“O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears…” -RS
Rebecca Solnit: Liberal with Cognitive Dissonance. My Reply to the 2012 TomsDispatch Essay “A Letter to My Dismal Allies” by Tommy Leon Festinger (1957) proposed cognitive dissonance theory, which states that a powerful motive to maintain cognitive consistency can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior. According to Festinger, we hold many cognitions about the world and ourselves; when they clash, a discrepancy is evoked, resulting in a state of tension known as cognitive dissonance. As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance (i.e. agreement). William Black on Sec.Treas. Geithner’s book “This attack constitutes further proof of our family rule that it is impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody.” Solnit is regarded as a rooted activist, and good writer; rightly so. She has won many awards for over ten books, has traveled the world interviewing people involved in social movements, and is now routinely cross posted from the great Tomsdispatch site to at least seven other widely read sites. She is the kind of hands on activist writer that went to an 'encuentro' of the Zapatistas, and detailed the amazing work of the women of the EZLN. She lauded Occupy, and knows many of the original sparks that helped start it. She has been involved in the bay area for over twenty years with good one issue movements. So why spend so much time and space deconstructing her cognitive dissonance and arrogance to tell the 'left' to shut up about Obama? Because it is a deep rooted and destructive aspect of USA progressive politics to allow 'leaders' and heroes to be gatekeepers. Since the demise of left radical movements common of the 1880's to 1940's in the USA, what is deemed the post 1960’s left has most often aligned with liberals, for one issue causes for basic reforms. With often productive results. That is, the vast array of Ralph Nader/Common Cause type reforms, the great progress from the 60's through the 70's for gender rights and latinos and African Americans to have a more viable say in municipal and federal politics. We don't need to go over all the 'good things' that have happened since the McCarthy era, or from the 1920’s. We take them as a given outcome of the past 100 years of American organizing and social movements. (See Zinn’s Peoples’ History) But these ‘alliances’ and bottom up forces that actually made change stopped cold and hard during Carter and were further blockaded during Reagan. To take the gains of the past one hundred years as gifts bestowed upon us by liberals is a gross historical fallacy propagated by liberal elites to …well…justify their status. These gains were only made possible by a large threatening organized left; socialist, anarchist, communist, black militant etc. The liberal elite, whose mantle Solnit assumes in this poorly written almost incoherent attack though in the past she has laughingly called herself a socialist, feel no need to respond to the people ‘left’ of the two parties. Since there is no militant organized left anymore in the USA, they can rightly assume their arrogance of place to herding to the only game in town, and the so-called reality of politics. When the democrats are in power. This is by no means a temporary unedited (obviously) rant of 2012 that people should forgive. On Facebook 2014 she is still demanding we look for the little things and not criticize the catastrophes: “If you can't find flaws, quickly switch the subject to something more dreary--"the war has ended, but something shitty is going on several thousand miles away" is always a good tactic, because there is always something shitty going on and always will be. This law may have saved a species/a million lives/a human right, but the politican who got it passed did something I disagreed with in 2007!" R.S. No mention of any law that saved a species, or a million lives. Quite the contrary has been happening since Obama took office. No backup or facts needed for Solnit in this ‘you shut up’ mode. Then this is how she characterized resistance under Bush: “I've been around activists all my adult life, and though it's popular to think the world gets changed by delightful people, a lot of the saints and agents of change are obsessive, intransigent, unreasonable, and demanding, of themselves and of us. That's what it generally takes to change the world.” Guardian 2007 R.S. What a change in attitude when a democrat is in power. The article originally posted on Tomdispatch was called “We Could be Heroes”. The title alternated and mutated among the four main liberal sites, and many others. http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175598/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_we_could_be_heroes As you can see, the comment section was deleted there. Commondreams.org, which has a much more ‘left’ and more representative audience of the general population, in my opinion (and somewhat educated web wasting time view) than Huffingtonpost or Salon.com, immediately had a 8 to 1 disgust, to put it lightly, against nearly every point, and every ad hominem/strawman attack. Even the other liberal sites, places where if you told the truth about Obama in the first year you would get a 10 to 1 verbal beat down, all by 2012 had at least half commentators railing against the article. To put it simply, Americans of the ‘left’, or ‘left’ of the Clintons and Gore, were aghast, angry and really pissed off that someone lauding so many social movements, that has built her over twenty year career doing that, would suddenly call anyone “left” infantile, stupid….and…belittle us to worshipping a Leninist vanguard ideology. The comments section on the Nation magazine website are 3 to 1 angry, and appalled. The Nation is a middle of the road magazine that still propagates the myth that Nader caused the Bush election, and that Gore was somehow a dove, not a vicious war mongering hawk against Iraq, and who had previously called for more military intervention. As has been the case for one hundred years, the ‘people’ are much more left than the liberal elites. Yes, even many Nation readers were appalled. So goes my right to my own reply to the whole article piece by piece. She is widely divergent of the population. The proof is on sites that were started to support democrat victories where peoples’ comments balked. The proof is in the wholesale disgust among the participants in every cities’ occupy assemblies against Obama, all of whom refused to endorse the Democratic Party’s leadership and refused to do any get out the vote for democrats. The proof is in national polls that show a population left of the democrats by 70%, not to mention only 40% of the population actually votes for either party. I’m actually most concerned that she is such a hero still among the ‘left’ of the bay area even after this article. It’s a dead end world when bay area anarchists and activists and socialists think that hero worship and alignment with such a vicious condescending gatekeeper is important in coalition building. A powerless one issue ‘left’, or grouping of ‘progressives’ here and there, begging to power. Rather than building power; the story of the ‘left’ since the 1970’s; one of fealty and defensiveness. Still looking to University degree experts for leadership. Her new book is co published by Haymarket Books, which I believe was started by a Trotskyite socialist org. Oh the irony. Interesting, also a member of the university liberal elite, Adolph Reed destroys this dead end in his recent article in Harpers: Nothing Left; The Slow Surrender of American Liberals http://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/nothing-left-2/ Chris Hedges, a former liberal, NY Times reporter, did also in his book Death of the Liberal Class, published in 2011. Times are so bad, and so at the point of tipping into totalitarian chaos that people of the upper strata are actually joining with the bottom against the oligarchy. Solnit does the opposite. With a childish and vicious aplomb of non-sequiturs, completely wrong historical analogies, and rampant contradiction. Calling anyone ‘left’ whatever that means in the USA, vile. Of course for one hundred years, anarchist writers such as Goldman, Rocker, Maltesta, Bookchin (in his early years), and most obviously in modern times Chomsky and Zinn, have detailed time and again, warned, and been vindicated, that any alliance with the liberal capitalist class leads to the destruction of social movements, the co-optation of all bottom up initiative, and ultimately makes all true progress subservient to the whims of what liberals decide is politically viable at the moment. There are also many historical examples of ‘liberal elites’ aligning with fascism rather than allow true bottom up socialist democracy. A