The local
Where we need to grow our America
as well as our lettuce

Sam Smith

[Editor’s Note: This article by Sam Smith and six more that follow focus on a powerful fact and on an equally powerful opportunity. The fact, still little noticed by the mass media and/or suppressed, is that millions of Americans are not waiting for politicians to save them or solve their problems but are re-building their communities and the foundations of their livelihoods. The opportunity is for organizations like the Green Party, which is free of the ponderous weight and internal rancor of the major parties, to stop the government from doing things that stymie the creative energy of Americans and to goad government instead to facilitate and support that energy.]

You don’t have to tell Greens about the importance of the local, but increasingly the issue has become more than just a part of a sane and sustainable society. Now the survival of our country and the remaining freedoms we enjoy depend in no small part on what we do on the local level. 

The reason it is so important is that the powerful of this country live today in a culture of impunity, a term Latin Americans use to describe a system when law, responsibility, cooperation, community values, and religious faith no longer matter. They have, Mike Lofgren wrote of the American super rich, seceded from America even as their grip on its control mechanisms have tightened: “Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, says about the views of the 99 percent: ‘Who gives a crap about some imbecile?’”

Test it out by naming every national politician you actually admire; the problem becomes quickly apparent. Further, the national media has become embedded in the propaganda mill, leaving the capital of the country largely devoid of independent critics. The number of companies controlling a majority of media outlets has declined from 50 in 1983 to just five by 2004.

You even find it in such unexpected corners as corruption. Political corruption used to be a feudal system based in communities and contingent on those in power at least tithing to their constituents. Today, the most powerful constituency consists of campaign donors, whose funds are largely used to confuse and fool the voters. And corruption has fleeted up from local jobs, favors and cut corners, to multi-billion dollar development projects and huge defense contracts.

It doesn’t mean that every day is bad, only that we now live in an adhocracy, entirely dependent upon the whims of those at the top.

