the rich should fear their servants

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article that said the greatest fear of the wealthy is political violence in the streets.

But it’s not the people outside the gates they should fear--it’s all the ”little” people they need to fear run their lives, the butlers, nannies, drivers, gardeners, accountants, ass-wipers, and probably even the private security.

Even if these servants are well-compensated, they have eyes and ears and could realize that their bosses are screwing their friends and family and even endangering their lives.

Those inside the walls might take action or even leak some useful information to the rest of us.

Jack London wrote about this happening in a revolution in the US in THE IRON HEEL. It was incredibly accurate about the methods of the wealthy today even though it was written over a hundred years ago.

You can see a real life example of this in THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED when the wealthy of Venezuela are fretting on camera that their servants may be spying on them, then the camera turns for just a second to a Native maid dusting whose eyes flash up making you wonder if they were right.

So it will be here.

We have already seen this with low and mid-level people who execute the orders of the rich in the defense and foreign policy establishment, from functionaries who refuse to lie like the Iraq Survey Group and the pre-Iraq War intel analysts, to those in the military who leaked specifics of war plans against Iran and the suspicious movement of nuclear weapons in the US, to the wholesale leaking of Bradley Manning.

You can’t be an idiot and do those kind of government jobs, and when they see the real agenda, not of protecting our security or even enriching average Americans, but of killing people and crushing democracies to enrich a very few, they can’t do their job blindly forever. As Frederick Douglass said, when someone realizes they are doing an injustice, either they will be eaten by guilt until they end the injustice or they will figure out a way to justify it in their mind.

In the Internet Age, when it is so easy to find other opinions and facts about what’s going on, a literate person would have a hard time keeping up the walls of rationalization for long.

When enough of their servants say “ENOUGH,” their day will be over. Then we can get on with solving our pressing problems without worrying about whether the solutions offend or cut into the profit margins of  pampered, morally degenerate trust fund babies.

a violent reaction to nonviolent revolution

`Buzzflash posted a debate on violent versus nonviolent revolution between anti-war activists David Swanson and Ted Rall, but I felt an important angle was left out.  Here's my comment:

RE: blocking the courthouse

The hypothetical Swanson mentioned about blocking the courthouse until they allow gay marriages and Rall's reply to it about the cops dragging off the protesters or them being slaughtered shows the real use of violence, and even Martin Luther King used it in this way: when you get those in power to use violence against non-violent protesters and it is broadcast on TV for all to see, those in power have lost.  They can only retain power by using escalating violence and eventually, they will get to the point where police and soldiers will no longer pull the trigger--and then we have won.

That is what happened during the coup against Gorbachev and what happened when we tried to overthrow Hugo Chavez early in the Bush years.  In the latter case, enough of the military was tired of being the bad guys to their own people to undo the coup.

Nonviolence can work if you are willing to be on the receiving end of a rifle butt, tear gas canister, or even a bullet.

But as cities and states across the country are cutting police forces and looking to cut public pensions (which police would have), I don't think we have far to go before they will stop beating us and start joining us.

Egypt example should kill ''internet kill switch'' bill in US

Sen. Joe Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins have reintroduced a bill to set up an internet kill switch that can be activated by the president in the case of a cyber emergency, supposedly by terrorists or China or something.

Egypt has pulled just such a switch in the face of growing demonstrations to overthrow the Mubarak regime.

We should learn two things from Egypt's example:

1. The kill switch is more likely to be used to kill domestic dissent, which is exactly how it's being used in Egypt. If they were really worried about certain government or industry users, they could simply call them up and tell them to pull the ethernet cable or wifi card out of their computers--it ain't rocket science.
  More importantly though:
2. The kill switch doesn't work.  The leader who pulls it admits that he is a coward afraid of his own people having access to information and access to each other.   Those who propose such a switch in the United States or elsewhere have contempt for democracy and even if elected, serve the very wealthy who need protection from democracy not the rest of us.

Instead of looking for ways to silence dissent and keep up the embarrassing kibuki pretense of democracy, where we can vote all we want so long as the wealth of the very wealthy remains untouched and their crimes go unpunished, our government should be looking for ways to sync their words with reality instead of PR tested talking points and sync their policies with the common good instead of using public office to line up their next job as a lobbyist, CEO, or board member for the companies they served while in office (or if they are president, the more circuitous bribes of speaking fees and donations to their foundations and presidential libraries).

If Washington doesn't learn the lesson of Egypt and serve the massive middle and working class instead of the miniscule moneyed class, a lot of DC politicians will be joining Hosni Mubarak on whatever desolate rock where he lives out his sorry life.