by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 17, 2017 | Movement Building & Support, Strategy & Analysis
by Vincent Emanuele / Z Communications
Tonight, I attended a town hall meeting featuring John Zody, the utterly uninspiring and banal Chairman of the Indiana Democratic Party. The meeting was as informative and inspiring as it was frustrating and sad. Without doubt, the Indiana Democratic Party is in serious trouble. In a county that’s 48% people of color, less than five of the 65 folks in attendance were black or brown.
Honestly, I actually feel bad for the party and its die-hard supporters. That’s no bullshit. They’re so fractured and disorganized it’s almost unbelievable. For instance, the so-called leaders of the Lake County Democrats were too busy drinking Budweisers at the VFW bar to even pay attention to what most of their constituents were saying. That’s the level of respect the Democratic Party gives its people.
Mark Lopez, the top aide for Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-IN), spent the night walking around the room, making sly remarks under his breath, and shaking hands with the local drunks and criminals who operate the party at the county level. If you don’t know the history of the Democratic Party in Chicago or Lake County, Indiana, please, do some research.
At this point, I’m convinced that anyone who thinks they’re going to reform the Democratic Party is not only wrong, they are completely out of touch with reality. The Democratic Party resembles a walking zombie that doesn’t even realize it’s dead yet. That’s how bad tonight was, at least in terms of what people should expect for the future of the Indiana Democratic Party.
However, and this is a very important distinction, the people who attended tonight’s meeting, particularly the women in the room, had very interesting things to say about organization, values, vision and the future. They want a serious platform and they’re willing to work for it. They made tonight’s meeting worthwhile and interesting.
That being said, my frustration with the Left is limitless. To be clear, if the Left had its shit together, it could control entire swaths of this country, including places like Northwest Indiana. The people are ready. They want to organize. You know what I heard people say throughout tonight’s event? “How can we organize? How do we create grassroots organizations? Where are the tools and resources?”
In other words, the things that people were asking of Zody and the Democratic Party – resources, vision, money, manpower – should be provided by the Left. Those things will not come from traditional unions. In fact, as time moves along, I have less and less faith that organized labor will do a damn thing for the people of Indiana. After all, in 1962, Indiana was the third most unionized state in the country. Today, those unions are in shambles.
In many ways, unfortunately, they are part of the problem. The unions who operate in Indiana do not educate or organize their members, yet they badger those who voted for Trump. That’s not a winning strategy. I heard several people tonight talk about ignorant “hillbillies” and union members who “don’t get it.” In the meantime, instead of organizing their members and helping local community groups, unions in the Hoosier state wasted millions of dollars trying to elect centrist Democrats like Evan Bayh and John Gregg.
Undoubtedly, we need new institutions and we need to build them now. That’s the sort of work that gets me excited. And yet, I’m willing to work with local progressive Dems, for strategic reasons, but on our terms, not theirs. There is, for lack of a better term, a power vacuum in Northwest Indiana.
The Republican Party sure isn’t going to fill it. Black and brown people in the sate of Indiana aren’t going to all the sudden turn conservative. And after tonight, I’m more than convinced that the Democratic Party isn’t going to fill the gap. So, who, or what, will? That’s the question activists and organizers must answer, and soon.
Yes, right now, we have plenty of people in the streets. But these actions remind me of 2006-2008, when people were overwhelmingly opposed to the Bush regime. Yes, we were anti-Bush, but we never created alternatives to the Democrats or the major NGOs, many of whom continue to influence and/or control the major demonstrations taking place against Trump.
In many ways, I liken the Left’s current dilemma to someone thinking about getting back into good physical shape. You don’t go to the gym and expect to bench press 300lbs without years of laying a solid foundation. You don’t go to jiu jitsu practice expecting to successfully grapple black belts in your first couple years. These things take time.
We need to build a solid foundation and that becomes very difficult if we’re beholden to news cycles. My advice: stop watching the news. Stop paying attention to the day-to-day madness of the Trump regime. Sit back, read, think, reflect and learn. That’s the only way we’ll stop making the same mistakes we’ve made for decades.
People want to act, and that’s great. But if those actions aren’t tied to something larger, more substantive, they’ll be fruitless in the long-term. I fully understand everyone’s sense of urgency, but I’m starting to think that level of anxiety is extremely unhealthy and rather unproductive.
We need activists to operate with less emotions and urgency, and with more focus, which requires discipline, education and time. We don’t have time, but we can engender discipline and a radical political education.
