Is anyone yet at the point of "By any means necessary"?

Every day that goes by, I see more clearly why Malcolm X added that phrase to his speeches. The context is of course different, but the root cause of the attitude underlying the phrase is probably the same: the utter failure of our American institutions to function for the good of the people.

Writers like Susskind and Palast and all the writers that have documented the lies and incompetence that led to the illegal occupation of Iraq are providing all the information these institutions need to correct their actions.

At some point, will this failure lead to a large enough a mass of people to rise up and force one or more of the institutions to begin to function as it should?

I see the 2006 election as the last chance for the institutions to begin to right the wrongs of the last six years. More specifically, it's the last chance for the Democratic Party.

I'm encouraged by the new urgency of people like Kerry, Durbin and Levin in the Senate, finally recognizing that what people like Boxer and Feingold (and Gore of course) have been saying for years is the only realistic course of action.

Democrats who don't yet see that direct confontation with Bush/Rove/Co is the only course that can succeed (see Hillary) are as much an enemy, tactically speaking, as Rove is. They represent obstacles that must either be converted or eliminated (see Lieberman), and the Democratic party is running out of time.

After November, 2006, "By any means necessary" may become a phrase that many progressives will adopt. Bush/Rove/Co have already done enormous damage to this country. Some of this damage will take decades to correct, specifically the populating of our courts with rightwingers and the fiscal disaster, and so few of us recognize this damage. I am afraid that two more years of Bush/Rove/Co unchecked by congress will send the USA into a death spiral.

(edit-typo)

"That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

to the current (mis)government.

I'm surprised it isn't in the streets yet.

nt

The fact that people have not taken to the streets, or even had a general strike, is the death knell of democracy in the US, imho.

you and others to STOP posting such sentiments at DU.

Violence breeds violence. That is the story of revolutions. It is an outmoded model. It harms as many innocents as it helps. Look to South America for the new model--TRANSPARENT ELECTIONS!

And get to work on it!

it's going to be a slow, difficult slog through every state/local jurisdiction in the country--where ordinary people still have some potential influence--until we reach critical mass on throwing out Diebold, ES&S and all election theft machines (instituted by the infamous "Help America Vote for Bush Act" of 2002, in the Anthrax Congress, engineered by its two biggest crooks, Tom Delay and Bob Ney), and RESTORING OUR RIGHT TO VOTE.

The South Americans have done it. So can we.

All our votes are now 'counted' by "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls--"trade secret" code owned and controlled mainly by two corporations with very close ties to the Bush junta, Diebold and ES&S. Code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it. The problem is SO OBVIOUS.

Transparent elections (people vote, and you count the votes in public) = good leftist majority rule government.

Non-transparent elections (fascists counting the votes in secret) = the Bush junta.

We still have a chance to change this. We MUST get on it NOW!

meant. The people could decide to en masse not pay their taxes and shut down the government. The only way to legally do that would be for everyone to go on a general strike and not work because most taxes are automatically taken out of one's paycheck.

We don't have, and won't have, transparent elections. There is nothing the people of OH and FL can do. What exaclty would you suggest? Were exactly is our redress going to come from?

The fact that I and others are contemplating what "By any means necessary" means, in our current situation, does not mean we are planning anything violent.

It means we are recognizing the failure of the institutions as I discussed in the OP. The voting issues you discuss are a direct result of those instutitional failures.

Nothing in your post sheds any light on HOW the voting issues can be addressed. Perhaps you should address the HOW, before censoring others.

People are lazy. This won't be too hard.

Almost everyone is a captive of the society we live in, unfortunately.

If people are confronted by a choice between eating, keeping their homes, feeding and caring for their children, etc., and attempting to force the failed intitutions to function properly by witholding payroll taxes, there is no doubt in my mind what choice almost all will make.

After all, this bunch in Washington does not care at all about fiscal responsibilty now. I seriously doubt that they would pay much attention to a revenue shortfall arising from a general strike, since such a strike could not be large enough or long enough in duration to have a substantial effect.

without using money that the government could tax?

But hey the general strike was just one non-violent idea. There have to be others out there.

I guess I am just too much of an economic and sociological/psychological realist to believe it would work.

