Never Comin' Home, b/w Stolen Moments

Loyalty oaths are a crock of shit. Almost as bad as the kind you have to consciously sign are the ones you find you'd unconsciously signed. You think you've found a friendly lodging where at least a few people will share your quirks and then just like that, you realize that you can't live there any more.

I've bailed on debunkingwhite. I was there for about a year. It's a great little livejournal "grand central" for anyone interested in anti-racist work. I've learned a lot from the space and made what I think are some valuable connections. Maybe the folks I've connected with will now be done with me, too. So be it. Frankly I can't abide all the pro-Obama hype over there and the subliminal fine print that seems to say that nobody can be a committed anti-racist unless they want to genuflect before the glory of Obama. I don't genuflect before Democrats. I think the party is a loathsome pile of shit that more or less gave Bush a blank check to do whatever the fuck he wanted. Which includes continuing to wage both a global and domestic race war that's plenty vicious even if it doesn't quite measure up in clarity to the baroque fantasies of villain-du-jour, Ron Paul. I don't sign loyalty oaths to any Democrat, in the name of any cause, anywhere. For that reason and many, many others.

Strange though it seems, I would still recommend the space to lurkers interested in the hard work activists do and (especially) the White privilege we Whites need to dismantle before we can do anything for anybody outside the personal arena. I wish I was more like these folks, but I came up short when stamina was handed out. :o It infuriates and grieves me to see good people falling for Obama, a charlatan in a party full of charlatans. I just don't, in my heart of hearts, believe that he gives a damn about the things they give a damn about. I think he's a user running with other users. More anger and more grief is something I don't need to seek out deliberately, as it finds me on its own most of the time. I've been through this before. I've been the "bad feminist," the "bad Unionist," the "bad Jew," etc. because I left the DP and refuse to come back. Life goes on.

...If people ask me why I have to roam
I say that 90% of all accidents occur in the home...
-- Peter Case

I leave you with some "Stolen Moments" from the Anti-Divine Madman:

...Just put the damned ballot boxes on an altar while we’re at it. It’s a mystery what’s happening in them already, might as well go the rest of the way with it. Let’s just hold elections on sanctified ground. Anoint voters’ foreheads with holy water or ashes or the blood of a virgin or something as they are welcomed into the sacred offering of their futures to another pious fraud...

From Prey: Our Souls, 1/09/08 Liberal Street Fighter

...[I have] no patience for the cozy lies and the careful obfuscations anymore. I would like to believe that this was really a country of diversity, that we really were willing and able to confront and reconcile our centuries of enslavement and debasement and theft and genocide. Part of me smiles to see a black man building such momentum in a country as benighted as this one. I’m a sap. I want to believe all of the hallmarkian drivel of the “promise” of America. I want to believe that WE really believed in cooperation and openness and we’re not really a nation of greedy, warmongering racists eager to expand our hegemony over the globe.

The Invisible Man may very well be the Democratic (sic) party’s nominee for President. He is willing to practice the right sorts of misdirection to keep our eyes away from the real problems we face, willing to parade his beautiful assistant/wife to captivate and enthrall. He is willing to disappear behind a fog of beautiful words and high-flown promises, encased in the cozy nostrums of faith and family and a “new generation” of “change”.

I wish I could believe, but I just can’t fill in that blank anymore. I can’t allow another corporate lawyer to coax me into seeing in him what I wish he was. The exploited lower classes in this country will not find a champion in the Invisible Man anymore than they did in Bubba Clinton...

From Fill In The Blank, 1/6/08, Liberal Street Fighter.

[Cross-posted with minor alterations to Ms. Xeno's Remainder Bin.]

Israel-Palestine Open Thread

The title should say it all, but just in case... Bring your highlights, lowlights, mementos, scars and anything else regarding the situation there and post away.

I have no idea what to expect of such a thread, but I have heard too many stories of the repressive atmosphere around this debate on DK. It's time for an alternative to that. So let's give it a go.

Orange Letter #163

An "Open Letter" To Daily Kos

Swiped more or less intact from this thread at Marisacat's blog. lucid wrote it. I repost it with A) minor snips and B) his permission.

"I’ve given pause to what I would say to this “community”, if I ever saw fit to comment again. What meta would I nitpick? Which posters would I call out and link to, showing them to be the asshole DP whips that they are? Which cult of personality is the worst? Which ideological cult is the most offensive?