Vincent Emanuele is a writer, journalist and activist who lives in Michigan City, Indiana. He hosts “Meditations and Molotovs” which airs every Monday @1:00pm(CST) on the Progressive Radio Network (prn.fm) and can be reached at vincent.emanuele333@gmail.com
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 16, 2017 | Colonialism & Conquest
Featured image: Kaziranga park guards are heavily armed and instructed to shoot intruders on sight. © Survival International
by Survival International
A BBC investigation has revealed that tribal peoples living around a national park in India are facing arrest and beatings, torture and death under the Park’s notorious “shoot-on-sight” policy.
The report for television, radio and the BBC news website featured interviews with park guards, tribal people who have been affected by the policy in Kaziranga National Park, and a spokesman from WWF-India, which helps fund, train and equip park guards and advertises tours of the park through its website.
The park gets over 170,000 visitors each year. Fifty suspects were extrajudicially executed there in the last three years, and a severely disabled tribal man was shot dead in 2013. The BBC has estimated that 106 have been killed in the last 20 years. In the same period, only one official has been killed.
The BBC interviewed one local man who had been beaten and tortured with electric shocks during a detention by park officials before they realized he had no involvement in poaching.
The program also featured Akash Orang, a seven-year-old tribal boy who was shot in the legs by park guards last July. Akash said that: “The forest guards suddenly shot me” as he was on his way to a local shop. His father said: “He’s changed. He used to be cheerful. He isn’t any more. In the night, he wakes up in pain and he cries for his mother.”
Park guards have effective immunity from prosecution and are encouraged to shoot suspects on sight – without arrest or trial, or any evidence that they might have been involved in poaching. One guard admitted that they are: “Fully ordered to shoot them, whenever you see the poachers or any people during night-time we are ordered to shoot them.”
WWF has provided equipment – including what the BBC calls “night vision goggles” – which have been used in night-time operations and “combat and ambush” training. When asked by the BBC how donors might feel about their money being used to enforce this brutal treatment, WWF India’s spokesman said that: “What is needed is on-ground protection… We want to reduce poaching and the idea is to reduce it with involving other partners.”
Survival International is leading the global fight against these abuses and first brought the park’s high death toll and serious instances of corruption among Kaziranga officials – including involvement in the illegal wildlife trade they are employed to stop – to global attention in 2016.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “Conservation organizations, including WWF, are supporting a model of conservation which is resulting in gross human rights abuses. They have failed to condemn policies that are leading to widespread extrajudicial executions. For too long, conservation has relied on its positive public image to hide its horrific and sustained attacks on indigenous and tribal peoples’ rights. We’re working to stop this. It’s time for conservationists to work with tribal people, the best conservationists and guardians of the natural world. It’s time for conservation organisations to call for an end to shoot on sight policies.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 11, 2017 | Colonialism & Conquest, Repression at Home
Featured image: Yoryanis Isabel Bernal Varela was shot dead in the head in Colombia. © El Heraldo
by Survival International
Yoryanis Isabel Bernal Varela, 43, was a leader of the Wiwa tribe and a campaigner for both indigenous and women’s rights.
The Wiwa are one of four tribes that live on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a unique pyramid-shaped mountain in northern Colombia. The Sierra Nevada Indians believe it is their responsibility to maintain the balance of the universe.
Bernal Varela is the latest victim in a long line of attacks against Sierra Nevada leaders, who have been at the forefront of the indigenous movement in South America. Many Indians have been killed by drug gangs, left-wing guerrillas and the army.
In November 2012 Rogelio Mejía, the leader of one of the other Sierra Nevada tribes, the Arhuaco, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt.
José Gregorio Rodríguez, secretary of the Wiwa Golkuche organization, stated: “Indigenous people are being threatened and intimidated. Today they murdered our comrade and violated our rights. Our other leaders must be protected.”
The problem is not limited to Colombia. Indigenous activists throughout Latin America are being murdered for campaigning against the theft of their lands and resources. The murderers are seldom brought to justice.
In January, Mexican Tarahumara indigenous leader Isidro Ballenero López was killed. In 2005 he had received the prestigious Goldman prize for his fight against illegal deforestation.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 3, 2017 | Lobbying
by Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
Today, Spokane activists, including several who were arrested for blocking fossil fuel trains in Spokane four months ago, filed suit against the federal government in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Washington.
