Just as i any structure where when it gains too much power, it starts to corrupt, so is the case with unions. Mega unions might have been needed to battle the megalith corporations, but there is no reason to need them in an anarchist society. A collaboration of labor is one thing, but to have an hierarchy of power with the elite or power hungry rising up to take control of it makes it no different than becoming a state power.

wangman July 1st, 2007 2:11 am
"Unions are not the answer to any progressive movement."

No, unions alone are not an "answer" - now, in the U.S.

Nonetheless, in my view, without unions, labor and progressive movements will both be weak. I don't think a progressive movement will get far w/o 1) the existence of unionized labor and 2) links to progressive unions and/or the progresive elements in existing unions.

Despite many U.S. unions' right wing slant, unions still provide a minimal economic and job security that make it possible for workers to think about politics. Even in their most compromised forms, unions create a class consciousness that workers' interests are opposed to the interests of capital. Without them, workers are more likely to be atomized and prey to a right wing media.

As for progressive movements, progressive movements need progressive unions for a number of reasons: numerical strength, class consciousness (the above workers vs. capital awareness), and authentic links with working people, for starters.

That makes work with unions - whether progressive unions, or to reform right wing ones - important for any progressive movement.

"Traditionally, labor has been the main agent of change, but today it is, as Chomsky put it, "smashed," and struggles to survive. Who can fill the huge gap that labor has left behind?"

Gore seems to suggest that the internet, which could reengage the people with politics, is the solution.

Or we're doomed.

Paul Hawken's book "Blessed Unrest" is all about what people are doing right now. Frances Moore Lappe's "Hope's Edge" is also instructive.
Much of what needs to be going on issues like the media, food, labor, the environment, racism, classism, sexism, progressive spirituality and psychology, green building, etc. - it's already going on. It's just a matter of discovering them, and contributing whatever time, energy, and resourcs you can. If I were to recommend one resource on how to keep up on progressive change work going on, it would be http://www.yesmagazine.org

Unions are not the answer to any progressive movement. Much of them stood behind Bush when he carried out his imperial policy in Iraq. In fact, they endorsed military conquests from Vietnam to Kosovo to Afghanistan. So you can see, they are part of the enablers of imperialism. In fact, the major unions don't just endorse our imperialist outpost in Israel, they actively fund it, making them an enabler of the regional hegemonist.

Chomsky's writings over the last 40 years are full of references to books and articles by numerous people who spell out different ways to shift away from the self-destructive capitalist economy. He may be verbose but he's mainly trying to draw attention to the conditions that need to change and to those who have pragmatic suggestions as to how to make that change. There are four such authors named in this article alone. Doing the reading is called research. The glitch, however, is getting people to actually read those references rather than dismiss the whole issue as either too simplistic or too difficult.

Change comes very hard to those who cannot give up their symbols of image and success.

Peace

I'm hoping for a gradual movement towards widspread support for Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. You don't hear much about him because he scares the hell out of corporate interests as well as the current transparent left candidates. Kucinich is the only Democrat out there with the cahones and the intellect to attack Health Care and other similar problems in our society head on. He openly recognizes the malelovent influence of big money which is the one and only issue we should all agitate on. When the influence of corporations is removed from politics, then all the other "issues" tnat separate us will naturally yield to the reason and rationality of the American people. Nothing will change until money is removed from politics and government. Support Kucinich!

American labor may be weakened, but its unions are filled with real fighters who don't give up. I'd like to see an informative documentary film teaching the public how the so-called "right to work" folks have propagandized us re: the labor movement (unions are greedy) and exalted the corporatists who now have not just power but ever more money (corporate profits are the highest good; all else - labor, the environment, any obligation to give back to the economy & society that nurtured it - must be considered dispensable.

This film should include exposure of consultants who make fortunes helping corporations prevent or get rid of unions and also "educate" judges all the way up to the Supreme Court on the perfidy of unions. The film should also demonstrate how America's current trade policy, the WTO and the World Bank all serve the corporatist philosophy.

Beyond such a film, Congress should look seriously at The Apollo Project, a plan developed partly by labor that would convert the US to a totally renewable economy over 10 years and, in the process, create hundreds of thousands of good jobs (union jobs) to carry out the work of that creation. See the details at www.ourfuture.org. It wouldn't hurt if Congress also read William Greider's "The Soul of Capitalism"

There are ways to overcome our current lousy state if we will only take them!!

