WE NEED HIGHER EXPECTATIONS

• I got an email over the weekend from one of our Global Network board members in Norway. The woman is a medical doctor and said the following in response to an email I sent around about one of the new space weapons technologies the Pentagon has developed.
  

We can just point out the fact that Israel and the US has never been interested in peace. They are both constantly provoking others and keeping up tensions as an excuse for them to gain more and more power in regions thousands of miles away from their shores. The American people should ask themselves, why don't you stop all this and rather use your energy in making the US republic a better place for all? We here in Scandinavia have nothing to learn from you when it`s about democracy and freedom.

People see the planet unraveling around them and most of the world's population, who live outside the U.S., have a clear understanding that the CIA (our real government) and Pentagon have their dirty hands in most of the bad shit going on.

Sadly most Americans, like good Germans during WW II, don't want to hear about it, and increasingly many progressives are in such despair they don't believe anything can be done to change things. Legions of liberals, loyal Democrats, are happy that we now have a president who can "speak well" and appears to be a good family man. The fact that he is running a Bush foreign policy and overseeing the destruction of social progress seems incidental since many of them still operate under the assumption that he has a "secret plan" to put on his Superman cape right after being reelected in 2012 and will then transform the nation into the shining city on the hill. Fantasy? Of course it is.

• Tomorrow I tape the next edition of my TV show, This Issue, and my guest will be artist and activist Robert Shetterly from Maine. Rob has created the wondrous series of paintings called Americans Who Tell the Truth and was one of the leading organizers in the recent labor mural controversy here in our state. When our new tea party governor took down a labor mural inside the Maine Department of Labor building at the capital it was Rob and other artists in the state who organized protests and lawsuits to try to reverse this tragic action. The Democrats and labor unions in Maine both gasped at the governor's action but outside of a few verbal complaints they did little to nothing to organize real resistance to putting the mural into a storage closet. It was the artists who stood up and resisted. I am excited about this interview. You will want to watch it once it gets posted here on the blog.


• On Wednesday I will travel to the state capital in Augusta for a protest being called by social service organizations in the state. The governor, and state legislature, are going forward with draconian cuts to human needs programs. In an appeal for people to join the protest, the group called Maine Can Do Better says, "These are the proposals that will harm people who need these safety net programs. These proposals will cause more homelessness, hunger and people unable to get the health care they need....Stand with hundreds of other Maine people as we take a stand in favor of priorities that serve the interests of ALL MAINE PEOPLE!"

Basically this organization is a Democratic Party front group and last time I attended one of their rallies the chants were: "Maine Can Do Better" and "Don't Drop the Baton." I will join a couple friends who will hold signs that say things like "Stop Endless War - Fund Human Needs" at their rally this week. Folks though have to make some serious demands on the political class if we truly hope to save social progress and prevent a return to feudalism. I must admit that I feel that the Democrats in Maine are just using groups like this to get themselves back into power where they will do the cutting, as they were doing just last year when they held power in Augusta, but they will do it with a bit less gusto. The progressive community has got to have much higher expectations during this period of capital accumulation by the oligarchy.

Life in the USA!