ON AND OFF

• Our electricity just went out - I could hear a big pop outside when it went off.  Then it came back on again.  The same thing happened yesterday.  It seems to happen frequently these days.  As I travel I take special note of the condition of the physical infrastructure around me.  It's a mess.  The U.S. is coming apart at the seams.  Roads and bridges crumbling.  Schools with leaky roofs and libraries closing.  Public hospitals shuttered.  Obviously those in power understand this but they seem to do nothing.  The $$$ continues to flow into the coffers of the Pentagon.  The human infrastructure is similarly collapsing as you see more homeless, more unemployed, more with mental health issues released onto the street like unwanted dogs.  There is a plan behind this - it doesn't just happen.  It's called neo-feudalism.
• Last night I drove south to Biddeford, Maine where I appeared on the one-hour public access TV show hosted by my friend Richard Rhames.  He was recently on my show so I returned the favor.  Richard, and his co-host Matt Hight, always make the show fun as they crack jokes while we tape the interview.  It's nice to break up the serious stuff with some razing.  Matt is a former Biddeford City Councilor while Richard now serves on the City Council.  I tease Richard that he is helping to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.  
• I've been closely following a running debate on a major peace movement list serve between one Obama supporter and the slew of Obama critics.  No matter what Obama does (expand drone attacks, sign the NDAA, etc) the supporter keeps telling everyone that they have to be "realistic" and support the president because the Republicans would only be worse.  The standard line.  This morning I noticed that Tarak Kauff (Veterans for Peace) had dug up some info about the Obama supporter. Tarak wrote that the Obama defender has "led Progressives for Obama, now called Progressive America Rising, as an independent left-progressive initiative, in part to convince those on the radical left to pursue what he considers more pragmatic alternatives." 
• It reminds me of the U.S. Indian reservation system where the federal government pitted band against band and chief against chief once the Native Americans were brought into captivity.  We see similar tactics underway today as the Pentagon and Democratic Party put their operatives into progressive movements to keep the left "under control" and thus unable to organize a unified and sustained opposition to the polices of endless war and dissolution of social progress that come out of both political parties. In many states the national foundations have pulled funding from groups that are critical of the Democrats.  Here in Maine this took place a few years back and now the largest coalition of "progressive" groups in our state is directed by the former "CEO" of the Maine Democratic Party.  This group has refused to work with the peace community to connect the dots between the cost of endless war and the growing cutbacks in social programs.  Instead their strategy is to criticize the Republicans in hopes that voters will put the Democrats back in power.  When previously in power the Democrats in Maine essentially began the process of defunding social programs.
• When I was in Chicago for the anti-NATO counter-summit I attended a workshop about the current campaign in Wisconsin to unseat right-wing Gov. Scott Walker.  The occupation of the state capital in Madison was first led by university teaching assistants who marched against cutbacks in education funding.  This then surged with various progressive constituencies joining the occupation of their capitol.  One of the young organizers said that once things really took off the unions came to the capitol and said they were going to take over.  The young people said no way because they knew that the unions were connected to the Democrats at the hip.  The organizer told us in the workshop, "We are going to have to do it, the Democrats won't do it alone."  She was of course referring to the push-back against Gov. Walker.  Only when an independent progressive movement was in place did the Democrats fall in line and begin to show some spine.  
• So the progressive community went out and gathered 900,000 signatures to force a recall of Gov. Walker which will come to a vote in a special election on June 5.  But first the Democrats had to have a primary election to decide who would face Walker.  The progressive groups ran Kathleen Falk as their preferred choice and the Democratic Party machine ran Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.  Barrett won.  There is serious disappointment in Wisconsin about Barrett because many progressives see him as the weaker of the two. At a debate last Thursday, the first of two during the month-long campaign, Barrett barely mentioned the laws passed last year by the Republican-controlled state legislature at Walker’s behest. As politico.com noted, “The issue of worker’s rights—which initially sparked last fall’s movement that resulted in the collection of nearly 1 million signatures—was almost a secondary issue in the debate."