Yet history suggests a way around, if not completely out, of the problem.
For example, Umbria, a section of Italy north of Rome, has – for over 2500 years - been invaded, burned, or bullied by the Etruscans, Romans, Goths, Longobards, Charlemagne, Pippin the Short, Vatican, Mussolini, German Nazis, and, most recently, the World Trade Organization. Yet Umbria has managed not only to survive but keep its culture, a reminder of the durability of the human spirit during history’s tumults.
Consider the novel, 1984. Orwell saw it coming, only his timing was off a bit. The dystopia described in 1984 is so overwhelming that one almost forgets that most residents of Oceana didn’t live in it. Orwell gives the breakdown. Only about two percent were in the Inner Party and another 13% in the Outer Party. The rest, numbering some 100 million, were the proles.
The proles were, for the most part, not worth the Party’s trouble. Yet Orwell thought that, if there was any hope, it lay with them.
Orwell’s division was almost precisely replicated in East Germany decades later, where about one percent belonged to the General Secretariat of the Communist Party, and another 13% being far less powerful party members.
As we move towards - and even surpass - the fictional bad dreams of Orwell or Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World,’ it is helpful to remember that these nightmares were mainly the curse of elites rather than of those who lived in the quaint, primitive manner of normal humans.
This bifurcation of society into a weak, struggling, but sane, mass and a manic depressive elite alternately vicious and afraid, unlimited and imprisoned, foreshadows what we find today - leaders willing, on the one hand, to occupy any corner of the world and, on the other, terrified of young men with box cutters.
Similarly, many years ago some people built castles, walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys out. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured how to cross the moats and opponents learned how to climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces over the town wall during their siege of Siena.
The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile - unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.
Yet like the castle-dwellers behind the moats, our elite is now spending huge sums to put themselves inside prisons of their own making.
For example, the densest concentration in America of police per acre is around the US Capitol. For a number of years I lived six blocks away and I would tell people I could show them exactly where the War on Terror ended: on Second Street. No one cared if a terrorist lurked in my alley, but a couple of blocks from the Capitol the cement barriers flourished, the guards were on alert, and instantly elevated blockades beneath the street marked the division between former and current America. The police even moved a bus route two blocks, so if a bomb were aboard it would kill ordinary homeowners and not members of Congress.
A Creative Irony
Strange as it may seem, it is in this dismal dichotomy between countryside and our political and economic capitals that the hope for saving America’s soul resides. The geographical and conceptual parochialism of the castle dwellers who have made this mess leaves vast acres of our land still free in which to nurture hopes, dreams, and perhaps even to foster the eventual eviction of those who have done us such wrong.
Because of this, the role of the local in American life has assumed an enormous, yet still largely unrecognized, role. It is no longer just about sensible communities, friends, ecology, or wise buying habits.
Sadly, however, liberal America has become increasingly federocentric, assuming that those speaking of states or local rights are just rightwing nuts. This ignores the history of every important progressive movement in America: from abolitionists, to populists, labor unions, environmentalists, and the advocates of civil rights. Indeed, devolution was a key principle of the 1960s. In each case, success was based not on playing the elite’s game but on mass decentralized organizing and pressure. Few things scare national politicians more than people getting together.
One standard objection liberals have to devolution is that it is too similar to the principle of states’ rights, which they believe was central to the Civil War. James W. Loewen in the Washington Post*, recently corrected that:
“Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery. . . Slavery, not states’ rights, birthed the Civil War. . . .They objected that New England states let black men vote and tolerated abolitionist societies. According to South Carolina, states should not have the right to let their citizens assemble and speak freely when what they said threatened slavery. The South’s opposition to states’ rights is not surprising. Until the Civil War, Southern presidents and lawmakers had dominated the federal government. The people in power in Washington always oppose states’ rights. Doing so preserves their own.”
And so, largely thanks to this misconception, liberals have turned the devolution of power into a gift to the right. Instead of fighting over how devolution should be done, the right of the federal government is considered in every case the preferred course. Thus we find such absurd interpretations as a recent federal judge who said the state of Vermont had no power to regulate the safety of its nuclear plants because that was a federal responsibility.
Arthur J. Versluis wrote in Modern Age** about Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts on the matter:
“Every state again is divided into counties, each to take care of what lies within its local bounds; each county again into townships or wards, to manage minuter details; and every ward into farms, to be governed each by its individual proprietor. . . It is by this partition of cares descending in gradation from general to particular that the mass of human affairs may be best managed for the good and prosperity of all.”
Jefferson was not alone. Alexis de Tocqueville also spoke of “the political effects of decentralization that I most admire in America.”
As late as 1992, the one hundred largest localities in America pursued an estimated 1,700 environmental crime prosecutions, more than twice the number of such cases that had been brought by the federal government in the previous decade. And as Congress was vainly struggling to get a handle on the tobacco industry, 750 communities passed indoor no-smoking laws.
But, at the top, power was going the other way. For example, the number of elected school boards in America declined from more than 80,000 in 1950 to less than 14,000 today.
The Principle of Subsidiarity
The most sensible way to think about this is the principle of subsidiarity – the idea that government should be carried out at the lowest practical level. This is complex, to be sure, and repeatedly debatable but that’s what politics is meant to be about – negotiating the complex rather than merely passing regulations that ignore the complex and pretend it doesn’t exist.
Subsidiarity can even work within the federal government. I learned about this as an officer in the Coast Guard back before the wars on drugs and terror sadly changed its assignments. In the early 1960s, the Coast Guard had 1,800 units, 30,000 enlisted personnel and only 3,000 officers. All around the country were lighthouses and lifesaving stations run by enlisted personnel who might not see an officer for six months at a time and never see anyone from Washington. Yet the Coast Guard was among the most highly regarded federal agencies.
What made it work was that it not only had the power of the federal government behind it, but understood that it also had to serve the communities in which it was stationed. Thus, I felt as if the cutter on which I was operations officer was not only a federal vessel but the flagship of the town of Bristol, Rhode Island - and that I was responsible to both.
I began collecting similar examples of federal decentralization including US Attorneys, the National Park Service, local postal carriers, and State Department charge d’affairs in cities outside the foreign capital where the US ambassador functioned. Interestingly, these examples are generally among the least criticized of federal agencies but also, unfortunately, the least seldom mentioned as models.
We could easily expand such practices at the federal level, but the devolution of federal powers regrettably is not on the table right now. Trapped between corruption, confusion and incompetence, Washington is incapable of reform. So it is up to us.
The amazingly successful one day assault on the anti-Internet bills is proof that it is still possible. I can’t think of another example in our history in which so many national politicians changed their positions for the better in such a short time as a direct result of public protest.
The Occupier movement, the revolts against a national ID and the Citizens United decision are other examples of the potential.
Acting on the Potential of the Local
But it involves far more than protest. It requires a clear willingness at the state and local level to stand up for those constitutional powers that do not belong to the federal government, not to surrender these powers in order to get some federal greenmail dollars, and – most importantly – to begin to define America from a local position rather than based on values foisted upon us by corrupt national pols, media and corporations.
It’s not just a political matter; it is also cultural. Some places understand this naturally, place as different as San Francisco, New Orleans and Maine that have been notably successful at not only defining their own values but making sure everyone knows it.  And this cultural power can translate into political clout as well. I first noticed this in Washington when it was clear that city politicians didn’t really want to mess with certain neighborhoods. The reason: they were too well organized.
Which is why I argued, albeit without success, that every neighborhood should create its own plan, written according to its own rules, consensus and values, before citywide urban planners got on the case. What are the most valuable places and buildings in the ‘hood? What matters to us? Who requires help? What does the neighborhood need most? Developer buddies of the mayor would rank low in every neighborhood that asked such questions. And while politicians are often bullies, bullies are often cowards if they are just confronted.
Every town and every state in America should do something similar. For example, our national policy is to conduct hyper expensive wars in strange places for no good reason. This is hurting the wallet of locality. What if all the places and states where a majority oppose such national stupidity put it on record just as an increasing number of places are doing with Citizens United?
Less grand, but just as important, is for local voices to come together. In the past few decades a once popular emphasis on coalition building has withered. Yet coalitions are essential for a louder sound. And among the most powerful are coalitions that concentrate on one issue and cut across class and ethnicity.
There also needs to be a greater realization of the degree to which the federal government has come to interfere with state and local government through greenmail i.e. “Yeah, we know it’s not in the Constitution, but if you want any money, you have to do it our way.” For example the federal government’s badly conceived education intrusions are based, in the case of New York, on giving the state merely one third of one percent of its school budgets.
For over two hundred years public education was a local matter, but then the education industry saw money in a test-obsessed system and the whole game changed. Admittedly, it’s hard to look a gift bribe in the mouth, but recently, for example, Hawaiian teachers did just that - 67% of them voting not to accept a Race to the Top contract.
The best place to start is with one’s town or neighborhood. What do we want? How do we make that clear? What do we think? How do we get others to hear? Who are our friends? How do we stay in touch? How do we bring them near?
The Internet, which has too often been used by activists only for cliktivism, i.e. applying the simplistic notions of marketing to the web, remains a huge potential tool. It is a way to keep track of what others are doing, finding common ground, and launching joint action of which the recent SOPA web blackouts were a dramatic example.
In the end, however, what really matters is that we understand that those supposed to be leading America have in too many cases seceded morally, politically, and culturally from our country and it is left to us – in our towns, counties and states, to redefine and change our nation the way it should be. In short, America, as well as lettuce, must be locally grown.

References:
*James W. Loewen, “Five myths about why the South seceded.” Washington Post, January 3, 2011.
**Arthur Versluis, “The Revolutionary Conservatism of Jefferson’s “Small Republics.” Modern Age 47 (2006) 1:4-17.

Sam Smith, editor of the online Progressive Review, has been editing alternative journals since 1964, longer than almost anyone in the country. Before moving to Maine in 2009, he covered Washington during nine of America’s presidencies - as long as almost anyone in the capital. He is the author of four books, three at the request of editors. Smith has served as an elected DC neighborhood commissioner, a school parents’ association president, a founding member of the DC Community Humanities Council, president of the Wolfe’s Neck Farm Foundation in mid-coast Maine, Coast Guard officer, and, for four decades, a semi-professional musician.