Baska, Working people and peasants in non-industrialized settings have united in struggle before. I do my best on a daily basis to raise class consciousness (and I'm not the only one). One thing I've found in the many workplaces is that while there is much "ideological confusion and atomization," there is also a strong class consciousness among workers just below the surface. The right-wing knows it and uses a populism twisted and corrupted by racism and nationalism but that is not hard to cut through and it isn't as strong as it once was. I am always listening and I hear a lot of anti-war and pro-ecology sentiment as well as a disgust with corruption and elitism. The most crippling thing I see is cynicism.

"Small business" will not save us nor will the "invisible hand of the market" or professional inellectuals like Chomsky (though he is a good influence), We, the working class must save ourselves and only we are capable of doing it.
Like addicts, many of us will work whatever system works to make ends meet buut when that system no longer works and we're in crisis, things will change. I agree that "ideological confusion and atomization can lead people in other directions" including fascism and barbarism but in times of crisis the vast majority have always rediscovered community. Our place as progressives must be to have somethings in place organizing the commune-ity and to educate and lead by thoughful example.

RE: WILL SOCIAL CRISIS NECESSARILY STRENGTHEN PROGRESSIVES?

Jaded Prole June 29th, 2007 9:11 pm
"Labor may be "broken" but ultimately the working class is still the only force capable or moving us beyond capitalism."

Dunno about that, Jaded Prole - 'Classic' left wing thought had specific reasons for predicting social change would come from the working class: class consciousness was to rise out of the collectively organized industrial workplace that would grasp its class identity and oppositional relationship to capital - appearing first as unions. "Working class" was an industrial working class; post-industrial workers are arguably atomized by contrast, making concerted action harder (e.g., as shown by less unionization...)

"As disparity and economic insecurity continue to increase we will again become a more unified force for progress — not out of the prescipted ideology quoted by the left intellgencia but because we have no other choice."

But, you write, in the absence of the collective industrial workplace, political consciousness will be created by the collective crisis of disparity/econ. insecurity? That is hypothesized a lot - but ideological confusion and atomization can lead people in other directions...It seems that this is a "prescripted" idea of one outcome in place of the workplace one...

RE: CHOMSKY ON 911

Unknown-Arts.org June 29th, 2007 6:19 pm

Thoughtful comments. But if Chomsky believed 911 were a conspiracy, I believe he would have written about it as such.

And if he were - even - truly 'agnostic' on the topic, I think his approach would be more like what you suggest - a pragmatic recommendation that progressives do not focus primarily on an as-yet-undecided-but-distracting question.

But he doesn't offer such a justification. It sounds to me, rather, as though he is pragmaticly seeking to avoid division by not directly debunking a government conspiracy explanation he does not accept. (Perhaps, also, he sympathizes with the great - and justified - distrust of govt. - due to its antidemocratic secrecy and actual secret crimes - and the estrangement from the political process that feeds this line of reasoning.)

Americans got the economic democracy we had at one time via the policies of Franklin Roosevelt. After 3 presidents (Harding the Teapot Dome Oil president, Coolidge Reagan's idol who said just go fishin' and let big business take over the government, and 'food bank' Hoover who continued the same basic policies while pushing himself off as a 'philanthropist'), Roosevelt had to step in, take the bull by the horns, shut down the banks, restore economic democracy and equal opportunity, in what was screamingly criticized by the Republicans as a dictatorship. In reality, Roosevelt was just reversing the dictatorship of the corporations and banks which Harding-Coolidge-Hoover had prostituted themselves to until it led to the Great Depression.
It took normal Americans starving and being homeless, pushed to the point of seeing that the media and corporations lied through their teeth while using them up and sucking them dry. Roosevelt was like a God who arrived to save the people, per most Americans (except the rich benefactors and brainwashed Republican ideologues), as FDR saved them from starvation, life on the street, and death. Literally.
That's how it was done before, when America was in the same situation, due to the same stinking Republican Greed policies, which even Reagan admitted came from Coolidge, and nurtured in the Hoover Institute and its ideological fraternities (running strong under the Bushes, whose family sat pretty in the 1930s while most Americans starved). The Bushes have been Robber Barons for generations, or 'Robin Hood in Reverse' as Reagan their stooge was often called.
Maybe what we have to have is another Roosevelt, a smart man with a conscience, who stepped in and put the Robber Barons in their place, and told them they had to give up some of their gold if they wanted a society that would allow them to maintain wealth or else end up being beheaded like Marie Antoinette or the Romanovs.
The lesson... if the corporate capitalists want to stay rich, they have to give up some goodies to the people who do the work to prop up their empires.
But the Bushes are megalomaniacs, living a life of arrogant privilege for generations, and just think the rest of us are ants (as manifest at Katrina, or among the homeless living on the streets -- called hoboes and bums the last time this happened).
Our Congress had better start Impeachment Soon, as the Supreme Court is stacked with Bush puppets who will just give him and Cheney and Rumsfeld-behind-the-curtain what they want, as planned.
Otherwise, we could have a truly Hitlerian state, which of course is what Roosevelt-era grandpa Prescott Bush thought was the way to go. We are very close to it Right Now.
I wish Al Gore would head a coup d'etat, take the Presidency he was elected to, and spin this country around and back to truly democratic path we should be on. He earned at least four years as President, and should be awarded with it now.
To Hell with the Bushes and their criminal entourage, and the sooner the better.... if we don't send them there now, they may drag the rest of us with them when they fall, as they will quite naturally.