case could be made this is so for the present situation in the USA, except that there is no militant non ballot box left. It’s as if the liberals, so intent on supporting the ‘non right’ party of inverted totalitarianism, are punching at ghosts: are fighting and preparing for a militant left that doesn’t exist unfortunately. The political actions of the liberals’ leaders of course border on corporate fascism. That’s obvious. Today’s liberals just don’t recognize that, preferring to always holler ‘the right is worse’. But lets leave the real left, (along with some libertarian Marxists) that is holding sway over most of the rest of the world’s social movements, often not in name or label, but real action, demands, and organizational aptitude, out of this. Because as the quotes below will show from Solnit, these people who are constantly hailed by her, for example the Zapatistisas, or the people who seized 200 factories in Buenos Aires for worker management are not allowed to exist in the USA. She fetishes third world libertarian left non ballot box movements while at the same time denouncing any similar attempt in the USA. There is no ‘third way’ allowed by her among us ‘left’, we are just children fantasizing. A country, and this is too obvious to state, that the world needs the most to do counter mass organizing against neo liberalism and militarism. I will put quotes throughout of people some of whom she has in the past praised. It’s an interesting contrast. “Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it..” Arhundati Roy. Adolph Reed Jr. Harper’s June 2014 “Nothing Left” “Anticipation of jobs and “access” – the crack cocaine (or more realistically, powder cocaine) of the interest-group world – helps to make this scam more alluring, especially among those who have nurtured their aspirations in elite universities of the policy-wonk left or both. Such aspirants can be among the most adamant in denouncing leftist criticism of the Democrat of the moment as irresponsible and politically immature.” OK so here I go. Title The Rain on Our Parade A Letter to My Dismal Allies (or We Could Be Heroes) “.. .to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I’ve come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again…… O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we’re talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.” R.S. So if I talked to you like this, would you even listen to me again? As if we are children. We are workers, middle class concerned citizens, activists disgusted by daily set backs, trying to build a better world, struggling to find the means to organize for a better world, but debased to infantile stupid little proles. Pony, Teletubby, Eeyore reference all in one paragraph. Where’s the ruler rapping our hands? You have a bad attitude! And we don’t need analysis, strategy? No, cuz we are too stupid to come up with that. This paragraph alone should have shunned her from anyone on the ‘left’: so derogatory, arrogant, so privileged. Analysis is not up to you little stupid workers. While she claims to move “toward more radical goals than the Democrats”, we are not allowed to even organize or agitate for such. How is she going to move toward more radical goals? What are they? In fact there has been a deep analysis, even from her ‘friends’ that she has written about for twenty years, and from the USA ‘left’ (counterpunch writers, Znet. Blackgendareport, IWW, thousands of books published by AK Press, PM Press, Common Courage,7 Stores Press, Zinn, etc) that coincides with the analysis of the ‘third world’ social movements that she has spent twenty years justifiably describing in positive detail. The real left, that is, the USA people that want an anti-capitalist internationalist movement, of which there are millions, but admittedly have no cohesive organizational properties, has said since Nafta, since the shutdown of the WTO in Seattle 99 (which she praises to no end) , that we need an internationalist perspective outside the ballot box, wherein bottom up movements build power to destroy or at the least reign in the global financial system of neo liberal economics and constant resource wars. But just shut up. You are poison. What did her brother or her ‘friend’ anarchist David Graeber think of this paragraph? She spent years rightly praising Occupy, Seattle 99, and then tells the ‘left’ to shut up, calls us rancid, and speaks to working class people like children. Because there is an election coming! The poison often emerges around electoral politics. Look, Obama does bad things and I deplore them, though not with a lot of fuss, since they’re hardly a surprise. He sometimes also does not-bad things, and I sometimes mention them in passing, and mentioning them does not negate the reality of the bad things. R.S. The poison? What is this poison? Critical analysis of what our government is doing across the world, what our government is subsidizing, as in Monsanto, big Pharma, and trade agreements that deny indigenous people their land rights in Colombia and Mexico. Obama does some bad things, children, though don’t take notice with much fuss! He sometimes does “not bad things.” Educating yourself on what your military is doing every week is poison? Learning about what your President and Congress is doing weekly and spreading that information is poison? Education about good little things is good. Education about big bad things, is poison. Solnit is dictating what you are allowed to discuss and what information you should share. Obama is worse than Bush, since he has continued all of Bush’s and Clinton’s and Cheney’s policies. Except for two Supreme Court nominations, Obama has done nothing different, hence everything is (then) four years times worse. But don’t put up a fuss, she tells you, over suspension of Habeus Corpus, lending 12 Trillion dollars to the too big to fail FIRE sector that created the tech bubble and housing sector bubble that she writes ten more columns about in the years later, but only blaming Google and tech workers, not the financial hot money Obama and Geitner and now Yellen threw at the whole bubble. And don’t raise a fuss about Obama allowing off shore drilling to increase, fracking to increase, instituting ‘austerity’ during a recession. (a Bush/Milton Friedman/Clinton doctrine) to ‘balance the budget” while increasing the military and homeland security budget. Don’t create a fuss about Obama and Holder being the most aggressive anti civil rights/whistleblower prosecutors in history as documented by ex-Obama supporter Glenn Greenwald. Also don’t fuss about maybe a hundred new military bases in Africa detailed on the site she home-posts on Tomdispatch! Which alone, contribute more to global warming than the Keystone Pipeline will. Obama is drone bombing at least ten more countries than Bush. He oversaw the overthrow of democracy in Honduras. Union leaders and journalists and peasant organizers are now being killed. He pushed another free trade pact through that includes Colombia. The most dangerous place in the world for campesino organizers/union organizers outside of recognized war zones. Hundreds of union organizers have been assassinated, fifty alone the year before the pact, and as is documented, often with our money and over site, either by the DEA, or CIA. Obama knows all this, as wikileaks showed. Our govt knows our money has funded at least 200,000 innocent deaths there. She praises the leakers but ignores what the leaks say. We create a ‘poison’ around electoral politics by documenting, researching, and passing onto other citizens what the president is doing. That must stop. Orwelian,in the reversal. A citizen of some stature and influence of the ‘progressive’ bent demanding a complete silence on a governments’ actions. To be productive and progressive you must have one eye on an issue, to know the good things, and keep one eye blind to the big picture. Inverted activism. A totalitarianism of critical thinking and discussion. That is, you may only document what one party does wrong. Number 2 party, is bad also, but does good things more often. Good things! But since I am far left and male, this would be the response: “Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another fortysomething years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.” RS More dangerous in a democracy than state propaganda is the ‘peer’ with ‘left’ influence that can herd people to ignorance with assurance, “we all know that, look over here.” Ignore the doomsayers, there is a once extinct trout spawning in a Truckee stream. But when the writers’ meme calls for it, global climate catastrophic change is coming. Except, you can only fight it by joining 350.org demonstrations. Not by building a social and class based movement against the economics that demand rape of the earth: only