More and more families are being pulled down. The New York Times News Service reports these somber findings based on figures provided by the Census Bureau:

Not only are 49 million people in the United States below the poverty line, a sad, atrocious, and embarrassing fact in itself, but consider this: in addition there are now 51 million Americans trying to survive on incomes that are less than 50% above the poverty line. The word given to describe this dire situation is “the near poor”.

This means that all told 100 million people, ONE IN THREE AMERICANS, are either in poverty or in the fretful zone just barely above it.

What does that say about the 1% who own 40% of the wealth of America?  What does that say about their leadership?  They run the country. What are they doing to it?  We reach a point in our country where they and their government are no longer legitimate. We reach a point where we now need and must proceed to accomplish a wholesale, non-violent political shift. 

A young woman of 22 with two kids and a university degree in public administration unable to find a job said it well at the Augusta, Maine Occupation. She said “We’ve got to get the power back in the people’s hands.” The shift can and must be done on behalf of the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, and the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

The 1% are an albatross around the neck of the 99%. Their leadership is bringing us to ruin. We must act to save ourselves and our country.

John Rensenbrink

Presented here by John Rensenbrink on behalf of Terry Fowler, Toronto, Canada

Looking for a program of demands from the Occupy movement is not getting the message. These protesters are not groping for leaders or platforms. They are enraged about social and economic inequality and the slick tactics being used to create it, but, just as crucially, they are drawing our attention to the importance of place.

Attachment to places has been all but erased by the global market economy. We buy clothes made in Malaysia and appliances from Brazil; we eat grapes from South Africa and let ourselves be entertained by stories from Hollywood. And I didn’t even mention China.

Our own suburban nests are far from clean, but the minerals and metals for our cars and computers spread deadly toxins into drinking water for villages halfway around the world. It’s impossible to be truly aware of those toxins in our own places.

The mortgages at the centre of the 2008 crisis were packaged and sold in a placeless capital market, totally unconnected from the streets and neighbourhoods where real families live in real houses.

Local face-to-face economies are small scale and unlikely to generate the inequalities that anger the protesters so much. In such economies, bankers lend to their neighbours, their kids go to school together. Peoples’ lives intersect in numerous ways, which give all their interactions – social, economic, recreational, political – a meaning. That meaning is summarized by the idea of place. Places can bring together what humans need to live and what they need to express themselves, to grow and change.

When production of goods and services go global, systems for meeting those needs are scattered and taken over by multi-billion dollar businesses. The economy becomes over-capitalized and wasteful. Huge sums are accumulated out of sight (and out of site!) That placeless capital is then used to build oversized skyscrapers and subdivisions, knock off tops of mountains to mine coal, and buy up agricultural land for GM soybeans or industrial pig farms.

These projects may be profitable but they are uneconomical, in part because they generate still more inequality. Moreover, face-to-face economics is out the window.
Don’t ever forget that governments are by now totally on board, and in bed, with global capitalism. The Occupy movement has no illusions about what would happen to an eloquent list of specific demands for change, politely presented to our sitting politicians.

This is a DIY movement. When protesters move to occupy a space, they set up an immediate community in that place. Everything needs to be done at once, and it doesn’t matter where anyone starts, but it doesn’t take long to set up kitchens, a central square, health services, bathrooms, and rudimentary ways of making collective decisions. This is as true in Lansing Michigan as it is on Wall Street.

Here on the ground proposals for change are no longer abstract. They are practical, immediate, and effective.
So the next step should be obvious. The same intelligence used to create working communities to occupy Wall Street can be used to recreate working communities in urban neighbourhoods and rural towns across the continent and across the world.

Remembering our affection for our places is actually quite subversive, because it creates a powerful motive to become competent actors at the local level.

Terry Fowler, Toronto, Canada

If it’s true that this will become an enduring movement, then we’re early into the new era and no one knows where it will take us. To date the “where to go” and “what to do” are vague and the movement is amorphous. The truth is that there are not really that many social change interests that apply to 99% of the population. At the larger encampments signs can be seen advocating the ideas of disparate thinkers from Naomi Klein (great!) to Paul Krugman (not so great) to Ron Paul (please). These are very, very different ideas.

So we don’t know what direction (directions) the movement will take, especially in regard to new pathbreaking ideas or new areas of inquiry/insight.

The movement of the Sixties also started out vague and just-reformist. The key document associated with the founding of SDS, The Port Huron Statement, was passionate in sentiment but tepid in terms of social change ideas. A particular phrase, though—“participatory democracy”—caught on and led to a creative ferment that spawned the development of a whole bunch of sub-movements.

Major new pathbreaking ideas are usually expressed in key books or articles that “everyone is reading” and that endure over time. Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I haven’t yet been aware of that kind of thing associated with OWS. I see mention of Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” Cornel West’s “Democracy Matters,” and Slavoj Zizek’s “Living in the End Times.” I’m sure there will be more to come.

Thinking about this, I undertook a project to try to list some of the books that were being read as the movements of the Sixties unfolded and then developed through the next couple of decades. These books either originated or expanded upon major new ideas associated with a variety of paths of inquiry. Let me know if you can think of others that ought to be added to the list.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

NEW LEFT
1958 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite
1962 Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States
1962 Port Huron Statement of SDS
1963 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
1964 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
1965 Pierre Jalee, The Pillage of the Third World
1967 G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America?
1968 Daniel/Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative
1969 Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins
1969 Carl Oglesby (editor), The New Left Reader
1969 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation
1971 Terrence Cook/Patrick Morgan, Participatory Democracy
1970 Mitchell Goodman (editor), The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution
1974 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System
1975 Christopher D. Stone, Where the Law Ends: The Social Control of Corporate Behavior
1980 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
1986 Albert/Cagan/Chomsky/Hahnel et. al., Liberating Theory
1987 George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left
1988 Martin Ryle, Ecology and Socialism
1990 Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism

NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
1963 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
1967 Alex Haley and Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
1969 BettyRoszak/Theodore Roszak, Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women
1971 Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate
1973 Koedt/Levine/Rapone, Radical Feminism
1978 Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her
1980 Manning Marable, From the Grassroots: Essays Toward Afro-American Liberation
1987 Betsy Hartman, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs

A LAST MAJOR RESURGENT INTEREST IN MARXISM
1962 Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory
1965 Michael Harrington, The Accidental Century
1966 Paul Baran/Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital
1966 Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism
1968 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
1972 Michael Harrington, Socialism
1973 James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State
1974 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism
1975 Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism

RESURGENT INTEREST IN ANARCHISM
1962 George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements
1970 Daniel Guerin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice
1972 Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism
1974 Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
1974 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
1977 Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State
1990 Harold Barclay, People Without Government

ECOLOGY / ENVIRONMENTALISM / SUSTAINABILITY
1960 Vance Packard, The Waste Makers
1962 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
1969 Paul Shepard/Daniel McKinley (editors), The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man
1971 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle
1971 Eugene Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology
1971 Frances Moore Lappe, Diet for a Small Planet
1971 John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid
1972 Meadows/Meadows/Randers/Behrens, The Limits to Growth
1972 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
1977 Amory Lovins, Soft Energy Paths
1977 William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity
1977 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: The Roots of Ecology
1980 Herman Daly (editor), Economics/Ecology/Ethics
1981 Lester Brown, Building a Sustainable Society
1981 Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Extinction: The Causes and Consequences of the Disappearance of Species
1982 Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness
1982 William R. Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change
1984 Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia
1985 R. J. Hoage (editor), Animal Extinctions: What Everyone Should Know
1987 John Robbins, Diet for a New America
1988 Edward O. Wilson, Biodiversity
1989 Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
1990 Barry Commoner, Making Peace With the Planet
1991 Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World
1993 Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce

ECO-ACTIVISM
1975 Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang
1985 Dave Foreman, EcoDefense
1990 Rik Scarce, Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement
1991 Christopher Manes, Green Rage
1993 Susan Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement

DEEP ECOLOGY / SOCIAL ECOLOGY
1967 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind
1969 Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold
1977 Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
1977 Gary Snyder, The Old Ways
1978 Dolores LaChapelle, Earth Wisdom
1980 Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture
1980 Michael Soule, Conservation Biology: An Evolutionary-Ecological Perspective
1982 Murray Murray, The Ecology of Freedom
1985 Bill Devall/George Sessions, Deep Ecology
1985 Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien: Humankind and the Environment
1986 Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics
1986 Arne Naess, The Deep Ecological Movement
1988 Bill Mollison, Permaculture
1989 Eugene Hargrove, Foundations of Environmental Ethics
1989 David Watson, How Deep Is Deep Ecology?
1989 Alan R. Drengson, Beyond Environmental Crisis: From Technocrat to Planetary Person
1990 Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild
1990 J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic
1990 John Clark, Renewing the Earth: The Promise of Social Ecology
1992 Edward Goldsmith, The Way: An Ecological World-view
1992 Max Oelschlaeger, The Wilderness Condition: Essays on Environment and Civilization
1996 David Watson, Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology

PSYCHOLOGY / PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT / CHILD-REARING / EDUCATION / DE-SCHOOLING
1959 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: the psychoanalytical meaning of history
1959 Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
1960 A. S. Neill, Summerhill
1961 Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education
1964 John Holt, How Children Fail
1966 Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body
1967 Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age
1968 Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being
1971 Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
1994 Gary Paul Nabhan/Stephen Trimble, The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places

DEVOLUTION / DECENTRALISM / COMMUNITARIANISM / BIOREGIONALISM
1972 Peter Van Dresser, Development on a Human Scale
1973 E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered
1974 Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century
1978 Leopold Kohr, The Overdeveloped Nations: The Diseconomies of Scale
1978 Peter Berg/Raymond Dasmann, Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California
1979 Karl Hess, Community Technology
1980 Mildred Loomis, Decentralism: Where It Came From; Where Is It Going?
1980 Michael Zwerin, Devolutionary Notes
1980 Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale
1981 John Todd/George Tukel, Reinhabiting Cities and Towns: Designing for Sustainability
1982 George Tukel, Toward a Bioregional Model
1984 Harry Boyte, Community is Possible: Repairing America’s Roots
1985 Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision
1989 Frank Bryan/John McLaughry, The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale
1990 Andruss/Plant/Wright (editors), Home: A Bioregional Reader

GREEN POLITICS
1975 Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia
1979 Alexander Cockburn/James Ridgeway, Political Ecology: An Activist’s Reader
1979 Mark Satin, New Age Politics
1980 Andre Gorz, Ecology as Politics
1981 Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia Emerging
1984 Rudolf Bahro, From Red to Green: Interviews with New Left Review
1984 Charlene Spretnak/Fritjof Capra, Green Politics: The Global Promise
1984 Elim Papakakis, The Green Movement in Western Germany
1985 Petra Kelly, Fighting for Hope: The German Greens
1985 Jonathan Porritt, Seeing Green: The Politics of Ecology Explained
1986 Charlene Spretnak, The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics
1986 Rudolf Bahro, Building the Green Movement
1988 Werner Hulsberg, The German Greens: A Social and Political Profile
1989 Robert C. Paehlke, Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics
1989 Sara Parkin, Green Parties: An International Guide
1990 Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought: An Introduction
1990 Howie Hawkins et. al., Toward a New Politics: A Green Statement of Principles (pamphlet)
1992 Penny Kemp, Europe’s Green Alternative: A Manifesto for a New World
1992 Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach
1992 Robert Goodin, Green Political Theory
1992 Brian Tokar, The Green Alternative: Creating an Ecological Future
1992 John Rensenbrink, The Greens and the Politics of Transformation
1993 Dimitrios Roussopoulos, Political Ecology: Beyond Environmentalism
1994 Daniel Coleman, Eco-Politics: Building A Green Society