Discordian Princess,

Are you kidding me when you say those progressive left outlets are the "left gatekeepers"? Those outlets are so marginalized by the mainstream media that they practically don't exist. Even the so called liberal democrap gatekeepers like Kos, Buzzflash don't acknowledge the existence of those left gatekeepers. Those progressive left could all of a sudden adopt all conspiracies of the anti-fascist right and those issues would not appear on Kos or the MSM's radar.

RE: HOW MIGHT SOCIAL CHANGE ARISE FROM THE 21st c. POST-INDUSTRIAL WORKING CLASS vs. THE 19th c. WORKING CLASS OF MARX?

Jaded Prole June 30th, 2007 7:38 am
"Working people and peasants in non-industrialized settings have united in struggle before."

Excellent point. As historians have noted, socialist revolutions developed in mainly nonindustrial societies - contrary to Marx's model. And peasant movement have formed an important part of Latin American social movements too. However, in at least some of these cases - I don't know about the Chinese case - anindustrial working class has had a major role: not only the creation of working class parties, but the establishment of relationships between cities and rural settings, with 'radicalized' peasants returning from cities/factories to the provinces they came from.

Late 20th c. U.S. post-industrial labor is something else, and behaves differently. Certainly there have been successful union service industry movements (L.A. Justice for Janitors, e.g.) - but this was mainly on the west coast, where a Latino culture formed an important dimension of group awareness.

"I do my best on a daily basis to raise class consciousness"

Glad to hear it. I make time to do a little work w/the political outreach arm of my teacher's union - it's not a big commitment, but my view is that if everyone did a little it would make a dif: I can't compensate for the greater situation. Besides which, family.

Discordian Princess,
I think Noam's insistence on giving up further investigation into the 911 attacks was meant to quell further paranoia and prevent wasting energy on half-baked conspiracy theories. The problems are much more complicated than a simplistic us (the people) vs. them (the oligarchy). Although the Bush dynasty has a lot to be ashamed of, I think most clear-headed intellectuals will not assume that they were behind the destruction of the WTC. But I do agree with you that Prof. CHomsky's ability to use a lot of words to say very little is astounding. But I don't agree that this is always a bad thing. Sometimes we need careful discourse to get clear about seemingly (emphasis on seemingly) simple issues.

We are in the sunset of an era, each clinging to the remainders of the good things we had. But we can all feel things tightening up. We probably won't appreciate how lucky we have been until things have changed for the worse.

As for strategies for doing battle with the beast: If we lefties think we can accomplish anything by ourselves, we are delusional. We are going to have to seriously broaden our perspective and find things we have in common with a lot more people.

An example I can think of: When I was a hippie kid in the late 70's, we atheist hippies found we had something in common with the Christians: Home Schooling. It was illegal back then in my state, and we were doing it for different reasons, but we teamed up with some Baptist families for readin' ritin' and rithmatic.

Now, living in a rural area, I have seen the wisdom of a more populist philosophy. I find there are a lot of things that I can talk about with the locals. They detest government interference in their lives. They chafe at the unfairness and the hypocracy. we can even agree on a lot of progressive values such as taking care of the environment(notice I didn't say environmentalism) so long as it isn't arrogantly rammed down their throats.