by influencing politicians, that have not been ‘influenced’ in any major way for thirty years. The planet, and ecosystems have a long memory. Liberals have one that lasts about a week; or these days, a typical daily news cycle. Her 'mansplaining' detour, one that she has been using for years now, even again in Harpers' as late as 2014, is a very effective way to dodge any factual criticism, especially by other 'left' women. Wrap up it all together in men shouting over top of her as a way to negate all criticism, and what man is logically allowed to point out she IS wrong, and often dangerously wrong? Noam Chomsky “`I don’t bother writing about Fox News. It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.” (You can see why Solnit never quotes Chomsky, or links to his talks, or mentions his books, one of the most popular USA left intellectuals worldwide-a believer in anarchist libertarianism.) Democracy Now March 18 2013 Arundhati Roy “ And Obama just goes on, you know, coming out with these smooth, mercurial sentences that are completely meaningless. I was—I remember when he was sworn in for the second time, and he came on stage with his daughters and his wife, and it was all really nice, and he said, you know, “Should my daughters have another dog, or should they not?” And a man who had lost his entire family in the drone attacks just a couple of weeks ago said, “What am I supposed to think? What am I supposed to think of this exhibition of love and family values and good fatherhood and good husbandhood?” I mean, we’re not morons, you know? It’s about time that we stopped acting so reasonable. I just don’t feel reasonable about this anymore.” Believe me, a lot of us already know most of the dimples on the imperial derriere by now, and there are other things worth discussing. RS “The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.” Arundhati Roy The dimples on his ass. That is what mass murder is to her. That is what mass surveillance and expansion of war is to her. Dimples. I could post many photos of blown apart bodies of women and children in Pakistan, Yemen, but you don’t need to see that. The gatekeeper is telling you what to discuss. She is also saying that a lot of us already know. Oh really? If she cuts off the discussion, and doesn’t allow her facebook followers to discuss Obama either, what do ‘they’ know? If she spends no time on Obama’s increased wars in Africa, what do her thousands of followers actually know? If she never mentions since he was elected, the financial casino that Obama has ratcheted up, what do people know? In not one article about the new boom in SF and the resulting evictions does she mention that the federal government’s economic policy is causing it. Do the tens of thousands of her readers know? Not one article about SF gentrification has she mentioned the Democratic Party monetary policies that allow a company like Google to have hyper inflated asset worth, though producing little actual ‘goods’, and who offshore billions of profit. Under a democrat, in her mind, these bubble companies exist in a gravity free vacuum, unaffected by a democratic party’s Federal Reserve appointed chairmen, Treasury Secretary, the corrupt regulators of the SEC, and lack of will by that party to clamp down on tax evasion and unregulated IPO conversion. Not one mention of Obama’s absolute guidance in steering over 10 TRILLION dollars at near zero interest rates to the too big to fail finance institutions whose tentacles and largesse are intertwined in every eviction, every million dollar condo development, every speculation by hedge funds and private equity that has bought up at least 40% of Oakland homes. Nor no mention that foreign rich are buying at least 1/3 of the high end properties. Which they can only do because of Obama’s policy of keeping interest rates near zero, and opening the Federal Reserve’s discount window to Finance institutions, and neo liberal free trade policies that let the 1%’s money float like a giant face sucking squid on humanity across the world. (Matt Taibbi hat tip) It’s hard to tell how much ‘we all know’. Since she doesn’t allow any talk about it. And “there are other things worth discussing”. Indeed. Like dancing and flowers and honey bees, and 350.org demos that won’t achieve one bit of change whatsoever. If every article she writes, reposted on five or more websites seen by hundreds of thousands of people, never mention that Obama and the usual criminals such as Summers, Hillary Clinton, Rubin, Bernanke, are behind this 2nd FIRE sector bubble, than where do her readers find that information if they are told not to read it when written by vile ‘leftists’? If the left is the only area you can get this information, but she calls us ‘rancid’ and wishing for ponies, do you think any of her followers know any facts about the ramp up of Bush policies that Obama, Clinton, Biden etc are doing? Why is the support of drone killings a positive majority with registered democrats, when under Bush a majority opposed them? Why the change? What critical thinking aspect in liberals’ thought changed their views? Well, it’s our party over all. There is no alternative. Naomi Klein Real News Network Aug 2008 (note date!) “The progressive network, blogs, and think tanks, have suspended critical thinking… My concern is you can’t shut up for awhile, it doesn’t really work that way…now Moveon.org is part of the Obama machine; well Obama doesn’t have a plan to end the war in Iraq, and Moveon should be telling their members that.…{my note: Obama withdrew from Iraq under Bush's agreement, BUT beforehand he and Clinton tried to continue the occupation!}. This is about the political integrity of progressives…not Obama bashing.. How do you segue from being a cheerleader to a grass roots pressure? You can (already) see how when more left organizations line up behind Obama how they are taken for granted. I mean to appoint Jason Furman as your chief economic advisor is a complete slap in the face.. “ (he was a walmart defender)..”If you’ve proven you’re a doormat, you can pretty much expect to get stomped on.” Sitting around with the first occupiers of Zuccotti Park on the first anniversary of Occupy, I listened to one lovely young man talking about the rage his peers, particularly his gender, often have. But, he added, fury is not a tactic or a strategy… R.S. Wait a minute, first paragraph said we are ‘not talking about an analysis or strategy’. So now I can’t use anger at an unjust economic system, an imperialistic mass murdering state with Obama as president, as a tool for action, nor can I allow rage and anger to show too much cuz of my gender? There’s a lotta rules in this soup. Insert a Clash lyric here. Most will agree. Can you imagine how far the Civil Rights Movement would have gotten, had it been run entirely by complainers for whom nothing was ever good enough? To hell with integrating the Montgomery public transit system when the problem was so much larger! R.S. This amazed me. She is a historian? This is what many commentators on the websites hit on. To which she replied to no one. This is the most base Thomas Friedman view of the civil rights movement I have read in years, outside of tea partiers. Her authoritarian moment of white rich liberal just telling people to shut up, unless it fits her meme of the paid article plays out here. The civil rights movement was not filled with ‘complainers’? My god she doesn’t even know what MLK said before he was assassinated? Of course she does, but she ignores what most of the black fighters were saying to fit her compact meme of shut up and vote. You can not find one personal history or wide reaching history (Free at Last? for example) that does not record that EVERYONE in the movement from the 1950's to the 1960's did INDEED think the problem was so much larger. MLK called the USA govt a terrorist country. I cannot guess how you would parse that as ‘not complaining’. After the federal government had ordered desegregation, after LBJ passed the civil rights act. He said that not near enough had been done, that there must be a great upheaval. He said for years that ‘moderates were to be more feared than conservatives’ (paraphrasing), that the most dangerous government was ours. He said this while there was a complete Democratic majority with LBJ. Only a white liberal would transform the African American civil rights movement from the failure of reconstruction through the drug war of today, to desegregating buses in the south in the late 1950’s. She is considered a historian? CORE, SNCC members were not constantly complaining and unhappy with what little progress that they got democrats to go with? Are white activists and liberals STILL this ignorant of what was said, what was demanded, and what was organized for? And what dreams died? Robert Moses field director