What if Los Angeles had a Monorail? It almost happened back in 1963. http://www.monorails.org/tmspages/LA1963.html

by: Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed

Occupy Wall Street protesters react and wave copies of the court order allowing them back into Zuccotti Park as police block them from re-entering, in New York, November 15, 2011. Hundreds of police officers arrested about 200 demonstrators early Tuesday in an operation to clear the nearly two-month-old camp.

Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.

Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.

Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional super committee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.

The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are “cathartic” and “entertaining,” as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.

The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton’s next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.

I have seen my share of revolts, insurgencies and revolutions, from the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America to the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan and Yemen, to the Palestinian uprising to the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.

Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in Leipzig, the regime was finished. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in December 1989 as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had depended on to crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day. Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak lost power once they could no longer count on the security forces to fire into crowds.

The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies. The resignations of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s deputy, Sharon Cornu, and the mayor’s legal adviser and longtime friend, Dan Siegel, in protest over the clearing of the Oakland encampment are some of the first cracks in the edifice. “Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators,” Siegel tweeted after his resignation.

There were times when I entered the ring as a boxer and knew, as did the spectators, that I was woefully mismatched. Ringers, experienced boxers in need of a tuneup or a little practice, would go to the clubs where semi-pros fought, lie about their long professional fight records, and toy with us. Those fights became about something other than winning. They became about dignity and self-respect. You fought to say something about who you were as a human being. These bouts were punishing, physically brutal and demoralizing. You would get knocked down and stagger back up. You would reel backwards from a blow that felt like a cement block. You would taste the saltiness of your blood on your lips. Your vision would blur. Your ribs, the back of your neck and your abdomen would ache. Your legs would feel like lead. But the longer you held on, the more the crowd in the club turned in your favor. No one, even you, thought you could win. But then, every once in a while, the ringer would get overconfident. He would get careless. He would become a victim of his own hubris. And you would find deep within yourself some new burst of energy, some untapped strength and, with the fury of the dispossessed, bring him down. I have not put on a pair of boxing gloves for 30 years. But I felt this twinge of euphoria again in my stomach this morning, this utter certainty that the impossible is possible, this realization that the mighty will fall.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said he could explain the problems with the economy in less than 2 minutes, 15 seconds—and he did it (with illustrations to boot). It’s great! Check it out.

By SCOTT SHANE of the New York Times
Published: February 27, 2011

For nearly two decades, the leaders of Al Qaeda have denounced the Arab world’s dictators as heretics and puppets of the West and called for their downfall. Now, people in country after country have risen to topple their leaders — and Al Qaeda has played absolutely no role.

In fact, the motley opposition movements that have appeared so suddenly and proved so powerful have shunned the two central tenets of the Qaeda credo: murderous violence and religious fanaticism. The demonstrators have used force defensively, treated Islam as an afterthought and embraced democracy, which is anathema to Osama bin Laden and his followers.

So for Al Qaeda — and perhaps no less for the American policies that have been built around the threat it poses — the democratic revolutions that have gripped the world’s attention present a crossroads. Will the terrorist network shrivel slowly to irrelevance? Or will it find a way to exploit the chaos produced by political upheaval and the disappointment that will inevitably follow hopes now raised so high?

For many specialists on terrorism and the Middle East, though not all, the past few weeks have the makings of an epochal disaster for Al Qaeda, making the jihadists look like ineffectual bystanders to history while offering young Muslims an appealing alternative to terrorism.

“So far — and I emphasize so far — the score card looks pretty terrible for Al Qaeda,” said Paul R. Pillar, who studied terrorism and the Middle East for nearly three decades at the C.I.A. and is now at Georgetown University. “Democracy is bad news for terrorists. The more peaceful channels people have to express grievances and pursue their goals, the less likely they are to turn to violence.”

If the terrorists network’s leaders hope to seize the moment, they have been slow off the mark. Mr. bin Laden has been silent. His Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, has issued three rambling statements from his presumed hide-out in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region that seemed oddly out of sync with the news, not noting the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose government detained and tortured Mr. Zawahri in the 1980s.

“Knocking off Mubarak has been Zawahri’s goal for more than 20 years, and he was unable to achieve it,” said Brian Fishman, a terrorism expert at the New America Foundation. “Now a nonviolent, nonreligious, pro-democracy movement got rid of him in a matter of weeks. It’s a major problem for Al Qaeda.”