I even find that we can soft-pedal some of the contentious hot-button issues and not make them a problem. We can all respect hard work, and ingenuity - helping each other out with problems.

The only way we are going to have a chance will be to start relating to each other on the most basic and fundamental levels and hope that becomes a durable network that rises like a tide and floats us all.

"Who can fill the huge gap that labor has left behind?"

The answer is small business. Small, independent enterprises. Small farmers, craftsmen, and merchants serving local communities. Do business with them, consciously.

This is how you democratize the economy.

The Progressive movement has no legs because too many people feel they still have too much too loose economically in a major political and economic upheaval.

Although things are going down hill fast, the masses in the US aren't going jump off the bridge into turbulent waters until things are are much worse. People have learned to live with the current situation. Fear and uncertainty are powerful barriers to change. Denial helps too.

When things get bad enough, when there is less to loose, then change will happen.

There are objective processes taking place in the world, and all "progressives" should try and understand them.

You can only come up with a correct strategy if the problem is set up correctly.

We have move from the industrial revolution to the electronic revolution. This qualitative change in production is changing many things. Capitalists are finding it more difficult to make a profit, and as a result are fighting wars for control of oil so as to complete on a global scale.They are also scouring the earth for the cheapest labor they can find. Technology as robotics is labor replacing. These job will never come back on line. Think about what this means. Many, many workers will never find jobs again, but they still have needs. If they are not making money how will they buy things? If they can't buy things, who will buy the commodities these robots are producing?

You can't stop technology, as this is a basic objective law of capitalism. You can't ask the capitalists to stop striving for maximum profit, as this is also an objective law of capitalism.

If these are objective facts, then your strategy must be based on these "truths".

If you believe capitalism can be "reformed" then you have one strategy. If not, then another strategy must be developed.

One things seems certain. As this process unfolds globally, millions of people are going to be forced to try and survive. Who will represent their interests. They will have demands that will not be able to be met under the current economic and political system.

Is it not the job of the "progressive" to put together a strategy, that will represent, these very independent interests?

Labor may be "broken" but ultimately the working class is still the only force capable or moving us beyond capitalism. As disparity and economic insecurity continue to increase we will again become a more unified force for progress -- not out of the prescipted ideology quoted by the left intellgencia but because we have no other choice.

"Democratize the economy"?

Doesn't 1% of the population own 95% of the wealth in the US?

Wouldn't it be more strategically viable to basically repeal the interstate commerce clause of the US Constution thereby allowing local and state protectionism? Then we could sit back and watch the owners of the means of production fight it out and kill themselves....

Chomsky is a diagnostician of what is wrong by taking a good history and connecting the dots.

He is no politician and that is what is needed to facilitate political change. The people are way to the left of both parties. The opportunity is there waiting.

The media is always praising savvy politicians. I can't see it.

"Since the state, having become so thoroughly co-opted by corporate interests, is part of the problem, it is difficult to significantly change it from within through elections or public policy reforms."

Hence, the only weapon we have is our money. They want it, they gotta earn it. A massive, targeted boycott of Exxon will hit them the only place it hurts and force the other oil companies to react or suffer the same losses. Is it so hard to drive past the Exxon to the other station next to it?

That's why our protests and the polls are ignored - they do not care what we think as long as we keep giving them our money. But stop the cash flow and they will squirm like worms.

ill bet u $1,000,000 that noam would describe himself as a marginalized scholar, not the pivotal pundit honored for 25 minutes of hello-interview as stated by this "journalist". the only thing more pathetic than the political left grovelling before noam's often obscure leftist political rants, is the lack of real, solid, stand-up-ness. its like worshipping the guru instead of enlightenment. noam chomsky? academic, good guy, dry left and one fkn good scientific-linguist although many of his solid stances are beginning to erode, or expand if u will, within his field of specialty - languages. noam? worship a different god.

Has anyone read the pdf document embedded in the article, the one titled, Finding Strategy: A Survey of Contmeporay Contributions to Progressive Strategy? You can find the pdf here: http://www.comw.org/pssp/fulltext/0611psspreport1.pdf

Read it, and do a word in the document search for "Progressive Democrats of America" Then, join this group, start a chapter, and start helping the movement get built.