"But why even do that? Most of you believe and defend with savage juvenility the idea that getting any Democrat elected will somehow cure all the ills of society. Most of you are young or naive enough in your ‘politically aware’ lives to forget about the fact that Clinton accomplished more for right wing politics than any Republican could ever have done before him. The gutting of welfare, hey, couldn’t be done under Reagan. Reinstatement of the federal death penalty… a no go there too, so long as a Republican was in office. The gutting of FCC ownership laws with respect to monopoly in specific localities? Hey, no Republican could achieve that either. First Amendment zones? Clinton. Pre-emptive war… Kosovo anyone?

"You bask in a fantastic memory that a Democrat in the White House somehow made the world a better place. It might have been better in this county for the upper middle class and marginally better for the poor, but it sucked just as equally for the rest of the world. We still fought cold and hot wars. We passed the most regressive trade legislation the world has ever seen that expropriated, exploited and killed more people than any of the shitty covert proxy wars we’d fought before.

The system is broken. There isn’t a democracy here.

The machine politicians to whom you contribute will do nothing to speak for the people.

"They only speak for those who show up at their $5,000/plate fundraising dinners. And they don’t give a shit about the “netroots” save the lip service of a staffer diary here and there & the buying of advertisements. That means they really care.

"I had jumped the ship. Then I gave it an ear again, for a time. But when I encountered more of the same, ‘shaming’, party whipping, rejection of anti-capitalist ideas, the complete disavowal of history, I jumped the ship again.

"You live in a fantasy. You haven’t the foresight to recognize the disintegration of everything you hold dear, though it drips away with every passing second."

(Find more from him at, Lucid Culture --what else ?!-- ;), regarding politics, local bands and other things.)

Showdown by the Bay: Sheehan vs. Pelosi

You may have read that Cindy Sheehan is considering running against current House Speaker Nancy "Impeachment Is Off The Table" Pelosi in next year's election. First, a quick snip of the AssPress article - courtesy of Marisacat:

Sheehan Considers Challenge to Pelosi
CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) — Cindy Sheehan, the soldier’s mother who galvanized the anti-war movement, said Sunday that she plans to seek House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat unless she introduces articles of impeachment against President Bush in the next two weeks.
Sheehan said she will run against the San Francisco Democrat in 2008 as an independent if Pelosi does not seek by July 23 to impeach Bush. That’s when Sheehan and her supporters are to arrive in Washington, D.C., after a 13-day caravan and walking tour starting next week from the group’s war protest site near Bush’s Crawford ranch.

Not too surprisingly, since Ms. Sheehan has been known to frequent Daily Kos, she announced her intentions over there, with the predictable result: a lot of partisan Democrat whining, including the usual dross about her writing a "troll diary," and of course the usual effort by current and former DK front-pagers to show her the door.

What has happened is that the Dems couldn't "contain" Ms. Sheehan. Let's go back to two years ago, when Stan Goff said (circa August 2005):

The Democrats are already grooming a few 2008 candidates, including the execrable Hillary Rodham Clinton who has stated her desire to beef up the war against Southwest Asia. Let's not forget that her husband presided over an Iraqi holocaust that George W. Bush is still trying to match. The Republicans are secure for now with their white nationalist popular base. An active and increasingly militant left is a more immediate threat to the Democrats ­ who have prospered from Republican reaction for decades now by capturing social bases that feel they have nowhere else to go. That dilemma is real, but it is also predicated on the notion that to "go there" we need to contain ourselves in electoralism and pluralist policy fights that are engineered by corporations and NGOs.
That's why Sheehan and others who propose the radical option of simply leaving Iraq are now being surrounded by the friendly faces of "progressives" who will try and redirect this newfound mobilization along the acceptable policy-debate paths.