The Arab revolutions, of course, remain very much a work in progress, as the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, orders a bloody defense of Tripoli, and Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, negotiates to cling to power. The breakdown of order could create havens for terrorist cells, at least for a time — a hazard both Colonel Qaddafi and Mr. Saleh have prevented, winning the gratitude of the American government.

“There’s an operational advantage for militants in any place where law enforcement and domestic security are weak and distracted,” said Steven Simon, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of “The Age of Sacred Terror.” But over all, he said, developments in the Arab countries are a strategic defeat for violent jihadism.

“These uprisings have shown that the new generation is not terribly interested in Al Qaeda’s ideology,” Mr. Simon said. He called the Zawahri statements “forlorn, if not pathetic.”

There is evidence that the uprisings have enthralled some jihadists. One Algerian man associated with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the network’s North African affiliate, welcomed the uprisings in a weekend interview and said militants were returning from exile to join the battle in Libya, arming themselves from government weapons caches.

“Since the land is in chaos and Qaddafi is helping through his reactions and actions to increase the hatred of the population against him, it will be easier for us to recruit new members,” said the Algerian man, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Salman. He said that Libyans and Tunisians who had fought in Iraq or Afghanistan were now considering a return home.

“There is lots of work to do,” he said. “We have to help the people fighting and then build an Islamic state.”

Abu Khaled, a Jordanian jihadist who fought in Iraq with the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, suggested that Al Qaeda would benefit in the long run from dashed hopes.

“At the end of the day, how much change will there really be in Egypt and other countries?” he asked. “There will be many disappointed demonstrators, and that’s when they will realize what the only alternative is. We are certain that this will all play into our hands.”

Michael Scheuer, author of a new biography of Mr. bin Laden and head of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit in the late 1990s, thinks such enthusiasm is more than wishful thinking.

Mr. Scheuer says he believes that Americans, including many experts, have wildly misjudged the uprisings by focusing on the secular, English-speaking, Westernized protesters who are a natural draw for television. Thousands of Islamists have been released from prisons in Egypt alone, and the ouster of Al Qaeda’s enemy, Mr. Mubarak, will help revitalize every stripe of Islamism, including that of Al Qaeda and its allies, he said.

“The talent of an organization is not just leadership, but taking advantage of opportunities,” Mr. Scheuer said. In Al Qaeda and its allies, he said, “We’re looking over all at a more geographically widespread, probably numerically bigger and certainly more influential movement than in 2001.”

If Al Qaeda faces an uncertain moment, so does the Obama administration. For a decade, the United States has been preoccupied with the Muslim world as a source of terrorist violence — one reason both the Bush and Obama administrations had friendly relations with the authoritarian governments now under fire.

It was such a dominant theme of American policy that even Colonel Qaddafi, the quixotic and brutal Libyan leader who President Obama said Saturday should step down, had drawn American praise as a bulwark against jihadists. A cable from the American Embassy in Tripoli briefing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice before a 2008 visit called Libya “a strong partner in the war against terrorism,” noting “excellent” intelligence cooperation and specifically lauding Colonel Qaddafi’s efforts to block the return of Libyan militants from Afghanistan and Iraq and to “blunt the ideological appeal of radical Islam.”

Such perceived dividends of cooperation with the likes of Colonel Qaddafi are now history, and that is a point not lost on the C.I.A., the State Department and the White House. As during the United States’ halting adjustment to the fall of Communist governments from 1989 to 1991, officials are scrambling to balance day-to-day crisis management with consideration of how American policy must adjust for the long term.

“There has to be a major rethinking of how the U.S. engages with that part of the world,” said Christopher Boucek, who studies the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We have to make clear that our security no longer comes at the expense of poor governance and no rights for the people in those countries.

“All of the givens,” Mr. Boucek said, “are gone.”

by Kathy Kristof for CBS MoneyWatch.com

What does sitting in traffic cost you? About $808 on average, according to the latest Urban Mobility Report, conducted by the Texas Transportation Institute. But the cost is dramatically higher if you live in Chicago, where the cost per commuter hit a whopping $1,738.

In fact, commuters in large urban areas spend roughly 40% more on average, wasting some $1,166 per year twiddling their thumbs in traffic.

Where do these cost estimates come from? TTI calculates the cost of traffic by analyzing vast data sets to determine how many hours the average commuter spends sitting in traffic jams and then breaks the data down based on how many of these commuters are driving cars versus trucks. They then add up the cost of wasted gasoline and time. But the cost of time is considerably higher for truckers — $106 per hour — than for drivers — $16.