COUNTERCULTURE / CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY, PROGRESS, DEVELOPMENT, OVER-DOMESTICATION
1961 John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks
1961 Alan W. Watts, Psychotherapy East and West
1962 Aldous Huxley, Island
1964 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
1964 David Riesman (editor), Abundance for What?
1967 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development
1968 Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred
1968 Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology
1969 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition
1969 E. J. Mishan, The Costs of Economic Growth
1969 Paul Goodman, The New Reformation
1970 Thomas Hanna, Bodies in Revolt
1970 Charles Reich, The Greening of America
1970 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power
1970 Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
1972 Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society
1972 Theodore Roszak, Sources (for Braving the Great Technological Wilderness)
1972 Douglas Liversidge, The Luddites: Machine Breakers of the Early Nineteenth Century
1972 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics
1974 Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization
1974 Konrad Lorenz, Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins
1975 Elman Service, Origins of the State and Civilization
1976 Edward Hyams, Soil and Civilization
1976 Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health
1976 Frances Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest
1977 Ivan Illich, Towards a History of Needs
1977 Herman Daly, Steady-State Economics
1977 Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought
1978 Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society
1978 Akwesasne Notes, Basic Call to Consciousness: The Haudenosaunee Address to the Western World
1980 David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism
1980 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution
1980 Frederick W. Turner, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness
1980 Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress
1980 Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building
1981 Fifth Estate critique of technology issue
1981 Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity: Toward A New Way of Life
1982 Ivan Illich, Shadow Work
1982 Fredy Perlman, Against His-story! Against Leviathan!
1984 David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation
1986 Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
1988 Barbara Garson, The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office Into a Factory
1988 Edward Goldsmith, The Great U-Turn: De-Industrializing Society
1989 Paul Wachtel, The Poverty of Affluence: A Psychological Portrait of the American Way of Life
1989 Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development
1989 Mark Nathan Cohen, Health and the Rise of Civilization
1990 Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise
1991 Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology/Survival of the Indian Nations
1991 John Zerzann/Alice Carnes, Questioning Technology
1992 Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
1992 William Kotke, The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization/The Seed of the Future
1994 Michael E. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity
1994 Chellis Glendinning, My Name Is Chellis, and I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization
1998 David Watson, Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and Its Enemies

Cyberspace . . . is the new Heaven. It’s full of gadgets. Personally, I want to go elsewhere. Back to the land.

Identification with the land and a particular place-on-earth was a fundamental aspect of tribal existence. Aboriginal peoples typically had an earth-based sensibility of sacredness. The trend toward monotheism following the “ascent into civilization” involved a radical transition during which earth-centered spirituality was displaced by the modern sky-god religions. People’s attention and concern shifted as the locus of sacredness was “elevated” to the heavens. The relationship with the land and the local was fundamentally altered.

These trends have been viewed by Western civilization as part of the process of progressive development. Since its inception, civilized life has encroached upon and crowded out tribal life. Resources have been drawn away from villages toward the metropolis. Centralized states have fostered technological progress, recognizing it as an instrumental phenomenon in the service of power elites.

The building of roads opened up new areas for exploitation. The expansion of commerce yielded greater profits. The increasingly sophisticated and powerful technologies of mobility and communication have served to take all of us “outward and upward.”

The unfolding of this process throughout history has been accompanied by occasional expressions of skepticism and regard for consequences. In his essay “Life Without Principle” (1863) Thoreau writes: “In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.”

Clearly the trend has accelerated over time. Where Thoreau’s poor fellow might have received ten letters a day, the poor folks of our modern cyber-reality are overwhelmed by ten emails or text messages per hour. The busy-busy business executive (and the homework-avoiding high-schooler!) might be getting a hundred electronic messages in a day.

Our domain of experience is fast becoming “elevated” into the World Wide Web. Interestingly, cyberspace is now being referred to as “the cloud,” apropos of the fact that our attention and concern is orienting more and more toward this new Heaven. A visitor from another planet might infer that our ubiquitous screens are our Portals to the Sacred, but in truth they are our most-modern source of distraction.

There is a mystique about it all that is not likely to endure. We have access to boundless magnitudes of facts and information, while few of us are knowledgeable about where our water comes from when we turn on the faucet. We follow news from around the world, but most of our neighbors are unfamiliar to us. We have hundreds or thousands of cyber-friends, but few of them live close enough to spend face-to-face time with on a regular basis.

With so little connection to place and such facile ability to communicate at a distance, hypermobility has become the norm. Sustained daily-intimate relationships have become a rarity. Families “keep in touch” while widely scattered, but there is little real touch and no particular place is felt to be the stable and beloved familial home.

A case can be made that “progress” has taken us too far from our original localist community-and-place-based life orientation. We now live everywhere and nowhere. What cyberspace and the internet represent are just the latest next-step in the problematic process of losing our grounding. It follows that what we need is to bring our attention “back down” ... away from heaven-sacredness, away from the global marketplace, away from the industrial mega-state, away from the cyberspace “cloud” ... and back toward a particular place-on-earth where we can renew real community and recreate Home.

Tribalists and ancient villagers found their satisfactions in the place-on-earth they called Home. By contrast, we are restless, bored and unsatisfied. We try to solve our problems of attention deficit disorder and hyper-stimulation by adding on more stimulation (or taking pills). We are losing appreciation for simple equilibrium, peace and quiet, limits and balances.

Erich Fromm said that societies-as-a-whole can exhibit characteristics of insanity. If we don’t get back to lifeways centered around the basics of land, soma, and community, we will be in danger of losing even more - ecological consciousness and personal health, as well as social sanity.

It’s time to shatter the mystique of the cybernetic dystopia that is threatening to envelop us in an electronic daze. It’s time to recognize that, rather than the “next higher stage” of technological development, it constitutes the next misguided milepost on the road to a pathological future.