of SNCC said that he was drawn by the “sullen, angry and determined look” of the protestors of the 1960 lunch counter sit down , qualitatively different from the “defensive cringing” expression common to most photos of protestors of the south. (Cockburn, Colossal Wreck) White House Tapes: MLK to LBJ “"There's no use giving lectures on the law as long as you've got rats eating on peoples' children and unemployed and no roof over their head and no job to go to and maybe with a dope needle in one side and the cancer in the other." August 20, 1965 In the midst of the Watts riots, President Johnson and Dr. King discuss how to fix the underlying problems. He’s not complaining at all is he? Cuz little happy gains had been made. He told the motherfucking president right to his face, then later called him a goddamn leader of a terrorist state! Even after LBJ made more concessions. That is how you deal with power, you assert your power again and again….against. Not only do you constantly complain but you fight back against the liberal elite. “ Not only did King make the hard choice to discard his partnership with Johnson, but in so doing he brought down the wrath of previously supportive politicians, and of some of his closest confidantes. The NAACP denounced King and disassociated themselves from his statement. Other SCLC leaders were angry that he chose to end his silence instead of compromising with the powerful.” Margaret Kimberly BlackAgendaReport.com 12/2008 To call the blacks that died by the thousands from the 40’s to 60’s for economic equality, for voting rights, for housing rights, to say that MLK’s trip to Chicago, and then his joining in the Memphis March before his death, was for desegregation of transit, or simply non-complaining is complete obfuscation. For this historical inaccuracy alone, she should be questioned in all serious discussion of social movements in the USA. The flippant lack of scholarship and the portrayal of blacks in the 60’s as passive non complainers subservient to the democratic party is disgusting. But of course most white ‘liberals’ see no problem with this. There were hundreds of urban riots in 1965. MLK was assassinated in 1968. Hundreds more cities then blew up. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was in goddamn 1956. The black power movement grew out of a specific demand that conservative (i.e. subservient to incremental gains from democrat white leaders) black leaders step aside. Then came the black panthers. Viciously suppressed, assassinated and infiltrated by both parties’ agents. Oh yes, they were complaining to fucking hell, and still are. [As an aside, you will note in not one Solnit article in the past four years has she ever quoted a USA radical black voice, nor a radical latino voice, only POC liberals, While documenting non-white radicals/leftists in other countries. Make your own conclusion.] Picture Gandhi’s salt marchers bitching all the way to the sea, or the Zapatistas, if Subcomandante Marcos was merely the master kvetcher of the Lacandon jungle, or an Aung San Suu Kyi who conducted herself like a caustic American pundit. Why did the Egyptian revolutionary who told me about being tortured repeatedly seem so much less bitter than many of those I run into here who have never suffered such harm? R.S. This paragraph is as Thomas Friedman as the last. Gandhi doing anti state direct actions, not voting for lesser of two evils; Zapatistas never have endorsed a politician. They are constantly complaining about USA presidents and their free trade corporate bludgeon. You can’t get though the history of the Zapatistas without coming away with a knowledgeable hatred of USA corporate rape. The EZLN started the day a Democrat President instituted NAFTA. Yes, they rose up with GUNS the day Nafta was instituted by a democrat, against a corrupt oligarchic democracy?!? If that is not complaining, and working outside the ballot box, I don’t know what is right from left, hand from foot. And Solnit is a historian of the people. Indeed. “We learned a long time ago that we should never subject ourselves to the schedules of the powerful. We had to follow our own calendar and impose it on those above.” Sub Marcos of the EZLN The Zapatistas, as she has written about in the past mostly factually, did not ever engage in ballot box politics. It was an armed uprising. Their existence is a complete counterpoint to just shut up and vote. Cognitive dissonance starts turning to parody. I can’t understand the intellectual sloppiness that could reach such a comparison. But she can’t stop herself from projecting. “Caustic American Pundit”? She’s the one assuming the throne, not us. What else is this whole essay but a bitter belittling pundit preaching to those of us down below? And here comes the big self projection…… Because, really, people, part of how we are going to thrive in this imperfect moment is through élan, esprit de corps, fierce hope, and generous hearts. R.S. Indeed. And all of her screed undermines all of that sentence. You told me I am scum, and now I am supposed to be ‘generous’ with you? You compared me and all the anarchists you have known and lauded in the bay area for twenty years as “flies buzzing around your head.” First sentence of this essay is …. Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. RS What prize? Who are these flies? You reader, she is calling you a fly. A gnat. Unworthy of engaging in discussion. A bug. To be brushed off. “He has been more effective in Evil-Doing than Bush in terms of protecting the citadels of corporate power, and advancing the imperial agenda. He has put both Wall Street and U.S. imperial power on new and more aggressive tracks – just as he hired himself out to do. That was always Wall Street’s expectation of Obama, and his promise to them. That’s why they gave him far more money in 2008 than they gave John McCain. They were buying Obama futures on the electoral political market – and they made out like bandits. They invested in Obama to protect them from harm, as a hedge against the risk of systemic disaster caused by their own predations. And, it was a good bet, a good deal. It paid out in the tens of trillions of dollars.” Glenn Ford Blackagendareport.com The usual reply on the left is that there’s no difference between the two experiences and they prefer that Che Guevara give them a spa pedicure. Now, the Che pedicure is not actually one of the available options, though surely in heaven we will all have our toenails painted camo green by El Jefe. R.S. Oh my, The usual reply on the left is a Che reply? So who on the left has she been talking to? The majority of organizers whom in occupy that she correctly identifies as anarchists? Does she read anything on the left? Say Counterpunch? Znet? Even Commondreams.org articles? All three have a total of millions of readers. All have a huge majority of anti Leninist /‘che’/maoist, and majority of all ‘left’ in the USA is libertarian. PM Press and AK press, the latter the biggest far left publisher and distributor in the country pushes Che? Quite the opposite. Could it be, she actually stands with a ‘comrade’ but doesn’t even gell what the fuck he or she is saying? That she has her books printed by the ‘left’ but has no concept of the left libertarian ideals common for thirty years here? Is the cognitive dissonance that bad? Another point raised here; where she should not be considered a voice from left of center whatsoever. She doesn’t read your articles or books! As an aside, she did say recently on FB that she doesn’t like counterpunch.org. No wonder. Doesn’t fit her bubble. How many articles did she write praising Occupy? And what of occupy was not Left? All the assemblies said they would not endorse a democratic slate even locally, and all would not allow democratic politicians to speak. GA’s would not even allow union bureaucrats to take any credit, only rank and file were allowed to speak and organize. How more ‘left’ and a representation of ‘there is not much difference’ can you get? And NO ‘Che’ worship. The radical small press, that she is a star because of, publishes Che, Lenin and Trotsky vanguardist crap? No, majority of the ‘left press’ in the USA prints anti Leninist anarchists and left libertarian views. Amazing, that now her new book, is a co imprint with Haymarket….which is actually run by a trotskyist ISO cabal. Har. http://externalbulletin.wordpress.com/2014/02/01/questions-and-concerns-about-the-iso-and-cersc/ Sorry I love that irony. Much has to be said for Haymarket’s reputation in my opinion. They have done amazing work despite their connections to a secret nasty trot sect. Really please look and buy what they put out. Now they are helping her spread her venom to the left. Odd. Well beyond that fantastically weird disconnect, the belittling goes on. We are children that