democracy – Hank Kalet

#OWS: Democrats or democracy

This is an interesting piece from In These Times that rips the mask off the false pragmatism that the Democratic Party has demanded from its minions since the election of Barack Obama, but that has heightened in its hypocrisy as the Occupy Wall Street movement turns its attention to the broken party.

In it, Joe Macaré outlines four basic fallacies on which the prime criticism of the movement hinges — that taking a moral stand, as the Occupy protesters have done, is morally indefensible; that pragmatism requires protesters to trade principle for the potential of some paltry favor from those in power; that history shows that progressive protest creates backlash (when it actually shows that protest creates a moral momentum for change); and assumption that the Occupiers are looking to be an extension of the Democratic Party.

None of these assumptions are accurate, as Macaré makes clear, which is why they are fallacies.

The Occupiers are small “d” democrats who have as their chief goal breaking the grip of money on the political system and re-empowering the so-called 99 percent, to give us control over a government that now views corporate America as its sole master.

This goal may require the election of some progressive Democrats, but it may also require the defeat of corporate Democrats and the formation of a new progressive party outside the Democrats, which is something the Occupy movement understands.

This is about democracy not the Democrats or the liberal establishment.

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Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Libya on the brink and the French respond

The French are stepping in to aid the rebels in Libya, as the Qaddafi regime steps up its repression.

The civil war already has created a humanitarian crisis in the African nation, one the west needs to address. So we should follow the French lead, aid the rebels — in Libya and across the region — to show that we believe our own rhetoric about democracy and that we are not the monsters al Qaeda paints the West to be.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

For democracy to flower, the grassroots need constant attention

Democratic self government needs some help in the United States. We have grown soft in our assumption that change comes from the orderly, yearly visit to the ballot box. Nothing more is needed from us.

Is that true? Not when you consider the evidence. Our willingness to cede our own authority to our elected officials, to vote them into office and then ignore what they do, has left us with a fragile connection to power. Money governs the electoral process — picks the candidates and runs the campaigns — and the winners at the ballot box know exactly to whom they owe their jobs.

A huge majority of Americans tell pollsters they want politicians to leave Social Security alone, for instance, but because the financial services sector wants a piece of the federal retirement pie it keeps ending up on the table.

We got financial reform, but only in name, health-care reform that leaves corporate health-care companies in charge, a recommitment to state secrecy, and we’re still waging two disastrous — and unpopular — wars, despite two elections in which voters emphatically said we should leave.

It’s not Barack Obama’s fault, however. Anyone who thought Obama, whose ascendancy in the Democratic Party was anything but a challenge to the party hierarchy, would challenge the corporate state just hasn’t paid attention to his history as a politician or the history of the republic.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m angry with Obama and the Democrats. They talked a decent game, but had no intention of playing.

But we cannot blame them for betraying progressive principles if we have not applied the necessary pressure.

Consider the wars — as Chris Hedges does in this rabble-rousing column. The wars go on because we have not demanded that they end, have not forced the issue.

We will not stop the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we will not end this slaughter of innocents, unless we are willing to rise up as have state workers in Wisconsin and citizens on the streets of Arab capitals. Repeated and sustained acts of civil disobedience are the only weapons that remain to us.

We have to march and write and speak out. That’s what history tells us, as Howard Zinn made clear during the early part of the 2008 election season, as the press got caught up in the blathering nonsense of candidates and the minutiae of horse-race politics:

The unprecedented policies of the New Deal—Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing—were not simply the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army—thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.

In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.

Without a national crisis—economic destitution and rebellion—it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.

Rahm Emanuel said before the inauguration that Obama would not let a crisis go to waste. The president did, as did a neutered American left. It is up to us on the left to change the dynamic, to make them do the right thing.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

The protests continue

The analysts say that Hosni Mubarak is planning to wait out the protests in Egypt, hoping that the protesters will lose stamina, average Egyptians will turn against them because of the disruptions or both.

But it is tough for me to believe that the protesters will give up — especially with record protests today. A change is coming, the only questions are when and what shape it will take. The end game, however, has to be of the Egyptians’ choosing.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Change in the Middle East: The people choose a different model

There appears to be a wave of change rushing across the Middle East. Tunisia, Egypt and now Jordan have faced or are facing massive demonstrations, with governments falling and change being forced upon calcified regimes.

Neocons had made the case back in 2003 that the toppling of Saddam Hussein by the American military would lead to a sea change in the region, but that sea change never came.

Suddenly, in response to the suicide of a fruit seller in Tunis, the revolution appears to be happening.

What the Bush administration and his neocon allies never understood back in 2003 was that democracy cannot be created at the point of a gun, that change would only happen from below. Now, with Hosni Mubarak’s regime teetering on collapse and Jordan having dismissed its cabinet, we are faced with the prospect of a change we cannot control — and it scares us, because we see a remake of the Iranian revolution in the offing.

But what if what we are witnessing is not Iran-redux, but a remake of the 1989 collapse of the Iron Curtain? Jonathan Schell, in his 2003 book, The Unconquerable World, talked of the power of people movements, as opposed to the use of force.

Violence is the means, as all dictators have known, whereby the few dominate and exploit the many. Nonviolence is the means by which the many can reclaim their rights and advance their interests. Peace begins, someone has said, when the hungry are fed. It is equally true that the hungry will be fed when peace begins. Equality and nonviolence–peace and justice–are inextricably linked, and neither can flourish in the absence of the other. Peace, social justice and defense of the environment are a triad to pit against the imperial triad of war, economic exploitation and environmental exploitation.

The Eastern Europeans, he said, along with others who have broken away from dictatorial regimes and managed to set up free and open societies, eschewed violent revolution for the force of human connectedness. Where violence was the means to the end, the overthrow of the strongman was followed by the creation of a new authoritarian regime (as with the former Soviet Republics that border on Asia and many of the former colonial holdings in African and Latin America).

Violence begets violence, which is why our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to civil wars in those countries and has yet to bear democratic fruit. It is why we are more likely to see democracy grown in Tunisia and Egypt than in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least in the short term.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.