I think our best hope is to simply overwhelm the republicans at the ballot box this November, so that election results are put out of reach of cheating.

is keeping our fingers crossed that elections work (one more time). Yes November will tell the story about the value of elections. And what if it happens again--ie. they manage to steal it without repercussions, or if the results are not believed by large numbers of people?

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

there have been many nations freed from tyranny by non-violence recently, we could and should do the same. It is actually illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the government.

I never would. I'm just pointing out something that Thomas Jefferson said about it.

I do not believe any good ever comes from violence. Never have, never will.

Are we supposed to stand by quietly while the fanatical right wingers use "any means necessary" to wreck this country, to take away our freedoms, to plunder our treasury and our environment and our youth, and to invade other countries based on lies?

The Ann Coulter's of this country think we will do just that.

She's wrong.

Malcolm X said "by any means necessary," but he was not associated with violent acts. The saying has to do with two others he often said: {1} "Who taught you to hate yourself?" and {2} "How far are you willing to go to make changes?" In fact, none of the three were calls to violence. Minister Malcolm knew that in order to change the circumstances that his people faced in that time period, they had to change themselves. He knew that no significant changes could be made by people who had a pint of whiskey or some funny cigarette up to their lips. He knew that no meaningful political changes could be made by people who were addicted to pornography and gambling. Those three questions were intended as a call to internal direction, not external confusion. They are similar to the harsh teachings of the prophet Jesus.

I will grant that Brother Malcolm made some people anxious.

As always, your post is illuminating. I suspected that the Malcolm X was not advocating violence with the phrase, and you have confirmed my belief.

I'm not speaking about the young Malcolm Little. But Malcolm X was a great man. He remains one of the best examples of the human capacity to transform ones' self. There were times when he used some strong language. But he really was one of the most non-violent leaders of his era. Again, his message was that people were shackled by booze, pot, heroin, gambling, prostitution, pornography, and ignorance. He used to strongly urge young folks to get their education. After he broke with Elijah, he was able to advocate voter registration and grass-roots political organization. He did speak about self-defense, but most people recognize that there is a human right to defend one's self and an obligation to defend one's family.

that is legal. I looked up the law on this, and the only thing that is illegal is advocating the use of violence or force <-I assume those are the same things.

I think the general strike idea would work.

Here are the laws on this:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sup_01_18_10_I_20_115.html

... in a country corrupted by the "I got mine, fuck you" ideology. "United"? Bullshit.

the election of 2006 will be a huge indicator of where we stand. We will be able to read the writing on the wall at that point as to whether there is hope for change through the election process.

I grew up an angry kid and had a stepfather that was a green beret in Nam who taught me a few things I'd never picked up on my own, so it's not like options haven't crossed my mind over the years. The older I got the less productive that type of thing sounded though, it never actually solves anything.

Sometimes it does take something extreme to get attention, it's possible that without Malcolm X MLK wouldn't have got as far as he did, but in the end it wasn't the Malcolm type that made the difference. It was the MLK type. There's plenty out there who would do something extreme without me adding to it. It's the reasonable side that needs more help.

We need to stop compromising when it's a difference of right and wrong rather than of simple preference, it's cost us dearly in the past and it continues to do so. In the civil rights era we had a strong voter base then we compromised that for the drug war and the same population groups who used to be a strong part of our base hardly even vote anymore. Did it ever occur to us that the fact we've been imprisoning them at a high rate for decades and stripping many of the right to vote might shape that?

Getting violent over what we've done to the nation ourselves isn't an answer. Waking up and getting out of this selfish "me first" attitude is. When we realize that we've been doing the same thing to the poor that we blame the rich for doing to us we'll be half way there. All they've done is to look at things from their own point of view with too little concern for those below them, and that's exactly what we've done to the bottom as well. Who are we supposed to get even with there? We need to fix things, not add to the problems.

done to the poor the same thing the rich have done to us.

I assume, by "we" you mean the middle class. It's true that the middle class has failed to help the poor by, for example engaging in segregationist activities. And those activities have had economic and obviously sociological effects that have been negative.

But look at what the rich have done to the country over the last five years. They created a deficit that will require decades to address, and as the tax code currently reads, that sacrifice will be borne by the non-rich.