just want to have our toenails painted in camo green (again, an unbased reference to the white left being vanguardist supporting guerrilla war). This is an elitist liberal upper class view. That all left in the USA are white well off people. It just goes to show that even living in SF for so long, she was not connected to any of the working class whites, and especially not the radical blacks and browns, except as in an almost ‘colonialist’ way as totems, or ‘objects’ of culture. Or heroes conserving culture. Or just as 'poets' and 'artists'. That those of you who did organize with her, she saw as privileged just like her. Not working class. Take note. She thinks if you are ‘left’ you are a little child waiting for nirvana. Not inimically being dealt serious blows by both parties’ neo liberal economics. That we are waiting for a pedicure, rather than in rage about the wars, lack of jobs, lack of affordable health care, people we know dying for lack of care, people we know crushed that served in the vicious wars. That we can know no real passion for massive change, since we are really just typing away from a safe haven waiting for the revolution. Sorry, rage is a gender thing. I am odious for being angry. I’m doing that ‘man-splaining ‘ thing again. “If you are going to fight for anything, you’ve got to fight for the right to fight. That means fighting for the rule of law. So, if you don’t plan to go underground or into exile anytime soon, you must fight the president who claims the right to imprison or kill any person, of any nationality, any place on Earth, for reasons known only to him. The man who excelled George Bush by shepherding preventive detention through Congress – Barack Obama, the More Effective Evil. Fight him this election year. Fight him every year that he’s here.” Glenn Ford Blackagendareport.com An undocumented immigrant writes me, “The Democratic Party is not our friend: it is the only party we can negotiate with.” Or as a Nevada activist friend put it, “Oh my God, go be sanctimonious in California and don't vote or whatever, but those bitching radicals are basically suppressing the vote in states where it matters.” RS Yep, great how that ‘negotiation’ has gone. Obama has deported twice as many people as Bush, while immigration from southern Americas dropped drastically due to the worldwide recession. Interesting how her two points are people that wrote or talked to her. Not actual named bottom up human rights activists or spokespeople from actual Latino organizations fighting the deportations and incarceration in Texas Prisons. No discussion of how worse it’s gotten under Obama, while real latino cross border immigration has slowed so much due to the recession. No discussion or note about how Obama has increased the Clinton instituted rule of automatic deportation with conviction of a crime, even if you are a legal non native resident. Nor, how much power he actually has over this ‘issue’. The democratic trope is that these are “Bush” policies that have to be followed. Actually Clinton enacted more draconian laws, but leave that aside. A president can issue binding directives to ICE, the DEA, and of course greatly controls the direction the DOJ takes. If it was Romney, she’d be screaming to hell, about the thousands of Latinos that have been swept up in early morning hours by dark glass ICE cars in the bay area. Families broken up. Native born separated from immigrant parents. Teenagers flown immediately to isolation cells in Texas. Something even our local papers cover. No kidding. The SF Weekly owned by a corporate monopoly of weekly city papers has had excellent articles many times over the years. Actual journalistic articles about how bay area Latinos are being swept up under the Obama administration. How kids are being separated from families. But you know, shut up, don’t bring it up, raise your pinky with that tea cup of ‘negotiation’. And how ‘radicals’ can suppress the vote is so laughable. Millions of registered democrats voted republican since Nixon, through Reagan to Bush? Ahh facts be damned. No references, no citations, no facts. Just the democratic party mantra that a mysterious organized left (ha!) somehow suppresses the vote. This is fox news territory. A slogan with no facts whatsoever. Next you’ll get the Nader trope, and Gore was anti war. You know that’s coming. Liberals often concentrate on domestic policy, where education, health care, and economic justice matter more and where Democrats are sometimes decent, even lifesaving, while radicals are often obsessed with foreign policy to the exclusion of all else. R.S. Wow. Another ahistorical wow. Actually radicals for 100 years, as she has written about plenty of times, completely centered on ‘domestic issues’ which of course always tie into ‘foreign policy’. I like that phrase. She didn’t use massive intervention, imperialism and mass murder. Just ‘foreign policy’. Indeed. She has written BOOKS tied into this subject of ‘american’ radicals changing the course of history. Another paragraph off the bend. Wacky. Her own books and essays discount this. Well, really before Obama got elected. One of subjects she lists: economic justice…..was fought and died for by radicals. Not party politicians. The far left in the USA, the anarchists, and socialists were never ‘obsessed with foreign policy’. It has always been two in a pod, as she has written about her whole life. What another strange non historical jab. It doesn’t even make sense. What ‘radical’ in the USA ever divided the two? None. Who does today? None. Another very strange dissonance that should make editors shake their heads in disbelief when printing her articles. Seattle 1999 was just about foreign policy? Occupy had a strong middle class base over outrageous rentier class student debt and mortgage fraud. She wrote about this. So no one in Occupy was ‘left’ or “radical”? Cognitive dissonance. And what radical is wrong for focusing moreson on foreign policy since it completely affects domestic policy? At a demonstration in support of Bradley Manning this month, I was handed a postcard of a dead child with the caption "Tell this child the Democrats are the lesser of two evils." It behooves us not to use the dead for our own devices, but that child did die thanks to an Obama Administration policy. Others live because of the way that same administration has provided health insurance for millions of poor children or, for example, reinstated environmental regulations that save thousands of lives. R.S. "President Obama, for all the criticism he gets from Dick Cheney," argued Scahill, "is actually far more effective at the 'war games'—so to speak—than the neocons were, because he's able also to sell it to the liberal base." J. Schahill Nice trade off. Thousands of dead innocents, but here in the USA some poor kids will get Medicaid, or their parents will be forced to buy insurance from the death decider corporations. What a great moral compass here. By this compass of great activist and crusader Solnit, we would be happy that Obama is mass murdering a hundred thousand, if we got actual single payer healthcare. What a disgusting analogy. How you could even think that an imperialist bombing campaign incinerating thousands of people, a hundred more military bases in Africa to ensure land grabs, and drone bombing there now too, should be compared to USA citizens buying ‘health insurance’ is beyond possession of any moral center. By the way, the phrase “environmental regulations that save thousands of lives” is complete bullshit. Obama is as bad as Bush. Fracking has massively increased. Federal lands were opened to more coal mining, and the gulf has been opened up to more offshore drilling. Obama got over $800.000 from oil companies. That claim should also get her banned as any ‘source’ of fact from progressive sites. “I” would really like to see a real discussion about that. It won’t happen. She’s untouchable among the liberal sites and the elites that run the Nation magazine and Harpers. Interesting though that Harpers is such a great magazine that articles within it have detailed how Obama is worse than Bush on the environment, because he is pursuing the same ‘all of the above’ policies that Bush did. So things are much worse. While I read on her Facebook page in 2014, they are actually going to print another one of her articles. It ‘behoves’ me to mention dimples on a corporate ass yes. He allowed BP to handle the Gulf spill, just as Bush would have. He has greenlighted all fracking; polluting ground water all over the country and poisoning arable land and making thousands of families sick. All of the Keystone Pipeling carrying nasty Canadian tar sands down to Texas is DONE and approved, except phase four, which Solnit is on a crusade to stop. A bait and switch for the coming election. Look up Obama’s