While I’m awaiting the answers to my questions about Afghanistan…………… on another thread.

I’ve not seen much coverage of it, but there’s a petition
for SUPPORTING Victor Agosto, who is very much an American,
and the fact that more than one dozen, two dozen persons
and MORE have put their names on it is an encouraging indication
to some persons.

As a group, the American civilian public is behaving much
like it did pre-9/11/01 . Buying oil from the royal family
of Saudi Arabia – massive, MASSIVE quantities of oil.
Buying products manufactured in China. Quietly going on with
life while the USA’s federal government is borrowing billions and
billions and billions and billions and billions and billions
and billions and billions and billions of dollars. Currently,
there’s no military draft going on in the USA. That might change.
It might change, given the ” unique ” circumstances the leadership of
Rumsfeld/Gates/Rove/Obama/Biden/Cheney/Clinton/Powell/Rice/Clinton/Bush developed on the USA’s taxpayers’ behalf.

The employees of businesses who manufacture bullets, guns, uniforms, flags,bombs, tanks,
helicopters, planes, plastic limbs, caskets, etc. etc. are willing
to earn a living by continuing this nation’s wars.

What would happen if, during the time that the USA’s military is run by Commander-In-Chief Obama, the volunteers that the USA’s federal government is now depending upon decide, en masse, to teach
Creative Writing to fourth-graders instead, or be nannies and
organically-grown lawn trimmers ? What’s the plan for
if that happens ?

Ooooooops.

I am just sayin’

Timothy R. Anderson

And given the massive equipment advantage of the Fed Govt, which Americans are going to resist and end up like a sad re-run of Kent State?

Maybe this or that line needs to be shored up…. maybe not.

I might be a bit hyperbolic in my claim that resistence to broad application of repressive measures would ignite politically-turbulent resistence. I doubt it, though.

Three kinds of separating membranes — pourous, semi-porous, impermeable. Our social boundaries — as part of the cosmopolitanism of our larger crises — have become at least semi-porous. Inter-racial and-or inter-national families, for example, are less likely to buy into racial or nativist demagogy. Who here is not her/himself, or have at least one friend or family member who is… gay? Things have changed. Almost 58 years now, I’ve been watching.

These kinds of realignments, often first through kinship ties, are hugely consequential in ways we cannot yet know. As these conflicts become more visible and open (they are concealed conflicts now), I sincerely believe that many people in the United States will pull back from these brinks.

Give Obama another six months of his grandstanding out of harm’s way, and the movements against war, torture, et al, will get their bearings again. Obama had to happen to teach a terrible lesson about the Democratic Party, about its utter amorality.

Will we ever live in a world in which such decisions are made by rational people trying to reach a decision based on the positive and negative consequences that such a decision would have? Or will we always be cursed by special interests manipulating naive or economically desperate people to conduct acts of violence against others for reasons of (national, class, sectarian, industry) self interest? Those are rhetorical questions so there is no need to answer unless you want to. My answer is that we will never know until there is a big change in the United States as the US seems to be the biggest source of so much conflict. After that the lesser evils can be tackled.

“But any attempt to use that power broadly would be met with broad – and politically devastating – resistance.”

Would you mind sharing your reasons for thinking that such resistance would arise and be politically devastating? I’m afraid I don’t know but a small handful of people who even bother to study this subject, and of that handful, I believe only 1 or 2 would engage in resistance. I just do not see the numbers of informed people prepared to resist. I don’t see the readiness to resist. I don’t see anyone but a very tiny minority wanting to resist. What am I missing?

If Fascism is a middle-class phenomenon, then the people to watch are the folks who have SOME small bit of money or privilege. They are the prime takers for the fear-mongering of the MSM, and always seem to fall for the Corporate-approved bogeymen of race, education, and homophobia, which is grounded in (white) male power and privilege.

I am eagerly awaiting my copy of Yoder’s book in the mail!

I don’t believe we are at the brink of some kind of Nazism, nor that the machinery is now in place just waiting for the will. We have these email conversations without much fear that we’ll be policed up. ooth, no executive will relinquish executive power; and that’s what Obama has done with his inheritance from Bush — the expansion of executive power: left it in place. We are still in that place, at the junction of culture and politics, where abuse of that power is very selective and wedded to rhetoric about terrorism. But any attempt to use that power broadly would be met with broad – and politically devastating – resistance.