Lewis Mumford, in his Myth of the Machine (1970), writes: “On the terms imposed by technocratic society, there is no hope ... except by ‘going with’ its plans for accelerated ‘progress.’ But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically ... as soon as we choose to walk out.”

- Steve Welzer

A “Local Commentary” appeared in my home town daily newspaper, the Bath/Brunswick (Maine) Times Record, a few weeks ago and got my surprised attention. It was written by a private advocate for families of children with special needs.

He writes: “ When I first began advocating for special needs children, my intent was to do so one family at a time. I had never expected to work with my state representative crafting legislation. Fortunately, with his encouragement and seemingly limitless energy and commitment, our efforts yielded some changes to public policy and brought the importance of special education to the foreground of the [Maine] Legislature.”

What surprised and buoyed my spirits was his discovery, to his own surprise, that politics can actually work for you. So many concerned citizens do not believe this, and often they are quite right. Though Hugo, the man’s name, was not anti-politics, yet it is apparent that he just did not think of politics as an avenue in which to accomplish anything good and valuable. He had settled instead, as many concerned people do, for approaching people one at a time. This is popular with many fine activists for human and natural good and has its good aspects. But there is much more than can and must be done if our troubled world is going to survive, much less prosper.

One of the crucial ways in which something can be done and must be done is through politics. This means direct political engagement – whether, as did Hugo, work vigorously with one’s elected representatives to help craft legislation; or to yourself run for office.

Hugo’s example shows two things: that there are people who do “get it”, who do realize that politics is a critical avenue for accomplishing a public good; and that taking such action can produce results.

It is a small example, granted that. But it’s there and there are many other such instances. Can we figure out ways to spread the word, especially among young people, that getting into politics is a critical and worthwhile step to take?

Once that step is in one’s mind, the next step is to figure out how to do it. One question is, can effective political engagement be accomplished through the two major parties? What is their record in the last few decades?  Do we need a new party? Do they already exist?  The answer is, of course they do. That is a subject for further blogs.

“Neither teachers nor state workers nor unions are to blame for the budgetary crises. Years of tax cuts for the richest individuals and tax avoidance by the big corporations are the real culprits.”

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone recently wrote this about corporate tax avoidance:

“There is a possibility that a second ‘one-time’ tax holiday will be approved for corporations as part of whatever deal emerges from the debt-ceiling negotiations.

“For those who don’t know about it, tax repatriation is one of the cons of the Washington lobbying community. Here’s how it works: the tax laws say that companies can avoid paying taxes as long as they keep their profits overseas. Think of it as a gigantic global IRA. Companies that put their profits in an offshore IRA can leave them there indefinitely with no tax consequence. Then, when they cash out, they’re supposed to pay the tax. Only there’s a catch. In 2004, the corporate lobby got together and begged congress to give them a tax holiday. A ‘one-time’ tax holiday was declared [and] companies paid about 5 percent in taxes, instead of the usual 35-40 percent.

“Companies started to systematically ‘offshore’ their profits right after that with the expectation that somewhere down the road they would get another holiday. [And sure enough] leading members of the Senate are seriously considering giving the most profitable companies in the world another ‘holiday’ as a reward for their last seven years of systematic tax avoidance.”

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/holiday-in-scambodia-20110720

Taibbi goes on to ask why there is no visible outrage about this kind of corporate/congressional behavior, which will result in hundreds of billions of potential tax dollars being withheld from the Treasury at a time of critical revenue shortfall. I think part of the answer lies in the simple fact that governmental and corporate centers are so remote and opaque vis-a-vis the daily lives of most of us.

One of the Ten Key Values of the Green Party addresses this problem as follows:

DECENTRALIZATION
Power and responsibility must be restored to local communities, within an overall framework of ecologically sound, socially just values and lifestyles. To counter the alienation of mass industrial society, we work toward the restoration of humanly-scaled communities, institutions, and technologies. We view political decentralization as a prerequisite for substantive participatory democracy.

I want to focus here on that last sentence: “We view political decentralization as a prerequisite for substantive participatory democracy.”

Democracy would be enhanced if people could participate more often and more directly in the process. But this is hardly possible when decisions are made in distant, hugely complex institutions of power (where Big Money tends to dominate the discourse).

The Green politics movement would like to see a gradual shift back to more-local decisionmaking within a context of “humanly-scaled communities, institutions, and technologies.”

As things stand now most of us have come to view governmental activity as “what they do”: “they” fix the roads, “they” run the schools, “they” collect the taxes, “they” formulate the budgets . . . “they” set policies of all kinds. There would be much more interest in (and ultimate buy-in for) policies that “we” participate in formulating. This is why the Green Party talks about the rejuvenation of local community life.

To the extent that the centers of power usurp so much of our decisionmaking authority and command so much of our resources and attention, people feel alienated and resentful. The Tea Party phenomenon taps into these feelings, but the Tea Party critique is mostly negative: anti-tax, anti-state, anti-regulation, etc. The Green Party presents a positive, pro-community alternative.

Our society has come so far in the problematic directions of globalization, centralization, and domination of the economy by multinationals, that it will take time to “turn the ship” toward more localism. Meanwhile, naturally, we should be raising our voices to address injustices like extreme wealth disparities and corporate tax avoidance. We must not allow bureaucratic and corporate elites to get away with self-interested, duplicitous behaviors that are so economically, socially, and ecologically irresponsible. We should elect representatives who will operate within the current federal and state legislatures to address these issues and shake up the status quo.

But at the same time we should also work to bring about a deeper kind of social change based on the idea of decentralization. A gradual devolution of power away from the statist and corporate centers would help rejuvenate our local communities and foster a healthy, responsive, participatory form of democracy.

In my state, New Jersey, Governor Christopher Christie has an ideological bias that precludes him from acknowledging the truth about the situation: Neither teachers nor state workers nor unions are to blame for the crisis; rather, years of tax cuts for the richest individuals and tax avoidance by the big corporations are the real culprits.

The wealthy and the economy-dominating corporations can afford to pay higher taxes. While much of the populace is struggling in the aftermath of the Great Recession, corporate profits are at record levels and wealthy households are experiencing a new Gilded Age.