The lawsuit, known as Holmquist et. al. v. United States, asserts that the federal law preempting city health and safety laws over fossil fuel rail shipments violates residents’ constitutional right to a healthy climate and local self-government.
This is a first-of-its-kind case directly challenging federal preemption as an infringement of constitutional rights when that preemption operates to prohibit the passage of health and safety laws at the municipal level.
The lawsuit comes on the heels of a recent federal court decision in Oregon which recognized that people possess a fundamental constitutional “right to a liveable climate” pursuant to the due process clause of the United States Constitution.
In that case, Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana v. United States, Civ. No. 6:15-cv-01517 (November 10, 2016), Judge Ann Aiken of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon wrote, “I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society. . . to hold otherwise would be to say that the Constitution affords no protection against a government’s knowing decision to poison the air its citizens breathe or the water its citizens drink.”
Plaintiffs in the Spokane lawsuit include Dr. Gunnar Holmquist, the primary sponsor of a City of Spokane citizen-sponsored initiative to ban coal and oil trains due to climate change. Additional plaintiffs are Rusty Nelson, Nancy Nelson, Margie Heller, Deena Romoff, George Taylor, and G. Maeve Aeolus, each of whom was arrested in August and September 2016 actions for blocking fossil fuel trains. The plaintiffs are being represented by Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin, a lawyer with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
Dr. Holmquist, the lead plaintiff in the litigation, declared, “Now is the time to step forward to do everything possible to stem the global crisis of climate change. This lawsuit will inevitably be the first of many which seek to begin to align state and federal laws with the realities of global warming – liberating communities to begin to take the difficult steps necessary for our continued survival on this planet.”
The federal lawsuit coincides with the re-filing of an initiative within the City of Spokane to amend the City’s home rule charter. The initiative would recognize a “right to a healthy climate” and ban fossil fuel trains as a violation of that right. Supporters of that initiative are preparing to collect signatures to qualify the initiative for the November 2017 ballot.
About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit, public interest law firm providing free and affordable legal services to communities facing threats to their local environment, local agriculture, local economy, and quality of life. Its mission is to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature.
Featured image: Steve Tatum, Flickr Creative Commons – Coal Train. View from the footbridge on the Huckleberry Trail crossing the Norfolk Southern tracks.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 30, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis
by Derrick Jensen
When I find myself in times of trouble, I’m less interested in Mother Mary’s wisdom than I am in Joe Hill’s: Don’t mourn; organize.
There’s a sense in which Trump’s election is a surprise, similar to how we somehow seem to be continually surprised when easily predictable negative consequences of this way of life come to pass. So we’re surprised when bathing the world in insecticides somehow causes crashes in insect populations, when covering the world in endocrine disrupters somehow leads to the disruption of endocrine systems, when damming and dewatering rivers somehow kills the rivers, when murdering oceans somehow murders oceans, when colonialism somehow destroys the lives of the colonized, when capitalism somehow destroys communities and the natural word, when rape culture somehow leads to rape, and so on. And we’re surprised when a racist, woman-hating culture elects a racist man who hates women.
But there are also many senses in which the rise of Trump or someone very like him was entirely predictable.
An empire in decay leads to a desperate push to the fore of values manifested by Trump: woman-hatred, racism, the scapegoating of those who impede empire, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to maintain that empire, to “make America [Greece, Rome, Britain, China] great again.”
When those who have been able to exploit others with impunity find their way of life (and more to the point, the exploitation and entitlement upon which their way of life is based) crumbling, what do they do?
We’ve seen this before. Why did lynchings of African-Americans go up soon after the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery? Why did the KKK rise again in the 1910s and 1920s? What is the relationship between Germany’s economic collapse in the 1920s and the rise of Nazi fascism?
Nietzsche provides one answer: “One does not hate when one can despise.”
So long as one’s exploitation of others proceeds relatively smoothly, one can merely despise those one exploits (despise, from the root de-specere, meaning to look down upon). So long as I have unfettered access to the lives and labor of, say, African-Americans, everything is, from my perspective, A-Okay. But impinge in any way on my ability to exploit, and watch the lynchings begin. The same is true for my access to other so-called resources as well, whether these “resources” are “timber resources,” “fisheries resources,” cheap plastic crap from China, or sexual and reproductive access to women. So long as the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remain underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred waits in the wings, ready to explode.