speeches on increased oil output. He’s really happy about it. Obama is the same as Bush on food inspection policy (there are less inspectors and less oversite than under Bush due to austerity cutbacks), and he has appointed corporate agriculture people to high posts. He has not made one mention, nor raised one regulatory hand against the massive amount of tar sands oil coming in by rail which has increased one hundred percent. Remember that town in Quebec that burned? We’ll see that happen in the USA very soon. There are now ten times as many rail cars a day carrying oil in Canada and the USA, with no federal upgrade or increased oversight. Thanks to empty wheel.net I realized I skipped over her lie about Kamala Harris, CA's attorney general : "Recently, I mentioned that California’s current attorney general, Kamala Harris, is anti-death penalty and also acting in good ways to defend people against foreclosure. A snarky Berkeley professor’s immediate response began,…." RS Emptywheel.net ( http://www.emptywheel.net/2012/09/28/rebecca-solnits-mirror/ ) cited a great David Dayen article, an economics writer frequently citied on Nakedcapitalism.com, the best 'left' finance site in the country, “President Obama stood with me and 48 other attorneys general in taking on the banks and winning $25 billion for struggling homeowners,” Harris said, noting that Obama also supported credit card and Wall Street reform…" Dayen then writes "At the risk of repeating myself for the umpteenth time, nobody “took on the banks” in the foreclosure fraud settlement. It was designed to deliver immunity for the crimes that created the Great Recession, the largest consumer fraud in history. You should not describe a penalty for documented crimes as “winning $25 billion for struggling homeowners.” And homeowners will never see the bulk of that money. Dozens of states have stolen the hard dollars out of that settlement to plug their budget holes, and that includes Harris’ home state of California. " People who told me back in 2000 that there was no difference between Bush and Gore never got back to me afterward. I didn’t like Gore, the ex-NAFTA-advocate and pro-WTO shill, but I knew that the differences did matter, especially to the most vulnerable among us, whether to people in Africa dying from the early impacts of climate change…. R.S. This is an allusion that Gore was better for Africa and acted while VP on climate change. Umitigated bullshit. He stopped AIDS drugs for years. The one good thing Bush did, was reverse that policy. Gore while VP was a complete shill also for the oil and gas industry. Gore single handedly went after African countries manufacturing AIDS drugs. He even threatened trade sanctions. You can google this. He is credited with a million dead over his fealty to pharmaceutical companies. Amazing she can white wash his record. Just amazing. There is nothing he did while VP pro environment. Record says opposite. He helped de-regulate with his and Clinton’s reinventing government business/corporate partner program. Ask her about Gore’s embracement of sanctions on Iraq, and the weekly bombing in the last year of Clinton. Ask her how way back in the first gulf war, he made a senate speech to invade Iraq. Ask her how in a 2000 debate (on youtube from Cspan), he says Saddamn was a real threat and must be overthrown. She won’t answer. So no, we can’t get back to her afterward. (see part 2) In fact she automatically deletes people on her facebook page if you stray just one bit in complaining about the democrats. Solnit never engages in any comments section on the many liberal sites her articles are posted on. She has no public website for discussion. Compare this to Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, or Yves Smith, or the one good financial writer of the NY Times Gretchen Morganson, who regularly do reply and have hundreds of thousands of readers. She is a gatekeeper, buttressed against argument and arrogant when confronted with facts. (see part 2) Bitterness poisons you and it poisons the people you feed it to, and with it you drive away a lot of people who don’t like poison. You don’t have to punish those who do choose to participate. Actually, you don’t have to punish anyone, period. R.S. Words are poison? Criticism is poison? Journalism and argument is poison? What kind of totalitarian logic is this? I copied this because it’s funny. Bad funny. Because it is projection and weird circular whirly gig words. Alliterative verbiage gravity free: why I have never been able to get through her books. Self help new age oddness with a Thomas Friedman mishmash again. The whole article is punishing anyone that hates the democrats. Somehow, I am poison. And then I am punishing people. Not Obama who is bombing innocent people everyday and since day one has been imposing austerity; resulting in a decline in life expectancy already, 200,000 teachers fired, 100,000 postal workers, a total of 700,000 civil service sector jobs lost, and cuts to funding to cities. A doubling of poverty rates with an Obama steered student loan profit sucking disaster that has seen student debt double since he took office. A big topic in occupy. It’s me. I am punishing and I am poison. Like us ‘leftists’ go around hitting people on the head outside the ballot box for voting democrat. Actually the democratic party punishes us when we vote for them. Austerity, deregulation of the financial sector, cut off of urban funds for working class housing, massive increase of the drug war under Clinton, and continuation by Obama.... Actually one poison in humanity’s progress within democracies has been the belief that elites ensconced in the right and liberal political class will act in the majority’s interests. That belief is actually a betrayal of the original ideas of the liberal enlightenment. And so without a hint of humility or bottom up democratic beliefs, she is saying that any act of righteous anger, vigorous analysis or protest against the liberal party is ‘poison’. Funny that occupy happened. Because that was its base. The democrats have betrayed the middle and working class, the republicans are worse, so we need a mass uprising. Hence Occupy. I really wonder how many people that did so much work in Occupy actually read this screed. If they were not thrown into a ‘man/woman rage’ , I wonder about their backbone and ethical compass also, if still praising her and supporting her. “The US Census reported late last year that in 2012, 46.5 million people were living in poverty, the largest number ever. The poverty rate has been rising from a low of 11.3% in 2000 to 15% in 2012. Many researchers claim that the official poverty rate understates the actual problem. For example, a study found that 38% of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck – including parts of the maxed-out middle class.” Wolf Richter Testosterone Report Being different means celebrating what you have in common with potential allies, not punishing them for often-minor differences. It means developing a more complex understanding of the matters under consideration than the cartoonish black and white that both left and the right tend to fall back on. RS Well there you go. The biggest cognitive dissonance you could have. Famous loved writer of the ‘left’ or progressive scene, just writes a paragraph that completely contradicts her whole diatribe. Indeed. “Developing a more complex understanding of the matters” when you just said way up there to not pay attention to complexities, nor to analysis, …and “cartoonish black and white’……what every ridiculous part of this whole diatribe is about. Shut up and vote…and the haters of the democrats are eyoores, little whiners…..comfortable typers.