Richard Grossman’s Recent Comments

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  James Hansen & Transformation

  Hansen called for "transformative change of direction in Washington in the next year."

  Hansen wrote: "Democracy works, but sometimes churns slowly."  

  Is the USA a democracy? Has it ever been?

  Every struggle for fundamental rights denied at the founding of this nation -- for Abolition, equality for women, desegregation, etc., -- has required more than a generation of sustained, collective, super-human effort. And after all that, "victory" under law turned out to be half-assed.

  People in each struggle quickly discovered that arrayed against
  them were the laws of the land (symbolized by the Constitution), the might of the nation, the great institutions of the privileged founders, along with July 4 fairy tales.

  Slavery and the slave system were legal, were constitutionalized.
  Denial of women's rights was legal, constitutionalized. Segregation by race was legal, constitutionalized.

  People found that they had no remedy under law. Abolitionists, women suffragists, civil rights workers -- they couldn't even rely on the alleged First Amendment. Or after the Civil War, on the blood-soaked 14th Amendment. So they had to go outside the law. To bleed anew. To die.

  The Constitution was constructed to make it exceedingly difficult for emerging rabble majorities to gain basics rights, and then to use their rights to make change. The Constitution
  was constructed to privilege men of property and their
  institutions -- to protect them from any would-be rabble.

  Today's corporate denial of worker rights is legal and constitutionalized. Today's denial of municipal self-governance
  is legal and consitutionalized. Today's privileging of a few
  behind their corporate shields is legal and constitutionalized.

  Reversing climate change is not about "emissions." The "transformative" changes Hansen has in mind are in the categories of investment, production, commerce, work and property -- and in the law of so-called "private corporations."  

  Transformative change will challenge property rights and corporate privilege. Transformative change will require disobedience to sacred theories and precedents and laws that even and especially good liberals hold dear....It will require mass disobedience to raw power.

  There are, alas, no "legal" or "constitutional" remedies to transformative.

  Take Nature. Hansen suggests trying corporate CEOs for
  high crimes against nature. Well, "nature" is merely someone's (or some corporation's) PROPERTY. In the USA today, there is no such thing as high crime against "Nature." Indeed,  property "owners" can do pretty much what they want with "their" property. Is Hansen prepared to advocate for the "rights" of nature and biological systems? "Rights" for rivers, mountains,
  air, glaciers? For those whom Native peoples called the flowing
  people, the standing people, the sitting people, the creeping people...?

  But wait! Our courts have decreed that corporate decision-making is a "property right." Corporate future profits are a  "property right." So the might of the Nation protects property owners from any misguided, passionate Rabble.

  All to say: major change in investment, production,
  commerce, work, corporations and "property" (not to mention Empire) will require challenging a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon law and custom, precedent and wisdom...now backed by
  great wealth, armed might, custom, habit, and the teachings
  of our best schools and universities.

  It's nothing personal. That's simply where so much awful history
  has landed us.

  So shouldn't we be clear that people advocating transformational change are not simply requesting that a few "special interests" get out of the way. They are calling for dismantling our Corporate State...the end of USA Global Empire.

  Can we talk about this as we talk about "low-carbon high-efficiency products"? As we talk about "clean energy"?  As we inject into "transformative" undoing this nation's anti-democratic and rights-denying laws, precedents, theories, governing mechanisms and endless self-praise?  

  As we turn to our local governments for remedy and leadership -- in other words, as we turn away from  the men and women in the absurd deliberative bodies that have brought today's messes upon this Earth; as we discover ourselves...in the places where we actually live and breathe, where we raise our children?

  And as we explore together the terrible histories of violence, rights denial, subjugation, Earthly plunder and denial that
  have characterized these United States.

  For we might discover that it will be the communal crackings of those histories that will enable the transformations of ourselves, and of our communities.

  -Richard Grossman
  West Hurley, NYOn Hansen's message to the planet posted 1 year, 4 months ago 17 Responses

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  Komanoff's The Terrorists Have Won

  I am saddened to learn about murder by automobile of Florence Cioffi.

  But Charlie's title and context is not helpful for seeing past the professional propagandists of violence and empire. Or for thinking critically about what September 11 was or was not; what the War on Terrorism is or is not; what the USA is and is not.

  Florence was not killed by evil people lurking in foreign lands.

  That deed was done by the SUV driver...The driver had unflagging help from great champions of this country: directors and stockholders of automobile & truck manufacturing & selling corporations; banking and insurance corporations; advertising, news, entertainment and liquor corporations; mining and chemical corporations; weapons of mass destruction corporations; spy corporations; lawyer corporations; their non-profit lobby corporations (such as the American Manufacturing Association, the Chamber of Commerce); news, entertainment and advertising corporations; along with their shills in legislatures, courts, city halls, governors' mansions; not to mention in the Democratic and Republican parties...

  For generations, these representatives of what Eugene Debs
  called the "small class" -- the corporate class of this nation and of the world -- have been up to their eyeballs in usurpations and destructions. With their legal treatises, constitutional gobbledygook, judge-made law, illegitimate legislation, lawsuits and lucre galore, these humans long ago corporatized governance on transportation (and everything else that matters, of course).

  In the process they wrote laws and legal doctrines stripping municipalities and neighborhoods of their authority to govern themselves.

  That is today's true terror -- long homegrown and gone to fat. These honored and well-compensated terrorists, wrapped in stars and stripes, crooning patriotic songs and dripping with blood, win every day...year in and day out.

  May Florence rest in peace.

  For the living, who harbor these All-American terrorists in our midst, can there be either rest or peace?

  R GrossmanOn Reflections on death by SUV posted 1 year, 9 months ago 25 Responses