The rich have the power and they have abused it. The middle class had some power, which it has now lost. You could argue that the middle class squandered it's power by electing Bush twice and I would agree with that.

I'll start you with one quote then a couple of pages for you to browse on your own, you'll understand better after that. Yeah, we've done it. Not individually maybe but as a nation and both parties.

"Mandatory sentencing laws disproportionately affect people of color. African-Americans make up 15% of the country’s drug users, yet they make up 37% of those arrested for drug violations, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison for a drug offense."

That's the first quote from the following web page on Mandatory Minimums. They also have sections on other aspects of what we've done. http://www.idpi.us/resources/factsheets/mm_factsheet.htm

Now with that in mind check this one out, it's as ugly as they get and it's as real as it gets. That is our system today. http://www.prisonsucks.com/

Then just for good measure let's see what we've done it for. To protect the kids from drugs, right? How did that work out?

Death rates for opiates (heroin)
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/death/cdc/opiates-yr.htm
Death rates for cocaine
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/death/cdc/cocaine-yr.htm

Yeah, we did it. Everyone who still thinks the drug war and tough on crime is a good idea is still doing it. This is just the tip of it, it doesn't get any better when we look deeper. It stays as bad or worse.

that many DUers did it.

Doesn't resposibility for the laws you cite lie primarily with conservatives and more specifically the Right Wing?

Personally, I have never voted for a republican in my life, and that's mostly because republicans favor the kinds of laws that have led us to the situation you cite.

Sure, I have no doubt voted for some people that have supported these kinds of laws, just as I voted for Lieberman once or twice to my regret.

I still disagree with your assertion that "we" have done it. I just see the linkage as much stronger to conservatives.

Awareness here is pretty good, if the same people had the same awareness when we were building the system or not I don't know. I mean we as a people, the middle.

Through the 70's, the 80's, and the 90's those stats kept building. What leader from what party had the honesty to simply tell us where we stood? Through all that time, and even today on this board, we've written off complaints of racism and unfair treatment without ever looking deep enough to see what they might have been complaining about. They were right according to the stats.

While it's true that the "conservatives" probably took a leading role it's also true that through fair parts of it the Dems had control of one or both houses and/or the Presidency. The trend lines don't change for it.

There's a pair of charts in the following document about 1/4 way down the page that tracks our rate of prison growth from 1925 through 2002, look it over and tell me where the good guys vs the bad guys were in charge. Can't tell the difference from the chart.

http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/pub9036.pdf

I don't mean to condemn anyone, more to point out that getting caught up in our middle classed concerns and our worries cost people who had less to start with than we did. It wasn't because we were mean spirited, it was simply because we didn't care to check the results of what we were doing. I'd imagine some who we blame might think they have the same excuse. Some blacks call most whites racist not because of overt racism, but because we don't seem to care while they suffer. Some of us call those in charge now fascist because they don't seem to care while we suffer. I'm not sure I see a real difference.

We just disagree on who's responsible. I don't hear black leaders consistently speaking out on this, much less acting to address it.

Maybe I'm not listening carefully enough, or perhaps I'm just caving in to my belief that minority "haves" generally fail to help their own "have nots" (a belief born of life experience).

For example, let's take Vernon Jordan, perhaps the most powerful black democrat over the last 20 years or so. I used to kind of work for him in one of his many corporate directorships, and I will bet you dollars to donuts he has never lifted a finger on this issue. And if he had worked the issue during the Clinton years, I think the trend lines you cite would be different.

If prominent blacks don't put a high enough priority on this issue (and I'm arguing they don't) is it any surprise that the predominantly white leadership of Democrats and progressives have neglected it?

That's one thing that I never have been able to figure out. Why in the world isn't Jesse Jackson or other black leaders making noise about this? You aren't missing it, it just hasn't been there. The sheer scale and imbalance of it seems a hell of an issue to me but so far nobody in power will touch it, not even those who claim to represent the people hurt worst by it.