I often find that the trouble with some on the left is that they await the messiah to tell them what to do. Chomsky rightfully points out that it is systemic change that needs to occur, but the system will not change unless there is a growing and growing more powerful movement to make this happen. There has to be pressure for this to happen. It cannot and will not occur if people sit and wait for the messiah to lead the way.

From what I have read of Chomsky in the past, he remains optimistic that we can change things and that things are not hopeless yet. He smartly describes the terrain and points the direction through it. Are we willing to head in the direction? It means we must act. We must take the lead, often into a kind of unknown that requires much of us, or we waiting to follow? I don't hold Chomsky accountable for what we haven't done, and I don't think any of us should. We must, "pick up our cots and walk" to use a biblical allusion.

We must all start working, tirelessly, in our individual ways and by joining and forming organizations involved in building a movement that can change things. We must coalition with other organizations of the like-minded. These things do not happen overnight and have an inherent ebb and flow. We have to keep the flow part going, and less ebb.

If the movement isn't due to each one of us actually doing "something" so that a big change can happen, then we may as well be an ostrich with our head in the sand or lemmings thoughtlessly following a foolish routine staring up the crack of the one in front of us.

Discordian Princess:

I, too, would agree that there is very little of Chomsky's words for a 25 minute interview. I am assuming that there is some link to their report that will given further details. That said, Chomsky has never been one for telling anyone HOW to defeat the interests at hand and there is a very good reason for it: It is damned hard to come up with a reasonable plan. The corporate interests own the airwaves, the governing class, influence how our public education (doesn't) works, and so on. They control the military. I think any rational person would tell you that, to un-entrench these interests will take means that would land the speaker in prison for sedition. I could be wrong on that, but it is the conclusion I inevitably come to at the end of the day.

As to why Chomsky suggests that further inquiry into 9/11 would be the death of the Left, he is not selling out the movement, or protecting the powers of the CIA. He is presenting a pragmatic point of view on two fronts. The first is that the voices of conspiracy are easily marginalized in this country. It is the mantra of the status quo when they want their doings kept dark, that so-and-so is a CONSPIRACY THEORIST. It is the equivalent of the Cold War habit of calling any voice of Social Justice a "communist". While this branding should not deter us from the truth, to FOCUS on the conspiracies would weaken the stature of the LEFT in MANY EYES. Mainstream eyes. And, as we see with the Kennedy assassination, a preponderance of evidence has not yet struck down the facade of the official story, nor has it wrecked the reputation of the CIA or FBI. KNOWING the crimes of Hoover has not made the PUBLIC sick at the sight of his NAME on the building of our Secret Police. The point is, evidence will only go so far against a giant PR machine and the pursuit of a conspiracy will lose us more than it will gain. It is fine to pursue the truth of 9/11, but not something the Left should be vested in as a whole. Should it turn out that it was not a conspiracy, but more a conspiracy of dunces, then the Left will have a further credibility drop in the eyes of those who believe our government could NEVER do such a thing to their own people. Mind, Americans DOUBT this while there are published, documented reports of the government testing radioactive materials on institutionalized individuals during the Cold War. Read, "The Plutonium Files," or, "The State Boys Rebellion." The Tuskegee Syphilis experiments come to mind, too. Conspiracy has become a word that hides truth. It is a word of derision, equivalent to "mythology" or "folklore". Even those things mentioned above that are WELL DOCUMENTED and NOT DENIED (anymore) are ignored and disbelieved. Read one of those books and then discuss it with someone you know. See how difficult it is for them to believe AND, if they DO believe, how IMPOSSIBLE it is for them to extrapolate these events into our current situations. Chomsky is not suggesting that our government is innocent in ANYTHING, nor that they should be protected. His point, well-made, is that it would be counter-productive and, in some cases, harmful to pursue them with righteous indignation. Our energies would be better served elsewhere.

Having listened to Prof. Chomsky for more than a decade now, I'm sure he has many ideas about how to change and improve this country. I rather suspect its just that this writer didn't bother to ask the question.

And wouldn't a transcript of what Prof. Chomsky actually said be more interesting than this shallow little recap piece?

American's have the corporate point of view drilled into them from an early age onwards. It comes in school, it comes in entertainment from childrens programs and adverts on up. It comes in everything that passes for information from the corporate media.