Income disparities have widened considerably in recent decades. In 1980 the top 10% of earners accounted for 33% of the state population’s total income. Now they account for almost 50%. Half of all income goes to just 10% of the population!

Nationally, according to the Campaign for America’s Future, in 1955 the country’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers had an average income of $13.3 million (in 2008 dollars) and paid 51.2% of that in federal income taxes. In 2008 they had an average income of $270.5 million and paid 18% of that in federal income taxes! As income disparities have gone way up, effective tax rates for the richest have gone way down.

Progressive taxation *should* mean higher rates for wealthier people. If a household making $50,000 a year is taxed at a 20% rate they have $40,000 to live on. If a household making $500,000 a year is taxed at a 40% rate they have $300,000 to live on. Yet the rich have successfully lobbied to get their rates lowered . . . as if they need more disposable income! Due to capital gains benefits and all kinds of esoteric deductions, wealthier households now often wind up paying at a lower rate than typical middle-class households.

“Warren Buffett said that he was taxed at 17.7% on the $46 million he made last year, without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30%. Mr. Buffett told his audience, which included John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley, and Alan Patricof, the founder of the U.S. branch of Apax Partners, that U.S. government policy had accentuated a disparity of wealth that hurt the economy by stifling opportunity and motivation.”
http://tusb.stanford.edu/2007/07/warren_buffet_has_a_lower_tax.html

Millionaire’s tax rate:
1945: 66%
1965: 55%
1982: 48%
2000: 36%
2010: 32%

Share of federal tax revenue paid by large corporations:
1950: 27%
1970: 14%
1990: 10%
2009:  8%

Share of federal tax revenue paid by workers’ payroll taxes:
1950: 11%
1970: 21%
1990: 37%
2009: 42%

Above statistics from:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

“General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010. The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States. Its American tax bill? None [zero taxes paid]. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?pagewanted=all

Some people think that lowering taxes on wealthy investors and on large corporations enhances economic growth. But growth was higher back the fifties and sixties when the tax structure was more progressive than it is now.

Greens say: Don’t further burden those middle- and working-class citizens who are struggling to maintain a decent standard of living. Instead, get back to fairly taxing the bloated balance sheets of the super-rich and the “too big to fail” corporations!

When Republican reactionaries ganged up on Francis Perkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s choice for the Department of Labor in the early ‘30s (from which vantage point Perkins launched child labor laws, collective bargaining for unions, social security and other badly needed reforms), FDR backed her. He did not give in.

This week, when Republican rightwing bullies assailed Elizabeth Warren, the indefatigable creator of the much needed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Obama blinked, refused to nominate Ms. Warren to be its deserved head, and chose instead the Ohio Attorney General, Richard Cordray. Unlike FDR, Obama gave in.

His efforts to placate the bullies only increases their bullying. They think he is a pushover for his pains, scorn him, and push even harder on their settled intention to destroy his policies, destroy the people on his team who could help him stand and deliver for those policies, and destroy him.

It’s probably the case that the situation facing Obama is tougher than the one FDR was caught up in. But not by all that much, I suspect. Obama needs to see that sometimes, and that sometimes is now, a desperate situation requires a willingness to risk and a willingness to stand up to bullies. The situation in WDC is desperate by any measurement and according to any reasonably astute observer. He can’t go on losing his grip like this.

He may think that placating the bullies will help him win the election in 16 months. But he is wrong about that, too. And why not stand up, forget what his handlers are telling him, and go fight for what he wants. Having said that, I’ve got to ask myself, maybe he doesn’t want a renewed America. Maybe all he wants is to stay in office. If true, that would be truly sad. I wish he were more like Betty Ford! That would arouse America to his side.

John Rensenbrink

Sounds like Obama is a hero, right?

Not so – though he is trying to position himself as such in order to get re-elected in 16 months. 

First, Both the Democrats and the Republicans and Obama, just a few weeks ago, passed a humungus bill to fund the Pentagon’s wars, $680 Billion. Just some of that shaved off would bolster the domestic budget and make it patently unnecessary to cut Medicare and Social Security. There’s a cry that’s been going up for months to end the military intervention in Afghanistan, to say nothing of reducing the waste that is not even carefully hidden in the Pentagon’s arrogant and belligerent budget. But both parties and the president continue to shower money on the Pentagon.

So, by keeping the war budget carefully off the table, the President and the Democrats and the Republicans are tying one hand behind their collective backs and making a show of fighting with one hand over the leavings for domestic needs on the table. This makes it all a joke, except that it isn’t a joke – the people and the nation as a whole are the victims.

Secondly, pairing reductions for Medicare and Social Security with reduction of taxes for the very wealthy is unjust on its face. That such a proposal is made with a straight face should itself tell us just how far the White House and Congress have fallen. It’s not a small ditch. Not even a huge ditch. What they’ve fallen into is a cesspool of slime. They are fast proving their illegitimacy as self-claimed leaders of our country. They must be replaced!

If only one could think of the spectacle in Washington as a spectacle. Not that it isn’t a spectacle, an embarrassing charade, a ghastly joke, a bemusing entertainment. But it is a frighteningly clear illustration of incompetence, chicanery, deception, injustice, petty greed, dishonourable practices, bitter betrayals, the rhetoric of blame accompanied with shrill yelling, pathetic posturings, manipulation of rules for narrow and self-defeating little temporary triumphs to show up the opposition of the moment, and of presumably good minds gone to seed. They must be replaced!

Desmong Tutu, who along with Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, struggled successfully to end Apartheid and its evils in South Africa, continues to exhort the world to end what he correctly calls “nuclear evil”.  He says: “Eliminating nuclear weapons is the democratic wish of the world’s people. Yet no nuclear-armed country currently appears to be preparing for a future without these terrifying devices. In fact, all are squandering billions of dollars on modernization of their nuclear forces, making a mockery of United Nations disarmament pledges. If we allow this madness to continue, the eventual use of these instruments of terror seems all but inevitable.”

