Posted by
landerson in
Lane's Blog on
01 30th, 2010 |
no responses Dear Friends,
Was Zinn talking about honking for peace with this?
“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” Historian Howard Zinn
I think he was telling us the same thing that Gandhi did when he said we should be the change we wanted to see.
Michael Pollan refers to the idea as voting with our fork when he speaks about improving our food system. We vote on war, climate change and corporate dominance many times a day. When we drive our car instead of walking, bicycling or riding mass transit, we vote for war and climate chaos. At Arlington West Santa Monica last Sunday volunteers came to get Disneyland tickets but also got parking tickets. The AWSM staff were wondering what to do for them and I proposed giving them bus tokens but was not taken seriously. I think everyone drove their cars, voting for war and climate chaos while imaging themselves working for peace. I rode the bus from Long Beach and found it pleasant and efficient. I get my reading done on the bus. One regular at AWSM referred to my riding Mass Transit as activism….it is not, it is something the masses need to do to vote for peace and a future.
Leaders that will actually lead in this are few and far between, but here in Long Beach a state senator with real courage is putting something forth:
Alan Lowenthal has caused me to make my first contribution this year to a politician.
If other candidates showed this kind of spine I would be more involved in electoral politics.
While here in the Los Angeles area I am attending a lot of progressive and peace events in addition to Arlington West. I attended a peace demonstration last night where a popular sign was “Honk For Peace”. It was pretty noisy as cars and trucks honked for peace. The only vehicles that had any claim for peace or environment, the buses, were trying to negotiate the bus stop which was partially blocked by the demonstrators getting the cars to honk for peace. I’m sorry but I think this is nonsense. How about a sign that reads “Honk if you don’t drive a car”? “Vote For Peace, Kill Your Car”
After the demonstration we went to a showing of the film “American Casino”. about the economic crisis.
As is usual at progressive events, views challenging the status quo among progressives were not allowed. Any attempt to examine the role of the American Way Of Life (AWOL) in the creation of the crisis was ignored. While the moderator’s insistence that the film was accurate was, perhaps, true, it WAS incomplete in its perspective and its conclusions. The many spreadsheets and documents shown did NOT exclude second and subsequent mortgages, in fact commentators repeatedly pointed out that foreclosed homes had multiple mortgages. In those cases, a great many cases, the issue was not the purchase of the home but the reason for the subsequent loans. One featured individual for instance said that her family had owned the home since 1961 and now was losing it. The longest loan is a forty year loan so it was lost due to subsequent loans. So the issue of both wage stagnation, consumerism and individual moral hazard SHOULD have been an appropriate part of the discussion. Next, all was dismissed as the result of deregulation. For this we should look to Joseph Stiglitz (read “Free Fall”, published 2010). Stiglitz was chief economic advisor to Clinton when Clinton signed into law the repeal of Glass Steagall (Stiglitz had previously won the Nobel Prize in Economics and had served as Chief Economist at the World Bank). He had argued, along with Robert Reich, against the repeal but polls indicated that the public wanted more deregulation of the economy. Clinton had learned his lesson many years before when he did the right thing as governor of Arkansas and raised fees on motorists to pay for the cost of motoring and the public rewarded him by voting him out. After that he watched polls carefully and it was public opinion that guided him in ignoring the warnings of Stiglitz. He would not have been influenced by promise of campaign support since he was in his last term. Deregulation was a populist sentiment at the time.
There are clearly two levels of culpability, the creators of the liars loans have a special place in hell because, as the commentators pointed out, they had no skin in the game and emails showed that they knew they were bogus. Many realtors share this place in hell as they knew the housing prices were unsustainable but continued to push people to buy at those prices and, again, took their commissions and had no skin in the game. Below these, the perpetrators of the housing bubble and the liars loans, most everyone was speculating. When one speculates, shouldn’t the speculator share losses as well as gains? IF SO, shouldn’t the homeowner that takes out a second or third loan on equity, speculating that his home will keep rising in value also be responsible for the losses if it goes the other way? It is difficult to argue for accountability for the big speculators if you don’t also hold the small ones accountable.
There is currently an effort to do what Clinton had once tried…I urge you to support Lowenthal:
Was Zinn talking about honking for peace or about parking the car with this??
“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” Historian Howard Zinn
Best wishes, Lane Anderson
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www.LaneAnderson.org
http://www.smartvoter.org/2009/11/03/ca/sba/vote/anderson_r/
http://www.noozhawk.com/politics/article/100709_santa_barbara_council_qa_lane_anderson/
We Are the Antidote – Every Choice a revolutionary Act
S. Brian Willson, June 5, 2008
There is a deeply uncomfortable but clearly structural explanation for the pattern of historic U.S. war-making that continues to this very moment. US Americans, people like you and me, are addicted to insatiable consumption that makes the American Way Of Life totally dependent upon massive exploitation of others and their resources, and the earth herself.
The political-economic market system we have grown up with and support with our tax dollars and voting patterns is a significant contributor to the problem.
Part of the revolutionary antidote, if it occurs, will be in radically changed choices each of us
makes as to how we travel, what we eat, what we consume or don’t consume, etc. Take travel, for example.
Air and private auto travel not only emit massive amounts of carbon molecules, accumulating as particles of mass destruction
in our biosphere, they also consume inordinate amount of petroleum for each passenger mile traveled.
If we are not committed to taking radical leaps in our own consciousness that manifests in corresponding radical changes in our lifestyles, then we choose complicity in business as usual, i.e., continuing to live as we have been conditioned and to which we are now addicted – comfortable materialism. It is absolutely and totally unsustainable. We now have an evolutionary opportunity for a leap in consciousness to integrate ourselves into a cosmological reality of living in mutual respect with all other life.
But we are the antidote, not the government or the market. As we become conscious, each daily choice we make from eating, traveling, and consuming, or not, is a revolutionary act.
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