Oh, but we wouldn’t do that, would we? Well, what if someone told you that no matter how much you paid to purchase title to some piece of land, the land itself does not belong to you. No longer may you do whatever you wish with it. You may not cut the trees on it. You may not build on it. You may not run a bulldozer over it to put in a driveway. Would you get pissed? How if these outsiders took away your computer because the process of manufacturing the hard drive killed women in Thailand. They took your clothes because they were made in sweatshops, your meat because it was factory-farmed, your cheap vegetables because the agricorporations that provided them drove family farmers out of business, and your coffee because its production destroyed rain forests, decimated migratory songbird populations, and drove African, Asian, and South and Central American subsistence farmers off their land. They took your car because of global warming, and your wedding ring because mining exploits workers and destroys landscapes and communities. Imagine if you began losing all of these parts of your life that you have seen as fundamental. I’d imagine you’d be pretty pissed. Maybe you’d start to hate the assholes doing this to you, and maybe if enough other people who were pissed off had already formed an organization to fight these people who were trying to destroy your life—I could easily see you asking, “What do these people have against me anyway?”—maybe you’d even put on white robes and funny hats, and maybe you’d even get a little rough with a few of them, if that was what it took to stop them from destroying your way of life. Or maybe you would vote for anyone who promised to make your life great again, even if you didn’t really believe the promises.
The American Empire is failing. Real wages have been declining for decades, for the entire lifetime of most people living today in the U.S. Indeed if real wages peaked in 1973, the last of those who entered the workforce in a time of universally increasing expectations are retiring. Sure, some sectors of the economy have done well, but what of those left behind? What of those whose livelihoods have been destroyed by a globalized economy, by the shifting of jobs to China, Vietnam, Bangladesh?
What happens to people in a time of declining expectations? What is the relationship between these declining expectations and the rise of fascism?
Two decades ago now a long-time activist said to me that Walmart and its cheap plastic crap was the only thing standing between the United States and a fascist revolution.
But cheap plastic crap can only put off fascism for so long.
There’s a difference between the ends of previous empires and the end of the current empire. That difference is global ecological collapse. Empires are always based not only on the exploitation of the poor but on the existence of new frontiers. Any expanding economy–and all empires are by definition expanding economies—need to continue expanding or collapse. America grew because there was always another ridge to cross with another forest to cut on the far side, always another river to dam, another school of fish to find and net. And the forests are gone. The rivers are gone. The fish are gone. The pyramid scheme upon which both civilization and more recently capitalism are based has reached its endgame.
And rather than honestly and effectively addressing the predicament into which not only we ourselves but the world has been pushed, it’s far easier to lie to ourselves and to each other. For some—and Democrats generally choose this lie—the lie can be that despite all evidence, capitalism need not be destructive of the poor and of the natural world, that the “invisible hand of Adam Smith” can, as Bill Clinton put it, “have a green thumb.” We just have to do capitalism nicely. And another lie—this one more favored by Republicans and manifested by Trump—is that the sources of our misery do not inhere in capitalism but rather come from Mexicans “stealing our jobs” and not remembering their proper place, from women no longer remembering their proper place, from African Americans no longer remembering their proper place. Their proper place of course being in service to us. And of course those damn environmentalists—“Enviro-Meddlers,” as some call them—are to blame for denying us access to that last one percent of old growth forest, that last one percent of fish. This lie blames anyone and anything other than the end of empire.
All of which brings us to the Democrats’ responsibility for Trump’s election. There has not been a time in my adult life—I’m 55—when Democrats have maintained more than the barest pretense of representing people over corporations. Through this time Democrats have functionally played good cop to the Republicans’ bad cop, as Democrats have betrayed constituency after constituency to serve the corporations that we all know really run the show. For generations now Democrats have known and taken for granted that those of us who care more for the earth or for justice or sanity than we do increased corporate control will not jump ship and support the often open fascists on “the other side of the aisle,” so these Democrats have calmly sidled further and further to the right.
Bad cop George Bush the First threatened to gut the Endangered Species Act. Once he had us good and scared, in came good cop Bill Clinton, who did far more harm to the natural world than Bush ever did by talking a good game while gutting the agencies tasked with overseeing the Act. Clinton, like any good cop in this farcical play, claimed to “feel our pain” as he rammed NAFTA down our throats.
What were we going to do? Vote for Bob Dole? Not bloody likely.