…….Indeed rich person. There is NO cartoonish black and white. And her attempts to portray all left activists in the USA, and all left leaning wanna be fighters, as stupid children, do nothing but divide us even more. What a vicious tired sanctimonious bore. Pedicures indeed. There is nothing to celebrate when we don’t have the power to at the least, make the murderous powers above us, even cooperate for crumbs. Her entire diatribe is a complete cartoon, that offers no celebration whatsoever of the ‘left’ counter to democratic party policies, which at this point reflects (but can’t organize) a majority of the population, that offers no understanding of complexities of USA social movements or radical organizations, and that offers nothing but a black and white “shut up” alternative. What is my counter solution? What every radical, left, and progressive organization outside of ‘liberal’ parties all over the world are fighting, and in some places dying for. To build a world , whether piecemeal in nationalistic boundaries or internationally, that is guided by democratic bottom up political and economic ideas. Participatory economics and democracy. An end to right and liberal center parties doing the bidding of a global finance rentier class. That rests on eternal war and subjugation. Same shit we’ve been fighting for, for two hundred years. That hasn’t changed; but the recent role of gatekeeper liberals in actually having an influence on the ‘left’ has. Now they are allowed to actually talk down to us in the USA, when in the past they had to listen to us. Lets repeat that difference. In the past the liberals had to listen to the left. Liberals use to be scared of the ‘left’, and so did ameliorate via municipal and state actions the excesses and squeeze of capitalism. Now they just expect us to shut up, roll over and vote. And hit ‘like’ on facebook posts. Nine years ago I began writing about hope, and I eventually began to refer to my project as “snatching the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left.” All that complaining is a form of defeatism, a premature surrender, or an excuse for not really doing much. Despair is also a form of dismissiveness, a way of saying that you already know what will happen and nothing can be done, or that the differences don’t matter, or that nothing but the impossibly perfect is acceptable. If you’re privileged you can then go home and watch bad TV or reinforce your grumpiness with equally grumpy friends. R.S. Uh huh. We all are fighting for the ‘perfect’. Or saying that ‘nothing can be done’. I have not come across any left wing writer that is respected that said “nothing can be done” in thirty fucking years of reading books from Verso, Common Courage, Ak Press, Pm Press, Haymarket Books, or even columns from Harpers’ ex editor Lewis Lapham who though from the top 10% continually tore apart the corporate fealty of the democratic party. And he offered remedies, including ‘”pitchforks on the street”. Nearly every Counterpunch writer for twenty years has never said “nothing can be done” or that “differences don’t matter”. All the articles and books I’ve read for twenty years always have some chapter, or paragraph of what ‘can be done’. Of course, you will find if you watch her Facebook, and read her articles closely, she really doesn’t read ‘left wing books’, nor cull any financial information from the left, but cherry picks just what fits her monthly subject. Anyway according to Solnit, we sit and mope, then go home and watch bad TV. I really wish all the people of Occupy would read that. And ponder what that means for your work. How she uses what you did for her own fame, and for totem translation into her paid article memes, then turns around and trashes your ‘outside the ballot box’ participatory democracy and bottom up organizing; that is the general ‘left’ anti-both parties that was rife through all major occupys. I don’t remember many occupy people running around with signs that said Bush Bad Obama Better, So We Are Here to Say We Will All Vote for Him. Really the opposite. Occupy did start under Obama. It was anti-Obama financial and war policies. He was the president at the time and the Democrats controlled the Senate. In effect, they made policy. Am I really stretching here in saying her cognitive dissonance and gatekeeper arrogance is so confusing, that she has the capability to damn the ‘left’, while writing articles praising the USA left? Maybe someone can liberal-splain this to me. Well, just as a matter of record, most of us ‘left’ of her, can’t afford a $350,000 TIC/floor condo in San Francisco, that she then sells six years later for a $150,000 profit (No IRS tax on that.) Indeed, I’m grumpy about that too. Could that be why she has never made a mention in 6 years of how Obama is following the same economic policy as Clinton/Bush? That because she made such a huge profit on this new bubble she translates in her mind that there is a ‘recovery’ for the rest of us? Excuse me, I must go try to form some more peoples’ councils and get more people to join the IWW while I contemplate that profit. Such is despair. And Rage. Somehow it moves me to organize for a better world. Imagine that. Teddy Bear I don’t have. Just boots, books, and my body that I make a living off of. There is more in the article still, but this is enough. Like I said, if she was just some liberal pundit appropriating third world peasant orgs and translating that to ‘goodlittlethings’ it wouldn’t really matter. My anger comes from the continued reposting of all her articles on most left-liberal sites, and a near complete fealty of actual real working class leftists to her on facebook, and in defense of her. With a friend like this, you don’t need to worry about tea party enemies. The gatekeeper is within you. The desperate are often much more hopeful than that -- the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that amazingly effective immigrant farmworkers’ rights group, is hopeful because quitting for them would mean surrendering to modern-day slavery, dire poverty, hunger, or death, not cable-TV reruns. They’re hopeful and they’re powerful, and they went up against Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Safeway, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s, and they won. R.S. Not sure what this watching TV thing is about. Sounds very 80’s to me. That activists and workers organizing don’t watch TV? Most of the Immokalee Workers do. Many got satellite on those crappy trailers in what are inhumane conditions. Like above she says “If you’re privileged you can then go home and watch bad TV.” People living off garbage dumps in Manila pool their money to have a community TV. What an odd riff. Is it that old university elitist view that because we buy and watch escapist entertainment we are ‘lost’? Silly elitist I say. As is this praising of the gains in wages of the amazing CIW. She uses it as a passing reference to ‘hope’, not to brutal organizing and hard dirty work that was completely outside the ballot box. Kinda undermines her whole vicious beat down about voting doesn’t it? Just like the Zapatista reference. It was ‘hope’ that did it? Not desperation and anger. Indeed. No democrat did that for them. There are really only two questions for activists: What do you want to achieve? And who do you want to be? And those two questions are deeply entwined. Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style. R.S. Love, Rebecca. Totally incongruous with the rest of the article. We are vile, infantile children like flies buzzing about her head for demanding and trying to organize for a better world, writing and spreading information about what Obama and the democrats are doing in hopes of increasing dissent and thus spur more left organization to counter their corporate militarized oligarchy, but now are told we must know what we want to achieve. We already know what has to be done. We just can’t do it. And part of the reason we can’t is this constant peer group pressure of people considered ‘left’ that shut down any conversation and steer it back to ballot box only. Such is the ‘left’ and angry in the USA. Still willing to put up with elitists calling you stupid, portraying you as poisonous vermin, and then still fear the right wing more. The totalitarian in your self, your outlook, your peers and leaders should be feared more than a fascist minority. Because that is what keeps you from creatively and organically and democratically organizing the power that is in We Are Many They Are Few. Every minute of the day we are not making ‘our’ world. This is new age crappola and positive thinking crap that has put us defenseless and prostrate. We have little power in making our world. Obama, and the democrats and republicans have ensured that a real economic depression will descend upon us. And they have since the Clinton administration shown all signs that no Keynesian fixes, no big jobs program will happen then either. Austerity will ramp in with fangs. 