A chilling thought. An accurate assessment. A telling adjective to describe the behavior of the world’s nuclear leaders and would-be nuclear leaders: madness.  Our species is now in the grip of leaders behaving as if they have gone mad. Or does it go deeper than “behavior”? Could be that their soul has gone mad?

Think about that.  Isn’t it time now to do what the youth and their allies did in Egypt who get rid of their leader Mubarak for becoming quite mad – with power and greed and corruption in office? Are not the leaders of nuclear nations similarly afflicted? 

We have reached a point where the peoples of the world have got to get beyond staging ever more demonstrations begging, cajoling, shouting for their leaders to change their deadly policies – the need is to replace, replace, replace them with people who have the right priorities. Priorities that match the overwhelming needs of the people and the planet. Nuclear disarmament is one of those very top priorities. Maybe the very biggest priority. Replace bad leaders. Don’t just complain about them. Don’t just beg and cajole them, and arouse more people to beg and cajole them, to do the right thing. Replace them!

John Rensenbrink

David Brooks, influential columnist for the NYTimes, wrote an article early last week on the foolishness of spending $19 billion to promote “nation-building” in Afghanistan. Note: this is in addition to pouring out hundreds of billions for military hardware and 100,000 U.S. soldiers.

His article, like many he writes, is on the one hand insightful and on the other hand an example of the blindness of the New York Times and of the top elites of the United States for whom the Times is part of their daily breakfast.

I first comment on his insight and then take up the blindness.

True enough, writes Brooks, the $19 billion has provided things like basic health services for two-thirds of the people (up from 9 percent a decade ago) and has enabled 7 million Afghan boys and girls to attend school, whereas less than a million attended under the Taliban (and only boys). He points out that this has failed to bring about the hoped for stabilization and security. It has not quelled the violence.

Brooks then writes something that turns a good argument on its head. He writes: “Violence doesn’t stem from poverty. It stems from grudges, tribal dynamics, and religious fanaticism – none of which can be ameliorated by building new roads.”

There are five things about this that raise my ire:

First, he clearly implies that it’s the fault of the Afghan people; they’re the source of the violence, they’re to blame .

Second, it’s way too simplistic about the relationship of poverty and violence – being poor always exacerbates actual and potential unrest.

Third, being poor (which in Afghanistan, just as in the U.S., is a result of being kept poor while others are fabulously and corruptly rich) is a supreme question of justice which Brooks ignores.

Fourth, he sets aside a big reality. The same Uncle Sam who presents good works to the people is one-and-the-same military juggernaut that dominates the country, bombs civilians, and creates a puppet government for them. The good works are shadowed and soiled by the connection.

And five, closely related to number four, he misses entirely the crucial underlying reason for the failure of what is ridiculously called “nation-building”.  The reason is the colonialist approach to “doing good” to others. The assumption by the U.S. governing elite, mirrored in Brooks’ words, is that we are the big rich uncle who has come to Afghanistan to help them see the light –indeed, to get them to see the light.  “We will confer freedom upon you.”

That stance of “supreme benefactor” grates on the recipient. It arouses resentment and anger. It feeds directly into the strong reactions of those among the people who want to kick us out. Home grown patriots find a continuing source of support among the people at large who want their country to be their country. All of this goes to help the efforts of the old authoritarians (the Taliban) to regain power.

Add to these points the terrible fact that over 3 million people from Afghanistan are refugees. They, together with Iraq’s 1 million, six hundred and eighty thousand refugees constitute one-third of the world’s refugees.

The United States government should get out militarily and only after that has been accomplished might it make sense to do good works.

John Rensenbrink

The continuous NATO bombing of Tripoli must stop. It’s wrong. It’s criminal. It’s self-defeating. It’s unutterably stupid. Bombing has never won a war. The bombing is a major departure from the United Nations R2P (Responsibility to Protect) resolution.  The R2P gave no authorization of any kind to bomb and bomb in order to bludgeon the Gadaffi regime into submission and elimination and thus achieve a regime change. The R2P resolution by the UN Security Council was to protect civilians in imminent danger.

If NATO, and the Obama-led hawks in Washington, had really wanted to protect civilians, and if they had really wanted to stave off the suppression of the rebellion by Gadaffi (as they say they did), why wouldn’t they have taken action to prevent the flow of all arms to Gadaffi; and, in order to do that, worked diligently through persistent diplomacy to persuade all nations to desist allowing arms to find their way to Gadaffi.  That could be effective and in keeping with R2P.

Green Parties in many places are in internal turmoil about this. Tempers are flying. Accusations abound. Some more reasonable voices say don’t get involved since both sides stink; and besides, we don’t really know enough about what is actually going on. Others say it’s a a clear instance of intervention and Greens should condemn all interventions.

This seems plausible. But I’d like to know more. Does being against intervention include being against non-military intervention, too?  Is supporting the people of Gaza, and thereby, according to some, supporting Hamas, with shiploads of goods and medicines something that should not be done since it’s an intervention? If nations were to take critical non-military sanctions against the Syrian government, should that be opposed as intervention? The action by the World Court to bring leaders of governments to the bar of justice – should that be opposed as intervention? I favor each of those interventions and offer the following as a guide for action:

My answer to these questions is the need to distinguish carefully and sharply between military and non-military interventions, opposing the former and learning to judge each case of the latter with the following principle in mind: does the non-military intervention protect and help people in their struggle for freedom and justice with governments who use violence against them. If so, then such intervention should not be opposed and can be actively promoted.

Another related question: When U.S. Greens, and other Greens in the world, declare strong opposition to military intervention (meaning physically violent actions) by the U.S. government, do they also mean that we should oppose military intervention and violent means of any kind by any nation or insurgent group? I hope so. Or is only the United States doing it that’s bad? I favor a clear stand of being opposed to military and any form of violent coercion by physical means by any government or insurgent group in the world. U.S Greens can get so mad at their government that they get mesmerized by their own anger and say or do what seems to be, and is often taken to be, unvarnished anti-Americanism.  We can do better than that.