Something I said from around the same time:

If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. And that, as I see it is the real problem with the Dems. The "base" that the party takes for granted has no clue as to what the Dem party actually stands for. Folks periodically ask me what the Dems believe, and I have to say in all honesty that God only knows, and I'm sure even He is a bit puzzled. What we do know is that the Dem party leadership falls hook, line, and sinker for whatever b.s. the White House demands for fear of being labeled "obstructionist," "unpatriotic," and possibly "losing next year's election." That isn't exactly an inspiring approach to representative governing.
Cindy Sheehan has done something that the Dems have largely failed to do with regard to Iraq: she asked the question "why are we there?" If the Dems want to capitalize on the increasing dissatisfaction with the war, they would be well advised to ride the wave of dissent rather than try to contain it. Adding more troops (impractical) and looking for ways to exit with "dignity" (a term that in this context smells of American machismo) aren't going to cut it. Besides, to take an a line or two from an old David Bowie tune, "dignity is valuable, but our lives are valuable too." Tell it straight up: it was the wrong war, at the wrong time, fought for the wrong reasons; and it's high time to get the hell out and stop making even more of a mess of things in the region. There are no good reasons for Americans or Iraqis to keep dying. The party might generate some cross words from the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters of the world as a result, but that would have happened any way. In the process, the Dems might even gain a bit of the respect and trust that they've lost over the last couple decades. Otherwise, folks like me (just one of the "base") will keep on eying the third party scene for a better deal.

I'm sure at some point at one of the various gated community blogs I predicted that Cindy Sheehan's days at Daily Kos would be numbered; once it became readily apparent that Ms. Sheehan was not going to toe a Democrat Party line, she'd become expendable. The rumblings that she'd worn out her welcome at Big Orange were there for a while - now it's out in the open. In truth, the anti-war movement was useful to Dems only to the extent that anti-war voters might help the party get Congressional majorities and perhaps successfully recapture the White House. Once we stop being ATM machines for the Dems and various affiliated groups (e.g., MoveOn), then that bunch of goons simply doesn't want to know us.

Certainly I don't delude myself to think that Sheehan has a snowball's chance in Death Valley of unseating Pelosi. One: it's not entirely clear what her campaign will be about (beyond the Iraq War). Two: even if Sheehan gets it together as far as a coherent candidacy goes, there are more than enough Vichy "progressives" willing to give Pelosi sufficient cover to win in 2008. If nothing else, a Sheehan candidacy against Pelosi would serve to highlight Pelosi's many embarrassing failures as a so-called leader - in and of itself that would be valuable.

We're Not Buyin' It

In order to stimulate discussion, I'm giving this campaign its own post:

We're Not Buyin' It: National Boycott To Impeach For Peace and Justice.

This is a week-long campaign starting April 15th and running through April 22nd, 2007.

...Conservative estimates of the amount of money that could be drawn away from corporate accounts for the week of the protest range from tens to hundreds of billions or more, representing what could potentially be a serious threat to the economic well-being of the nations wealthiest class. Given that over 87% of Americans in the last MSNBC poll (out of 422,614 response) favored impeachment that could translate into more than 60,000,000 registered voters taking part in a boycott with the potential to shut down the economy...

Personally, I'm very intrigued by this idea. While I appreciate the "charge" (no pun intended) people experience at marches and protests, I admit to having soured on them since watching the anti-war movement do its Cave For Kerry routine three years ago. Marches start to seem like merely cosmetic solutions that the masters were happy enough to let us have-- so long as they are permitted, well-behaved, and dominated by those content to stay within the Democrats' veal pen.

Of course, a lot of folks will probably make the exact same arguments about a national boycott. Here a commenter wonders why there can't be a call for a permanent boycott of major corporations in the U.S. Heh. I'm guessing that a week without going to Starbucks, using one's debit card, or pulling into BP for gas would be enough of a challenge for a great many folks. It's also noteworthy that the call for the boycott has gone out during the season that more than one religion calls for the faithful to "do without" a particular food in the name of remembering the struggles of their oppressed ancestors;In order to stimulate thinking about struggle and reform in the present.

...Lew Brown stated that, "This is not a top down organization, "We Are Not Buying It" is an idea that people take to their homes and workplaces and work to implement within their own community. As coordinator, all I can do is answer questions and provide resources; the actual campaign is decentralized and democratic in the best traditions of American political activism. People aren't just signing a petition here, they are committing to do whatever needs to be done to change the course of history". With over 600 organizers working around the country and more than a month to go before Tax Day "We Are Not Buying It" might have an impact far beyond that of a march, a vote or a petition-at the very least it provides another way to put pressure on decision makers to move forward with impeachment...

(All quotes courtesy of Portland Indymedia)

I'll be looking into local organizing for this action soon, and if you all want to get involved or just share your own thoughts on the idea, please do it. Of course, U.S. corporations operate all around the world, so no need for the Canadians and Aussies to sit this one out if you find the notion appealing, too.

Some additional thoughts here as well.