30% unemployment will come. The planet is burning hotter everyday. And Obama drills more, and even sets up policies so that more coal can be extracted from public lands to be exported. Who do you want to be indeed? A person that belittles all social revolutionary organizing in the USA? A privileged upper class person who calls the working class left ‘flies’? Or do you want to be a visionary that acts and builds for a better world, with all the generosity and kindness that these goals have always brought forth? Do you want to fight for love and justice, though we expect failures over and over, but also know we will build real communities and bonds that last all life? Or do you want to sit with Rebecca and quietly follow orders…..and go to this demonstration or that….it changes by the month…..and when you fall out of line she berates you and signs it “love Rebecca”. Such style! [POSTSCRIPT: WHAT DID SHE SAY UNDER BUSH?] Guardian March 2007: “Periodically, I would speculate on what was the most extreme and radical thing I could do to stop the illegal prison camp at Guantánamo; picture chaining myself to the gates of the Senate, becoming one of those activists who takes up residence outside the White House or takes over a TV station to get a message out. I wanted to do something so epic that it would turn the tide, stop the crime.” “These days Americans seem to be waking up one at a time, groggy and embittered, from the hypnotic nightmare that was the Bush administration's one great success - spreading a miasma of fear and patriotic submissiveness that made it possible to mount an illegal and immoral war, piss on the bill of rights, burn the constitution and violate international charters on human rights and prisoners of war with widespread torture. None of the sleepers seems to remember that they were part of the legions who obeyed the orders to fear and hate - but we welcome the latecomers into our ranks anyway.” R.S. Bush and Chenney didn’t do this themselves. They had yes votes from the majority of the leading democrats who control the direction of the party. Biden, Kerry, Clinton, Feinstein etc. Also for the last two years of the Bush administration, the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. What did they do THEN? “. The Bush administration is by no means the Third Reich, but it produced an extraordinary time that made extraordinary demands on US citizens, demands that some of us rose to - and too many did not.” “There is resistance. But if it were enough, the crimes would have stopped, the war would have ended. When it does and they do, some will have been heroes. Some will have been honourable but moderate, in times that did not call for moderation. And some will have consented, through inaction, to crimes against humanity.” R.S. Indeed Solnit. Then and now. So now who has consented to crimes against humanity? And demands moderation? Guardian November 2009: “No one calls himself or herself a fanatic. It's what you call people who are weird or threatening, extremists in the defense of something other than your own worldview. I've been around activists all my adult life, and though it's popular to think the world gets changed by delightful people, a lot of the saints and agents of change are obsessive, intransigent, unreasonable, and demanding, of themselves and of us. That's what it generally takes to change the world.” R.S. This one paragraph negates her transformation under Obama. And her entire shut up and vote essay. She can’t even embrace a thought she wrote for an huge international website a year later. She turns on herself and all who agreed with this. Now under a democrat, WE are wrong for being unreasonable, intransigent, and foolish extremists. This is a trusted ‘historian’ and activist? A person that has a moral compass that completely switches due to the corporate party in power? Solnit won’t debate you about this subject. She never has and never will. She is an upper class person that has never had to work a 9 to 5 job in her life. Shops for San Francisco housing during a massive bubble, and complains cash buyers beat her out. Yes, a hero and beautiful writer indeed. No, an opportunist, and upper class gatekeeper, that cannot imagine white and black and brown working class people organizing against capitalism. Don’t even think of fighting against the bay area’s heroine that heroically fights gentrification with bi monthly articles, while able to buy half million dollar properties. You really just want a camo green pedicure. And if you’re male, everything you say is testoterone fueled and ‘left splaining’. If you’re female and in a rage, I just don’t know what the fuck to tell you. Cuz you gotta line up behind her. And take her orders. ____________________________________________________________________________________________ PS ONE: Comment to readers on 48hills (one of few I found )-March 10, 2014 Oh people, polish your reading and research skills before you speak. It was neither a condo nor a place located in the Mission that I sold in mid-2011, before the current situation had come into focus, to a Google engineer (who seemed best equipped to cope with the building’s co-owners). R.S. Obfuscation. It is a TLC, or a Loft, or a Condo. Whatever. It is a flat that cost over $300,000 at 104 Baker Street that was sold in 2011 for $450,000, She bought it in a yuppie area then six years later sold it for a $150,000 profit. What’s funny, is that I can’t find her EVER living in the mission for at least 20 years. Heh. To buy that place on Baker street in the mid 90’s she could have actually bought a whole house in the mission. Moved in families, etc. Nope a yuppie getaway instead. Right by the beautiful (then) whitebread yuppie park. What is interesting is the year she wrote this, while so many down and out housing activists and leftists love her, she admitted (and apparently doesn’t still realize it) that she is of the top 10 percent of the richest in the USA. Anyone that could buy a house in San Francisco in the height of a bubble in 2013 would have to be rich by any normal standards. How did that happen as a writer? Why don’t her followers question her wealth? I am always fine with rich people being active and donating and such, but never ok with them dictating to ‘us’. That is when ‘they’ should be absolutely shunned. What was the median price of a home in Bernal Heights? (she never expressed a desire to live in the Mission District). 800,000 goddamn fucking dollars. I believe she is just a renter now, but that is where she was looking in this bubble, to buy a house! London review of books Feb 2013 I weathered the dot-com boom of the late 1990s as an observer, but I sold my apartment to a Google engineer in 2011 and ventured out into both the rental market (for the short term) and home buying market (for the long term) with confidence that my long standing in this city and respectable finances would open a path. R.S. She weathered the dot-com boom by being rich and then selling her Baker Street flat for a $150,000 profit? My ‘respectable finances”….Oh my, yes respectable indeed. At the actual open houses, dozens of people who looked like students would show up with chequebooks and sheaves of resumés and other documents and pack the house, literally: it was like a cross between being at a rock concert without a band and the Hotel Rwanda. R.S. What a trial for her! Like being in Rwanda! Oh dear! I’m sorry your respectable finances were not enough to buy a house in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country! Where else to call us ‘leftists’ vile and tell us to shut up and vote for a President that is pumping the real estate market to more disastrous heights? No, I don’t want to mention the pimples on your presidents’ ass, but he is gonna make you another $150,000 non taxable by the IRS if you can get into a house soon, and then get out before this bubble bursts! Damn those richer techie nerds that stopped you! And with all your “long standing in this city”. Just for that you should get an ‘in’!!!!! I mean, why shouldn’t we award you the front place in line to buy an $800,000 property? You sure earned it didn't you with your labor? Public Records: Solnit’s property transaction 104 Baker Street. (Before that she lived on Lyon Street in the Haight). An area that was considered Yuppie before the 90’s gentrification in the Mission District. Bought in 2006: SF Assessors site: sold around 9/2011. According to real estate listings, 2006 purchase 04/24 $319,000 -- sold 2011 $470,000. The IRS allows up to $200,00 tax free profit on real estate sold if lived in for two years. SOLNIT ON NADER SFGATE (SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE !) JUNE 2004 Solnit describes herself as middle-of-the-road in her family. "I'm probably one of the more conservative members," she says. Some in her family are longtime Nader supporters. She's not. "Ralph Nader is a clown and should go away," Solnit says. "He doesn't get feminism, he doesn't get race politics, he doesn't get environmental issues, he doesn't get all these complex cultural issues like bioregionalism and local economies and sustainability and alternative community building," she says. "All he gets is why corporations are bad, and product reform, and the role corporate money plays in corrupting government. And it's such a narrow spectrum." No comment how many millions of lives Nader and his groups have saved. And I will not comment how he was addressing environmental issues (and getting Congress and Nixon to pass the most sweeping legislation since) nor the rest of it…Things Nader was doing twenty years before she wrote her first book. And again, she is a historian??????? Click to set custom HTML
|
"shut up, and stop complaining!"
"Radicals are obsessed with foreign policy!"
|