The latent power to make that kind of shift is still waiting for a greater degree of desperation from a lot more people and being pushed hardest not by politicians, who are inherently cautious – if perfidious – creatures; but by the likes of Lou Dobbs with his relentless nativist and anti-immigrant diatribes.

Obama’s timidity is a well-established bullet in his CV, and the embarrassment of some emerging scandal with a rogue government contractor will discomfit, not outrage, him. His concern is not ideological, as the Bush administration’s was. Obama is looking out for Obama in the most disembodied, poll-obsessive, Clinton-like kind of way.

What his opposition knows is how suggestible great masses of people can be. Boo.

Unfortunately, the left has been guilty of panic-mongering and impressionism, too.

On how to find personal power now, in the present American political climate… hmmm. Well I would begin by saying that knowledge is power, no matter how cliche that term becomes or remains. And obtaining knowledge requires healthy self-doubt, a willingness to believe that what previously you felt true, may indeed have been an elaborate (or simple) charade maintained by those who are in power.

In order to feel one’s own potential, one must know exactly where one stands. My point in the phrase you quoted was to say this — we cannot trust the Fed Govt to deal with us fairly in the current era. The POTUS has the ability to declare any of us an “enemy combatant” for any reason he or his designee chooses, and thereby destroy habeas corpus and all civil rights. Such a designee may be taken to Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib or the like, and held indefinitely without access to counsel.

This is the start, the legal framework. Layer on top of that the power held by Blackwater/Xe and like “contractors” for “security” matters. And imagine the POTUS or his designee authorizing the “security contractor” to neutralize “enemy combatants” within the nation.

The authority to treat us as were the Jews, Gypsies and others during Nazi Germany’s reign is fully in place. Halliburton began building the detention centers under Bush/Cheney, presumably it continues that work under Obama/Biden.

This is what I fear, Michael. And I think that if we’re going to get past this point in American history, we all need to know how bad things are.

Boy, it still amazes me how this tactic WORKS, on a certain level. This has been part of the book for centuries, and found a particular form of perfection in Germany mid-20th century. This could also be described as “Austrian thinking”, as Lobaczewski put it in his book—-using a solid-sounding, yet fallacious argument to prove a spurious conclusion.

To James H.—Your suggestion about a greater discussion is valued. I realized, after reading Stan’s Yoder quote, that I myself need to dig deeper into this subject. But, to start—-facing down, as Sean put it: “…a band of roving mercs with no moral compass afoot in America” is, to be blunt, a big slap in the face as far as dealing with your own concept of “personal empowerment” (as is known in the 20th-21st century American mode of thought), and a question aimed directly at you asking if you have made your own peace with, as W.C. Fields put it, “the fella in the bright nightgown”.

I know I still, at times, feel “that little masculine demon” down there, but I have him under control (the first step in dealing with a problem is admitting you have a problem)—the Blackwater boyz scare me, and at one time they would have made me angry and the little green-eyed monster would shout for revenge, but now the whole damn thing just hurts my heart instead. Ain’t no way to run a planet….I know it is what is, but I don’t have to like it—and I don’t.

Anarchism in the colloquial sense in many pockets of America is read or heard to mean “crazy bomb-throwers who want to dismantle the government with violence and destruction” — or something like that. Anarchism is simply what libertarianism would be if it stopped listening to “economists” who are “free-market” champions only because they want to privatize the government and profit off those privatization steps. They mean that they want a market free to profiteer, for the chosen few who help schematize the privatization on the road to minarchism. Anarchism means, basically, do whatever you like as long as you do no harm to another. Most intelligent people I know are really anarchist at heart, whether they’d admit it socially. They’d like to maximize their personal freedom because they know how to behave in a way that respects others, and they think others can do the same. Maybe anarchism sounds naive. Maybe it is naive. But it beats the stuffing out of pretending to want “liberty” when all that’s really sought is a shift in economic power from one select group to another.