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56% of the American people opposed the Iraq war, way back before the invasion, in Feb. '03. That would be a landslide in a presidential election.
And it's up to about 70% today. Not stupid, uninformed people. Disenfranchised, yeah. Perhaps too trusting in our democratic institutions (such as the election system). Perhaps mind-boggled by the 24/7 propaganda from the war profiteering corporate news monopolies that the progressive majority is the minority.
And we did, after all, put a million people on the streets against the war. Also, 50,000 Americans participated in an awesome anti-free trade, anti-WTO protest in Seattle in 1999--before the Bush Junta--and peacefully shut down the WTO, in the most slandered protest in our history.
Many of the people who were there were also in Cancun a few years later--or helped in the organization--where the third world finally took on the WTO, in a 20-country rebellion led by Brazil.
The American people are at the vortex of evil in the world. Our country is the spawning ground for the global corporate predators who are oppressing the world's poor, and have now turned on us as well. Therefore, the efforts to brainwash our people, and to fix our elections, are especially intense, massive and well thought out.
I think the American people are doing pretty well in this circumstance. And the revolution here may not happen in the same way that it happens elsewhere. We have truly humongous problems to deal with--one of them being this war machine leach that is sucking out our life and slaughtering and oppressing others. We find it almost unthinkable to imagine NOT having such a war machine. We should be cutting back the military budget by about 90%, to a true defensive posture. (No more wars of choice!) But that isn't even whispered in the war profiteering corporate news monopoly "public discourse." Most Democratic Party leaders would be horrified at the idea--for both militaristic and economic reasons.
You see what I mean. Our political establishment are the "lords of the earth," second only to their Corporate Ruler masters. Among other things, we've seen the mind-boggling silence of our party leadership as Bushite corporations took over our election system, with TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code in all these insecure, unreliable and extremely insider hackable electronic voting machines that have spread like a cancer across our nation.
We can barely keep up with the Corporate Rulers' oppressive schemes to silence us and dominate all others. People here are just catching on to the e-voting scam. There has been an IRON CURTAIN over "news" of this astonishing coup, which is only just lifting a little--although word of mouth has successfully gotten information to people. (We had a huge voter rebellion against the machines in these recent midterms--hardly noticed by anybody--in the form of Absentee Ballot voting--ordinary people trying to figure out a way around the rigged electronics.)
We have the war profiteering corporate news monopolies to deal with--which spread disinformation here, and everywhere else. We have an opposition party that is only just coming back to life, after years of inroads by the Corporate Rulers. We have a block of Dems in Congress who voted for torture and suspension of habeas corpus.
And that ain't the half of it. We have a MOUNTAIN of problems to solve before we even get to solving the nitty-gritty problems that directly affect our lives (skyrocketing costs of medical care, education, energy, and credit card interest rates, bankruptcy protection for the poor, the prison-industrial complex, pollution, environmental devastation, potential loss of the entire planet, etc., etc.), and before we can begin to implement policies that are helpful, and not devastating, to other countries.
So, anyway, to just berate the American people for not "taking to the streets" doesn't really help. Their will has been defeated in successive elections (and was not fully reflected in the recent one). They have reason to believe that the Bushites don't care a crap what they think--are immune to public opinion--so what's the use of street protests? You have to have some belief that they will INFLUENCE your leaders, to go to all that trouble. Also, this is a huge country. Where is the Bastille? Washington DC is an armed fortress, and those in charge really, really don't care what any protesters have to say. So, what are you asking for--for people to go running around willy-nilly in scattered protests all over the landscape, which will be completely ignored--or, at best, marginalized--by the corporate news monopolies?
What do you envision?
I've envisioned a massive multi-million person sit-down protest in Washington DC. We go there. We sit down in the streets. We don't move--until? Bush-Cheney are impeached? The last US soldier in Iraq has come home? Something like that. Me? I couldn't go (for compelling personal reasons). But I would certainly help organize and support it--if it got traction. I do believe in witness--and also, with some winds of change in the air, now might be the time to do it.
But I actually think that that kind of energy needs first to be addressed to the election system. Without transparent elections, we have little or no power to change any policy or bring about reform. It's a humbler task, that needs to take place in local/state jurisdictions all over the country. (We must not depend on even a Democratic Congress to fix it at all, or adequately--and they could even make it worse.)
As I said, the revolution might happen differently here. I tend to believe that this huge Absentee Ballot vote in the last elections was the beginning of it.
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