That’s the reason that Chicago beat out Washington, D.C. as the most costly city for commuters. Commuters in the District waste an equal number of hours — 70 per year — and even more gasoline — 57 gallons versus 52 gallons in Chicago. But fewer of the commuters in D.C. are driving trucks.

It’s also worth mentioning that New York doesn’t even make the top 10. Why? The study isn’t looking at just the core business districts — like Manhattan or downtown Los Angeles, said Tim Lomax, the study’s research engineer, in a telephone interview. It’s measuring traffic in much wider geographic areas.

“Manhattan would be off the charts,” he adds. ”But when you spread it out over the much larger urban area that we’re tracking, the average goes way down.”

Where does traffic cost the most, according to the study?

* 1. Chicago: $1,738 (70 hours/52 gallons)
* 2. Washington, D.C. : $1,555 (70 hours/57 gallons)
* 3. Los Angeles/Long Beach: $1,464 (63 hours/50 gallons)
* 4. Houston: $1,322 (58 hours/52 gallons)
* 5. Baltimore: $1,218 (50 hours/43 gallons)
* 6. San Francisco: $1,112 (49 hours/39 gallons)
* 7. Boston: $1,112 (48 hours/36 gallons
* 8. Dallas/Ft. Worth: $1,077 (48 hours/38 gallons)
* 9. Denver: $1,057 (47 hours/38 gallons)
* 10. Seattle: $1,056 (44 hours/35 gallons)

Obama may have entered the White House with the intention of assembling a Lincolnesque “team of rivals,” but Summers subverted that notion by making himself chief packager and gatekeeper for any dissenting arguments about economic policy—all, he claimed, to spare the President from meeting with “long-winded people.” Lincoln’s “team of rivals” reported directly to Lincoln, but, as one source told Alter, Summers so skewed the process in this White House that it was like “a team of rivals reporting to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s prideful secretary of war.” Even Warren Buffett, a supporter who had spoken to Obama weekly during the fall of 2008, “found himself mysteriously out of touch with the new president” once he took office.

Obama was now imprisoned within the cozy Summers-Geithner group “and it would be increasingly difficult for him to see beyond its borders.” This “disconnection from the world,” Alter concludes, was not due to ideology or the clout of special interests but was instead “the malign consequence of the American love of expertise, which, with the help of citadels of the meritocracy, had moved from a mere culture to something approaching a cult.” For all Obama’s skepticism of cant, he was “in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis, there was a ‘right answer’ to everything. But a right answer for whom?”

From: “Why Has He Fallen So Short” by Frank Rich in The New York Review of Books

From The Huffington Post
By Stephen Gyllenhaal

As I sit on the set of GrassRoots – our comedy about a small City Council race in Seattle back in 2001 – there are so many images that float through my mind. The extras getting ready, sure. The crew setting up the lights and our RED camera (some of the new digital technology). We’re shooting in Seattle, trying to recapture what happened up here during that local election, trying to capture what it meant/means in a larger context. Just a little campaign (I’m not going to give away what happens in the campaign/film but I will say that the production is small – in Hollywood terms – which has actually made it easier for us to create images that are more real – less gloss – the feel of a genuine Seattle — grunge humble.)

Then there are other images that float to the surface of my mind, not so humble, but far grungier – images of the BP oil spreading itself quietly over our gulf, for instance, its consequences seemingly now less a problem since the media has let it slip away as other stories move front and center (poor Lohan, lucky Labron).

New “big things” to pay attention to.

But isn’t it the little things (growing) that entangle us so dreadfully? Those first cancer cells? Those termites, untended? How does a civilization collapse? How do powerful businesses go belly up? Isn’t it the little “unpleasantries” ignored, that ultimately bring about demise?

The unpleasantry of a cheap safety valve, for instance, or of an over confident BP executive, an under zealous regulator with the easy answer that those that work hard and succeed in business or in government are capable of – more or less – doing the right thing.

The easy answers – almost always dangerous, too often catastrophic. And from where I sit looking out at the state of our world, the easy answers just aren’t gonna cut it anymore.(Did they ever?)

Regulate Wall Street and the banks. Not easy. Clean up the BP disaster. Not easy. Get decent humans elected to office. Not easy. Get our citizens, all our citizens, decent jobs. Not easy. Global warming. Deteriorating wars. Not easy. Not easy. And so on…

But, frankly, it may be impossible for the people now running our world to do anything substantive about any of this.