The key thing that has to change is that Americans have to realize they've been lied to and screwed and stop listening to and accepting this BS. Once you unplug from this constant corporate message pounding into your head, everything becomes much clearer. The day that Americans realize that the same corporate media that told us that WTO and NAFTA would be good for American jobs and that Iraq had WMDs is still lying to us today, and therefore should not be trusted nor even listened to, then that's the day things move forward. Today, just too many people are just too completely clueless as to how misled they are. And corporate control of the schools and the destruction of the teaching of methods of independent, critical thinking doesn't help any.

Momentum and inertia are powerful forces, even without corporate behemoths weighing in.

I very much doubt that we, as a nation, have the guts/humility/discipline to "change course" in time to save ourselves from the just recompense for our fear/arrogance/gluttony.

I agree with hazmat that the core change required involves stripping corporations of 'personhood'. Any attempt to reform any part of the status quo will run into that nasty reality, and its coercive power, until we fix it.

But every time I talk about corporate 'personhood', I see people's eyes glaze over. Americans are not big on abstractions. So we'll probably reap what we've sown.

I'm just thankful that God can, will, and shall redeem any idiocy we humans dream up. If I didn't believe that, I'd have to hang it up.

Peach McD in Durham NC

MetalDog,

I see no will to save the USA from its own greedy madness. Thus, the only stable future society would be a smaller human population living in eco-tech villages surrounded by miles of healthy wilderness and free to trade with each other with harm to none. Some have begun, but it's really hard work.

The clear implication here is that there's nothing productive that can be done in the short-term, only joining efforts to build the "cells of a future society."

If Chomsky has no concrete ideas for what we can do to salvage our nation, then it's hard to have much hope.

The American Republic was founded by the wealth class (read the bios of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention) - no surprise that it has always operated in a way that first and foremost serves and protects their interests, as well as protects their power monopoly. In fact, despite such lofty rhetoric as "government of the people, by the people, for the people", the US throughout its history can more properly be viewed as an oligarchy masquerading as a republic. Thus, working within the political system for redress of grievances is impossible, because the Optimates (as the patricians of ancient Roman times were sometimes called) own and control both the machinery all of the relevant players.

It's time for real progressives - as opposed to the pseudo variety that are in reality no more than Blue Team partisan hacks - to finally wake up and recognize that America's wealth class enforces economic apartheid in America as ruthlessly and systematically as the Afrikaners not so long ago enforced racial apartheid in South Africa. Unless we're able to somehow find it within ourselves to summon up the discipline, cohesiveness and warrior spirit of the African National Congress - unless we are willing to aggressively take the fight *to* the Optimates, instead of passively and feebly responding to their continued predations - then I submit we are beaten before we begin, and deservedly so.

I want to make clear that as of now I am in no way advocating violence as a method of affecting meaningful change. The ANC did not form the "Spear of the Nation" - its military wing - until it had spent many decades pursuing a peaceful, non-violent approach to systemic change. Ultimately, of course, the utter depravity and brutality of the South African government made that impossible. As yet, however, it's far too early to determine how that dynamic will play out in this country. But I believe one can still be a warrior without picking up a spear. And as of now, I see little evidence of that mentality in America among anyone on the left.

Is that it? I know Chomsky is often great at using a lot of words to say very little, but is this all they could squeeze out of the so-called 'Most Valuable Progressive' in 25 minutes?

When it comes to strategy, I think Noam has led The Left astray. Like Chomsky, I believe that Anarcho-syndicalism is probably humankind's best chance to get its shit together and live in peace. Unfortunately, Noam's proposed methods for change (when you can actually figure out what they are) have pointed left-wing (and libertarian) activists down a dead-end road.

After all, how can we take seriously someone who has said that further investigation into what really happened on 9/11 would be 'the end of The Left'. Chomsky actually said this! (Google "Noam Chomsky on 911 conspiracy part 2" to watch the video). Why would any intellectual in his right mind ever attempt to discourage further research into any subject? Chomsky's behavior on this issue (and other issues related to the American Intelligence Community) should set off alarm bells in the heads of left-wingers.

The Mainstream Left needs to familiarize itself with the 'left gatekeeper' phenomenon, and realize the truly astounding level of influence the CIA and other intelligence organizations have over the left-wing intelligentsia (including the folks at media outlets like The Nation, The Progressive, Democracy Now, and thousands of others - find out more by reading about The Ford Foundation, or pick up Frances Saunders' book "The Cultural Cold War"). It is simple Orwellian politics, and the gangsters in charge would be stupid not to infiltrate and misdirect left-wing organizations. Can anyone say 'Emmanuel Goldstein'?

how about a constitutional amendment plainly stating what we all instinctively know: that a corporation is not a person and, therefore, has no rights (speech=money???)

