Given that he is a local guy, I feel obligated to mention that Karl Rove has resigned as of August 30. I would be happy about this if I didn’t realize it means he will work his dark magic full time.

BuzzFlash is collecting readers’ reactions to Rove’s resignation.

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The last couple of weeks, I’ve been going back over and over to one article: “Neocons on a Cruise: What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren’t Listening,” by Johann Hari from the Independent UK (via Alternet) from July 17, 2007.

I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, “Of course, we need to execute some of these people,” I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. “A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country,” she says. “Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.” She squints at the sun and smiles. “Then things’ll change.”

Wha?

Is this really how they think? I want to think these people are exceptional. I want to, but I don’t. Could they pull the trigger, or are they just spewing the same old mindless empty words?

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Rather than putting out each fire as they light it, how do we put out the fire from the base? How do we change the fundamental story?

Ruth Rosen from the Progressive think tank Longview Institute (a spin-off of the Rockridge Institute for some reason) tells us to challenge market fundamentalism. You know that story. Tax cuts will provide jobs, which means people will buy their own health care, housing, and transportation. In this story, “the common good” means everyone for themselves. I have no doubt this is one of the lies we need to engage to some degree in order to discredit it. OK. Yes, let’s do that. But, let’s not stop there.

I want to see us go further than telling the story of what we are not. I want to see us tell the story of what we are.

I have been reading Mark Kurlansky’s Nonviolence: 25 Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea. He quoted Vaclav Havel as having said that the way to create a viable alternative to violent culture was to live not in opposition but to live in parallel. You can be, as John Mohawk wrote, a good subject (”Yes, sir”), a bad subject (in rebellion), or a non subject (moving on with your own concerns, not accepting the terms of domination). The non subject doesn’t live in reference to domination. (Though it is amusing that both nonsubject and nonviolence do refer to themselves in the negative.)

Rather than letting the dominant story determine our response (”not market fundamentalism”), we can tell the story the way we see it — not the challenge to their story but the heart of our story. We can tell the story of community, cooperation, and genuine democracy. This is a story in which we actually do love one another, a story in which the common good is determined in common.

Cliff Schecter thinks we’ll find synergy in the variety of voices and ways they find their audience to retell the story. I hope we reach synergy in our non subjecthood rather than in our bad subjecthood.

UPDATE:

• Immanuel Wallerstein makes an excellent point in his International Herald Tribune article, “The ‘Alter-Globalists’ Hit Their Stride”: the World Social Forum, which met last week, is already on that parallel path.
• Joshua Holland asks “Do you challenge them on their ‘free-market’ fundamentalism, or do you call bullshit on the entire premise?”

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The war with Iran is scheduled for April, according to the Daily Herald in Scotland that quoted “an official report from Sofia” and picked up details from Arab Times in Kuwait. OK. We have the trail of electronic news screens, but where is the rest? I expect we will begin hearing a lot more about this in the next month.

We already knew the plan for a broad attack on Iran, but these stories add a lot of detail.

Is Iran well-enough armed from U.S. military surplus yet to offer a credible stage for the Armageddon so many Americans seek? They better be. The “Stop Arming Iran Act” has been introduced, and opponents will have a difficult time justifying continued arming of Iran to the mainstream.

We’re a long way from the inevitable negotiations to move U.S. oil interests into the country, as are now happening in Iraq. Couldn’t we just skip the war with Iran and move directly to the negotiations this time? That wouldn’t satisfy the Armageddon lobby, would it.

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Here you go–the third in my three-part freak out on outsourcing the U.S. government to achieve a global corporate fascism and, ultimately, white Christian domination until they LEAVE ALREADY.

In the State of the Union address, Bush noted his intention to have Congress help him “design” a volunteer civilian reserve corps to ease the burden on the armed services. I can think of another way to ease their burden. Like so many of Bush’s seemingly pathetic bridges across the aisle, this turns out to be misleading–and far more dangerous than the weak words imply.

The volunteer civilian reserve corps, the mercenaries–let’s just call them Blackwater–are already an important part of the plan to outsource the military since the Republican fascist wave of the 1990s. “In fact,” says Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, “they represent the life’s work of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.”

This is a revolution in military affairs.

This is only part of their outsourcing of many areas of the U.S. government.

This is fed from the same stream of money that created the Family Research Council and other right-wing subversive organizations.

This is the future Eisenhower warned about with the unchecked military-industrial complex.

Scahill has published a series of important articles on Blackwater and on the mercenary phenomenon in The Nation. With five Blackwater employees killed on a security operation in Baghdad just hours before the State of the Union address this week, maybe now is a good time to pay attention. Among the tidbits of information we should know:

• Blackwater and other “private security firms” beat FEMA to New Orleans.
• U.S. govt paid $950 per day per Blackwater guard, which came to $30 million for the Katrina bill. FEMA anticipated needing the guards for 3-5 years.
• From 2004-2006 the U.S. government paid this global private mercenary army $320 million for “diplomatic security.”
• Families say Blackwater cut corners in the interest of profits, resulting in the gruesome deaths of four Blackwater employees in Falluja in 2004. Now Blackwater has Kenneth Starr working as their counsel to tell the families nu-uh. How’s that for independent counsel?

Blackwater and the clean up their global activities imply has even shown up in fiction in CBS’s post-nuclear television show Jericho as Ravenwood, mercilessly marauding pirates trying to raid the good-hearted middle American town. The producers say they had helpful discussions with private security contractors in creating the realistic image of mercenaries for the show.

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