Gary Rumor’s Anti-Entropic Continuum

Anarchists in Greece might bring the state down. This is pretty impressive. For 5 days running the youth of Greece have been rioting and in the lead are the Anarchists. These are the same Anarchists who are the nuisance’s at every peace march and rally in America. But in Greece they have managed to become the leaders of the opposition to the Greek police killing of a 15 year old youth.
That anarchists are in the lead at protests where bricks are thrown, windows are broken and cars trashed is not strange. What is unusual, is that anarchists are being given credit by the mainstream media, in this case the public TV News hour tonight called the anarchists the leaders of the protests. Former ambassador to Greece Nicholas Burns gave credit to them for the ongoing protests and made a case for the protests being justified. That is unusual in mainstream media.
But where will things in Greece go? Traditionally the socialists have been the main alternative to the generals and their conservative friends. But there is a large hard left in Greece and there is a chance that a left coalition may take power. Is there a chance of a revolution and the state dissolving into a series of anarchist communes, hardly. But to see anarchists in the lead of the opposition is heartening.
Speaking of anarchists, there is going to be a book fair in Los Angeles, the first Anarchist Book-fair here in modern history will be held at the People’s Library on Vermont Saturday Dec 13Th. If you want to bone up on your anarchist history, theory or just want to meet modern day anarchists, that is the place to be this weekend.
I was listening to the radio stations KPFK and KCRW this evening, listening to the financial doomsayers promoting deflation and a dire economy for the immediate future. But more than the economy was the talk of the failure of the governor of Illinois in his attempt to sell Obama seat in the senate. It seems that the governor’s in that state are particularly inept at the backroom deals that are normal to the democratic political process.
At work this morning the conservatives were crowing about the corruption of the Democrats in Illinois. The implication being of course that Obama’s victory was somehow linked and that the only way he was elected president was due to behind the scenes deals on the part of the operators in Illinois. Pretty swift if they were able to buy the election. The biggest fix since the Black Sox scandal in the 1919 World Series. But then how could this group of swifties manage to swing the national elections and then screw up on the simple matter of buying the replacement for Obama in the senate? My own paranoid thoughts would lead me to think that the opposite is the case, that the Republicans might be behind an attempt to blacken Obama’s reputation and implicate him in the scandal which would place his whole presidency in a shadow that would give the Republicans the beginnings of a return to power by discrediting the new administration before it even got in office.
It is unlikely that Obama will be caught in that. He is too smart. More likely the governor of Illinois will have to fall on his sword and take a hit for the sake of the party unless he is so single mindedly greedy that he would be willing to bring down the rest of the state establishment, an unlikely proposition.
We know that politics is dirty, just how dirty often is surprising. I have no illusions about the goodness of the democrats, but one would hope that the labor movement would have a chance to make somewhat of a come back so that we the workers can gain a little in a very uneven game before they have been beaten back by the interests of realpolitik. But from what I have heard tonight the forces who don’t like labor are already attempting to link the Service Workers Union with the scandal and are trying to bring down Labor’s attempt to make it easier to organize unions by passing a pro-labor law once Obama is elected. But if labor is discredited, then the Obama might have to distance himself and the law to make it easier to start a union might not get passed and that will make big business interests very happy. This may ultimately be the purpose of this whole thing. The federal prosecutors who are so interested in the Governor of Illinois may have bigger fish in mind and labor could very well be part of what they are trying to stop. If they can begin to emasculate Obama now, they will be a year ahead of the game on where they were when they went after Clinton at the beginning of his administration.
They played dirty with Clinton and he wasn’t even a liberal, just imagine what they will do to a genuine liberal like Obama. We can only hope that he is able to put the Clintonites in positions of seeming responsibility to pacify them and keep them from sabotaging him so he can work on making real changes that we need with people who can. People who are not bought out. We can only hope.
It is interesting to see Jesse Jackson Jr. coming out swinging protesting his innocence in the scandal with Governor Blagojevich who was arrested for trying to sell Obama’s senate seat. Blagojevich met with laid-off workers protesting at Republic Windows & Doors, his last politically correct act before being arrested. This ties in nicely with labor being in my mind one of the main targets of the prosecutors and the Republican party. But are these prosecutors, Mr Fitzgerald and company, Republican operatives or are they honest brokers? In the murky world of American politics, not likely. There are reasons why they went after Blagojevich now and not at another time.
The occupation of the plant by the workers at Republic Windows and Doors is another sign of the times. Perhaps we should be looking to Argentina and their experience in workers control when the owners abandoned their companies and shut down the economy. The workers there not only occupied the plants, but they got them working again. I will be looking for a book on workers control in Argentina at the Anarchist book fair this weekend. One thing for sure, these are interesting times and there is an old Chinese curse that goes “May you live in interesting times”. Damn Chinese… You know, however this thing plays out if we the people don’t get our collective act together and keep moving on in the direction towards real change, we are going to get stuck with one set of phony changes lite or another. You want real democracy, real socialized medicine, real economic reform? We have to fight for it and not leave it up to Obama or anyone else. Because if we let the operators stay in charge they will rob us blind and leave us with a cup and a couple of pennies to get by on.
Its not too late. And we can always hit the streets like our anarchist friends in Greece if they won’t listen to any other voice of common sense. Those workers in Chicago got their severance deal, forcing Bank of America to honor the 60 days pay instead of the 3 days severance they tried to give the workers. But we shouldn’t stop there, hell no, this is our land, not the land of the money men.
I heard an interview with Gar Alperovitz and he made a case for economic restructuring in his new book.
Unjust Deserts: How The Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance And Why We Should Take It Back.
The argument in the book is that wealth was developed by us all over generations and belongs to all of us. The workers in Chicago were smart. The rioters in Greece are right. Lets all do what we need to do to make sure the world is a better place for us all.