Obama made a big deal of delaying the Keystone XL as he pushed to build other pipeline after other pipeline, and as he opened up ever more areas to drilling. He pretended to “wage a war on coal” while expanding coal extraction for export.
What were we going to do? Vote for Mitt Romney?
For too long the primary and often sole argument Democrats have used in election after election is, “Vote for me. At least I’m not a Republican.” And as terrifying as I find Trump, Giuliani, Gingrich, Ryan, et al, this Democratic argument is not sustainable. Fool me five, six, seven, eight times, and maybe at long last I won’t get fooled again.
What we must finally realize is that the good cop act is, too, simply an act, and that neither the good cops nor the bad cops have ever had our interests at heart.
The primary function of Democrats and Republicans alike is to take care of business. The primary function is not to take care of communities. The primary function is not to take care of the planet. The primary function is to serve the interests of the owning class, by which I mean the owners of capital, the owners of society, the owners of the politicians.
We have seen over the last couple of generations a consistent ratcheting of American politics to the right, until by now our political choices have been reduced to on the one hand a moderately conservative Republican calling herself a Democrat, and on the other a strutting fascist calling himself a Republican. If we define “left” as being at minimum against capitalism, there is no functional left in this country.
For all of these reasons the election of Trump is no surprise.
But there’s another reason, too. The US is profoundly and functionally racist and woman-hating, nature hating, poor hating, and based on exploiting humans and nonhumans the world over. So why should it surprise us when someone who manifests these values is elected? He is not the first. Andrew Jackson anyone?
If that activist was right so many years ago, that cheap plastic crap from Walmart was the only thing standing between us and fascist revolution (and of course this cheap plastic crap merely pushed this social and natural destructiveness elsewhere) then he had to know also that cheap plastic crap is not a long term bulwark against fascism. It can only keep those chickens at bay for so long before they come home to roost.
The good cop/bad cop game is a classic tool used by abusers. You can do what I say, or I can beat you. You can sell me your cotton for 50 cents on the dollar, or I can hang you on a tree next to the last black man who refused my offer. Germans offered Jews the choices of different colored ID cards, and many Jews spent a lot of energy trying to figure out which color was better. But the whole point was to keep them busy while convincing them they held some responsibility for their own victimization.
I’ve long been guided by the words of Meir Berliner, who died fighting the SS at Treblinka, “When the oppressors give me two choices, I always take the third.”
By choosing the third I don’t mean simply choosing a third party candidate and perceiving yourself as pure and above the fray, as capitalism still continues to kill the planet.
I mean recognizing the truths about this whole exploitative, unsustainable, racist, woman-hating system. Recognizing that the function of politicians in a capitalist system is to act very much like human beings as they enact what is good for capital, as they facilitate, rationalize, put in place, and enforce a socio-pathological system. Recognizing that capital—including the functionaries of capitalism called “politicians”—will not act in opposition to capital because it is the right thing to do. These functionaries will not act in opposition to capital because we ask nicely. They will not act in opposition to capital because capitalism impoverishes the poor worldwide. They will not act in opposition to capital because capitalism is killing the planet. They will not act in opposition to capital. Period.
The power they wield, and the way they wield it, is not a mistake. It is what capitalism does.
Which brings us to Joe Hill. Don’t simply complain about Trump. Don’t simply throw up your hands in despair. Don’t fall into the magical thinking that the good cops would, if just unhindered by those bad cops, do the right thing or act in your best interests. Don’t fall into the magical thinking that capitalists will act other than they do. And certainly don’t take for granted that somehow magically we and the world will get out of this predicament, that somehow magically an anti-capitalist movement will spontaneously generate, or an anti-racist movement, a pro-woman movement, a movement to stop this culture from killing the planet. These movements emerge only through organized struggle. And someone has to do the organizing. Someone has to do the struggling. And it has to be you, and it has to be me.
A doctor friend of mine always says that the first step toward cure is proper diagnosis. Diagnose the problems, and then you become the cure.
You make it right.
So what I want you to do in response to the election of Donald Trump is to get off your butt and start working for the sort of world you want. Don’t mourn the election of Trump, organize to resist his reign, and organize to destroy the stranglehold that the Capitalist Party has over political processes, the stranglehold that capitalists and racists and woman-haters have over the planet and over all of our lives.
For more of Derrick Jensen’s analysis of racism, hatred, and the violence of civilization, see his book The Culture of Make Believe