It may be, for instance, impossible for Obama not to wage his various wars (too much money being made, too much power being accumulated and too much strength and grit being shown by doing it). It may be impossible for the rich (seemingly no different now than the royalty of old) to get out of their high powered cars, their air conditioned mansions, their plush first class seats, their yachts.

So what’s to be done?

And that’s when I come back to our little movie, back to that little Seattle City Council race, in which Grant Cogswell (unemployed and broke) decided that a monorail system – a serious public transportation approach – was absolutely necessary for the survival of a genuine Seattle (interesting in the light of all that oil spreading itself across our oceans now – Grant’s concept of mass transportation – which obviously uses so much less of BPs wayward product).

The results of what Grant was trying to do back in 2001 may not be fully felt for a long time to come. Hopefully our little movie will help – help to push the discussion of grassroots politics, grassroots thinking, grassroots approaches – ideas, actions and commitment from the ground up, not from the “royal top,” not from that utterly strange Republican/Reagan/Royal concept of “trickle down”. What an interesting approach: “trickle down,” just a trickle, folks, that’s all you get. And it will trickle down to you like manna from heaven – but how about the concept of trickle up, which after awhile becomes something, say a little bit bigger than a trickle, something – say – closer to a flood that washes away the mess of what our 19th/20th/21st Century royalty has been all about?

So there it is from where I sit, trying to make this little movie, Grassroots — real change seems to come only from the bottom. Don’t recent events make it sadly too clear what “change” from the top looks like – our laughable financial reforms, our new health-pharma-corporate care, the various wars that continue to expand and bleed us, particularly bleeding the bottom (that expanding group below the working class)?

But what’s so worrisome in all this is that change from the bottom isn’t usually pretty, boiling up in violence and rage, whether from the right or the left or even the center. So how do we nourish such change from the bottom without being destroyed by it? Well, it was grassroots that got Obama elected. But it was also those very grassroots that Obama had to ignore to function with the royalty of Washington, NY and in the other world capitals.

But he does it at his peril.

And it’s even more perilous for the rest of us because it seems to me that it’s those at the bottom who feel the pain of the mistakes from the top most acutely and most clearly. It’s also at the bottom where we finds roots, the real roots, working their way into the good earth (both metaphorical and real) from which, as I understand it, the sustenance for everything else is delivered.

July 4th. A day off from work. It’s been a packed stretch of time for me and I feel like I haven’t been here on my site enough (a site I love). I’ve been almost nowhere enough, except on the set where I’ve really gotten to play and do what I believe in most.

I’m grateful for the TV work I’ve had recently (and documented a bit here with videos) and paying my bills and getting to explore technique, etc, but there’s nothing like working on something you really believe in.

I really believe in GrassRoots and I find it coming to life with the crew, actors, the locations — Seattle — a real world being played with to make another real world on the screen. Magic. (Check out our slowly expanding Website: GrassrootsTheFilm.com)

And then it’s the 4th of July and I can’t help but come back to the ocean growing blacker, to BP defusing the truth (not the oil), to Wall Street having slipped through the fingers of the government. No regulations. No less money going to the people at the very top – bonuses – bonuses – bonuses. The Stock Market sliding now because no one took the painful steps earlier.

Grassroots.

Somehow it has a stronger and stronger ring for me. The guys at the top. (Pretty much guys – white, rational, struggling a bit with their weight, good at picking wine — these are the guys that have been running our show into the ground._So…

Grassroots.

The people.

Wasn’t that what July 4th was all about? 1776? People, of the people, by the people, etc?

Happy July Fourth…not just for the U.S., but for the world…Happy Independence Day…

some day…

From democracynow.org

Just under a year ago Dr. Binayak Sen, India’s most famous political prisoner, was released on bail after 2 years of imprisonment. Dr. Sen is a world-renowned “physician of the poor,” winner of the 2008 Jonathan Mann award for global health and human rights, and Vice President of India’s oldest civil liberties organization the People’s Union for Civil Liberties.

He was charged under the draconian and widely critiqued Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (or UAPA) and the Chhattisgarh Special Public Safety Act (CSPSA). The allegations against him ranged from helping the Maoist insurgency, being a member of a terrorist organization, to waging war against the Indian state.

Today is the third anniversary of his arrest and the trial against him continues. Democracy Now’s Anjali Kamat reached Dr. Sen in India.

Click here to listen to the interview