To end war the profit must be taken out of war. The end the destruction of the planet and humanity, we must end the run-amok multi-national capitalist system that is now destroying this country and the planet.

In addition to the other sources mentioned above I would urge you to read every day the World Socialist Web Site at
http://www.wsws.org
The WSWS daily news analysis from journalists around the world provides an essential critical and socialist perspective.

Chomsky's call for "democratizing the economy" is not something that can be achieved through the ballot box. Yet he gives no indication as to how such a profound transformation is to be achieved, in the face of the powerfully entrenched capitalist interests who want to maintain the status quo.

This paragragh provides the crux of the problem:

"Since the state, having become so thoroughly co-opted by corporate interests, is part of the problem, it is difficult to significantly change it from within through elections or public policy reforms. While short-term, pragmatic change remains possible and desirable, systemic change would require a transformation of power relations within society through a democratization of economic decision-making."

The problem is structural/systemic, which means the core of the problem exists in the constitution, or rather the amendments made to it regarding representation. I repeat my computer analogy: We have an outmoded OS trying to run malfunctioning hardware; to solve our problem, we must change both OS and hardware. How to go about making the changes and just what changes need to be made are two yet unanswered questions.

That Chomsky points to Bolivia as an example of what is possible for progressives also serves as a reference point as to the amount of work to be done to change the USA.

I'd prefer ordinary fellow Americans making right of US moral might, inherent in our magnificent Constitution.

Start by reading Alperovitz, Vern -- as the article suggests.

Let the people decide!

http://ni4d.us/

Yes, yes and yes.

But, where to go from here?

MichaelPDA:
I apologize for reprising my post from another thread, but I have to respond to your exhortation to "join this group, start a chapter, and start helping the movement get built," because the movement already exists and the PDA is part of the problem, not part of the solution. To whit:

"We all know that the PDA has one purpose: to keep up the pretense that progressives have a place–aside from under the doormat–within the Democratic Party. This is completely disingenuous. Like Dennis Kucinich, who plays Pied Piper to progressives during the primary season, only to roll over and urge his supporters to vote for the eventual Democratic nominee–who will of course be his political polar opposite--in the general election, the PDA will choose party over principle every time. You are loyal Democrats first and always. The fact that you can support the corporate-imperialist duopoly and still call yourselves "progressives" is hypocritical beyond belief. And if some of you are still, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, under the delusion that you can change the donkey party from within, you might just as well join "Klansmen Against Racial Bigotry," which is equally ludicrous and has exactly the same chance of success: Zilch!"

Come on Michael, dump the Democrats. If you are a progressive, they don't want you, they don't like you, and they certainly will never represent you. Re-register as an independent or decline-to-state or go to http://switch2green.org/ and stop beating a dead donkey.

One thing voters should recognize is that if you vote for candidates who are advocating "universal coverage" we won't even get "pragmatic change", since this policy proposal, advocated by Clinton, Obama and Biden to name just three is a nonstarter as far as solving the health care problems in America.
You need "real health care reform" and that means stripping profit from the activity.
So, if you're going to vote for any of those above, you are just voting for the status quo.

Bolivia got very hungry for a long period of time, people were murdered by the Oligarchy for their resistance, and the battle is not yet over. People got very hungry here, people were murdered by the Oligarchy for their resistance here - and we got the Roosevelt Legacy and the greatest distribution of wealth we have ever known. After two short generations, our Oligarchy murdered the Roosevelt Legacy and took it away from us. The battle is never over as long as the structures of Oligarchy survive and they will never be gone until we wipe them from inside of our minds.

What economic class are you in? How is your well-being determined by your ability to treat humans as commodities to be bought or sold? What would your life be like if a family of four could meet all their needs including home, quality education for life, single payer health care for life, and a fixed benefit retirement at 85%, based on a single earner income with a 37.5 hr work wk and 2-3wk annual vacations. That's what we had. That is what we gave away. We listened to monsters, and we put our heads down and we obeyed, and we did not question authority. Those who did in meaningful ways got the gold or the bullet, and we got the message. Most of us aren't hungry enough yet. We will be. Master likes hungry peasants. Always has.

Peace.