That's part of why I see it as a national failure rather than something imposed on us from above. We voted tough on crime, it's the results of our answers in the polls that drove the policies and few ever bothered to check what the results of it was. Not on any side. The few that did were generally written off as crackpots, people shouting racism at every shadow or excuse. There's been plenty of reason to look but few who have.

A couple have though, some in surprising places. One of the leading conservative economists since this all started has been against it from the start and trying to tell people, we just never listened. Not to him or anyone else on any side. There's more than one type of responsibility, our leaders own the burden of not having the guts to tell us the truth but we own the responsibility for apathy. The clues were all there and have been for ages, we just never looked, and it was our poll answers that drove it. The stock market and our retirement was more important than if those mandatory minimum laws meant a mother couldn't feed her kid that night. Many of those one in eight young black men behind bars today used to help take care of kids or parents, and much of the poverty we see today is a direct result of our actions or lack of them.

I grew up poor, my sympathies tend to be with them. We had options and some measure of power, they depended on us.

I think of Kevin Phillips in the same way, but I don't believe he's an economist.

There's a page on the DRCNet Library web pages where some of his comments over the years have been collected. Can't say I agree with him on most things but he's been right from the start on this one, long before most caught on. In 1972 he was telling us this was a bad idea.

http://www.druglibrary.org/special/friedman/milton_friedman.htm

And thanks for the links. I always take legitimate conservative economists seriously (and he is most definitely legit, as opposed to fruitcakes like Kudrow), even though I disagree with them on many issues. So I will read them.

If you ever want to talk about any aspect of the drug war feel free to drop me a note, it's what I do given the choice. Has been for years.

Ends does NOT justify means. If the only way to get something done is by immoral means, I'd rather die trying to fix it the right way.

I'm not gonna get off my lazy ass and start shooting people on my lonesome, but if any kind of mass movement starts, I'll be only too happy to eat lead on the front lines.

Better dead than red.

and all my options are well-oiled and loaded. All of them.

was one of the greatest Americans in the history of this nation. Every day is a good day to study Malcolm and incorporate him into our being.

I believe in America, and I believe our nightmare will soon be over.

The Constitution is sacred to me.

I certainly have hope. However, other than the historical swing of the pendulum, I see nothing that gives me firm belief.

be prepared to defend it by any means necessary.

I would prefer a none violent solution to this horrid mess , I really would and I'm not a gun owner and I'm too damn old to fight in the streets . On the other hand I am sick of living in this stale mate .

We have a lot more people out of work and they have immediate dread and concern . We have a lot more people who will either tomarrow or next week or next month end up jobless . Without an income you have no power and not much left to loose . Add into this no healthcare for how many numbers of very ill people . You have people who lost everything to Katrina and troops either dead or destroyed for life . All this and jobs continue to vanish . All this and forget the rise of the minimum wage .
This just sumes up a small part of the problems but these are right at the bone , the cut has been made and the bleeding has begun .

Roll in the black clouds or the environment issues and the high price of energy and the loss of many of our rights with more to come given time and soon you will be without a voice or the avenue to the information .

I have lost a long term job that allowed 50,000 per year for my wife and I so we were ok , not great but ok . This was in oct 2004 , then 12 months , 6 of unemployment and selling items i owned and 6 of continued selling of not much left and credit card help . This went to 4 1/2 months of finally employment or many many more hours in that provided enough while the credit card interest doubled and here we are again laid off and 4 months into this and finally one job that pays $8 per hour with bonuses if i can learn and keep up . So at best case with the 40 hours max a week allowed maybe $1600 per month before taxes so now it's really on the edge .

This is not funny , I don't have the luxury of sitting here hopeful and secure that things will change before they become worse . Maybe some here have a good income and a secure job , this is great . I thought my job was secure and was shocked to find it was not .

Yes November , if and maybe november . If it all goes down the drain and it may , do you trust your vote will count ? I don't hold much faith in this . I also don't hold much faith in the midterms .

So if all goes down the drain then what , what about those who are already in a world of hurt , nothing will turn this mess around soon enough for them and not for me , luck may be the only hope and that's about it .

At this point without the luxury I may be for anything that ends this administration . It was bad enough when I had a good job , it was bad enough to know what was going on , now it is real close to bad with more to come . So tell me what your thoughts are if you were in my shoes .