayed the working class, have no credibility. . . .