Debunking Choice

"The Gringos provide the weapons, Colombia provides the dead," reads a billboard near the home of Yaneth Perez who recently spoke across the state of Montana. This is Yaneth's second visit to the Big Sky country in as many years. On this particular visit to Montana she spoke in front of 18 different audiences to as many 800 people. Fortunately, nearly 375 of those able to hear her speak were high school students!

Hallelujah! because at least some high school students in Montana were exposed to the firsthand testimony of an actual Colombian whose real lived experience differs from the doctrinal version sold hook, line and sinker to them the rest of the 179 school days! Surely, dozens of those high school students didn't pay attention or even care what Yaneth had to say, but for many others, seeds of doubt and serious questions about U.S. foreign and economic policy were raised.

As I was in attendance at four of the high school presentations, I can attest to the high level of concern Montana high school youth expressed for Yaneth's precarious existence. And as Yaneth explained to them the role American lifestyle plays in the wide-spread killings in Colombia through the consumption of cocaine and oil, these students were moved. They were moved because unlike the vast majority of adults who live in massive denial about the effects of their lifestyles and who don't get the most basic lessons of economics, the high school students understood that if we stopped providing the demand then it would follow that Colombians would stop killing each other in order to provide the supply.

As a side note, one of the most disconcerting tendencies I've heard out many of my own students this year is the notion that choice plays a significant role in the harsh realities most of the world suffers. Nearly 70% of my students believe people choose to be poor, homeless, etc.! If there were one single aspect of American indoctrination that most concerns me, it is this bullshit myth.

American culture provides us with so much in the way of meaningless choices (thousands of cold beverages, shoes, etc.) that we begin to assume all areas of our lives are a matter of choices. Choices that are simple to understand, but difficult to discipline ourselves to take. Ah! discipline. If only we were all as "disciplined" as the wealthy! At least 70% of my students are convinced that "making it" is a matter of their choosing. On the other hand, they are equipped with an excuse already made for them, that if they don't "make it" it was due to poor choices and lack of discipline. In other words, they chose not to overachieve and strive and assuredly the disinterested economic and political structure had nothing to do with it. In fact, many Americans may go so far as to believe these structures provide encouragement and assistance when discipline is present. In other words, they not only failed themselves, but they failed a benevolent system and have become a drag on the whole society. Besides living in poverty, the poor should feel ashamed of having wasting a golden opportunity! A basic assumption these students are making is that these structures are in essence benign and simply a matter of disciplining oneself to learn how to navigate their complex labyrinth.

Someday soon, many of these high school students will become American adults and will join their parents in undisciplined choices, denial about the role their lifestyle plays in the rest of the world and the orgy of thoughtless consumption. Thanks to some teachers efforts to demystify American myths and deconstruct power relationships and expose the omnipresent institutional flack machine, some students may begin to question things as they seem. Thanks to Yaneth Perez, an unmediated actual person, at least a number of them have now heard some of the "unofficial" story.

Been Caught Thinking

Thanks to Troutsky and his tagging me with a Thinking Blogger Award, I'm going to have to start thinking about my thinking!


Here are five bloggers that keep me thinking:

1. Aprilloper at Idaho Blue is not a frequent blogger, but offers deep reflections about our world and looks at a diverse range of topics. Were she not so busy being a mother, running her businesses, remodeling her home, and volunteering perhaps she would give more time to blogging. Or perhaps she says just enough.
2. Marie Trigona at Latin American Activism is on the front line of important struggles throughout Latin America. Her dedication to libertarian struggles in Argentina are one of a kind in the blogosphere.
3. Graemeanfinson over at Left in East Dakota is another thoughtful blogger. He keeps me laughing with all variety of blogs. Not too mention, his sight honors the IWW!
4. Very little need be said about the Mutualist Blog, but it definitely keeps me on my toes and gives me plenty to ponder.
5. Without a doubt, Thoughtstreaming is the blog I always start with for my daily dose.

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging.

The participation rules are simple:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

Bush Unwelcome in Latin America

A quick browsing of CNN Español’s online video clips reveals the continent-wide hatred our latino neighbors reserve for our commander-in-chief—the government’s devastating economic and political policies in tow. Meanwhile, protests have erupted throughout Latin America where President Bush is desperately seeking a place to land Air Force One where he might be welcomed. Instead, Latin Americans from Guatemala to Argentina are reminding Bush that should he land his airplane in their territory it will be to voices chanting in unison: “asesino” (“murderer”).

Of course, this ire should not belong to Bush alone, as he is only the most current version of imperial master. After 500 years of regional oppression, isolation and division Latin Americans are looking increasingly towards each other for solidarity. Loosely modeling of regional integration after the European Union, today’s Latin American leaders Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Lula da Silva of Brazil, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Nestor Kirchner of Argentina and Tabare Vazquez of Uruguay are rejecting American foreign and economic policy in lieu of their own trade and diplomatic agreements.

Notable among the majority of voices rejecting Bush is one dissenting voice: American ally Alvarez Uribe of Colombia. Not surprisingly, Colombia is the third largest recipient of American military aid and is seeking to have President Bush extend our nation’s inhumane aid package called Plan Colombia. This U.S. taxpayer-funded “plan” has led to the loss of ten of thousands of innocent lives, environmental destruction and made possible the continuation of an insanely brutal war. Conspicuously absent from the list of nations highlighted in the easy-to-dismiss “Human Rights Report” issued by the U.S. each year (besides itself) was Colombia where thousands of people are killed every year at the hands of Colombia’s military/para-military forces that our glorious government funds. Does hypocrisy and irony know no limit?

Getting Horizontal

If you have not already read or heard of a newer book called Horizontalism by Marina Sitrin, RUN—DO NOT WALK—TO FIND IT.

This amazing collection of voices emerging from the nearly-impossible-to-describe Argentine reality is revolutionary. This book works ontologically to discuss all variety of issues including power structures, language, participatory politics and economics, among other important social issues.

Even now, as I try to recapitulate this book’s assessments I am denied access. The point is Argentines are recreating, reinventing and defying reification. I have even had a discussion with an American who recently returned from his stay there that spanned several years. The voices and testimony provided in this book have even eluded him despite his sincerest intentions and seemingly open mind.

If the voices Sitrin collected from across Argentina continue to exist there, it would seem there is ample reason to have hope that a complete reworking of civilizations is possible. Entire communities are asking deeply critical and existential questions about the nature of our old and out-dated ways of thinking.

“Hope,” however, is not to be confused with utopia. What is being discussed, discovered and practiced is sticky, messy and painful. However, presuppositions about the untenable contradictions of capitalism have put many of these Argentines on the doorstep of deciding to permit the dissolution of humanity or create a whole new civilization. At the same time, these horizontal processes and movements are equally suspicious of all of history’s revolutions. They seem determined, in many cases, to avoid co-optation by leftist politics as well. As the voices in the book continually resound, they are seeking new paths for organizing their societies.

In college, getting “horizontal” had an all too banal meaning. That too is being reworked in my mind.

Teachers in a World of "Shock and Awe"

As if teachers don’t get enough blame heaped on them, I’m going to heap some more. Being a teacher myself, I deserve a share of the criticism. It seems that we teachers are completely oblivious to the hypocrisy of our “do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do” approach to education. We also have a tremendous knack for criticizing our students for not learning things we never teach them, namely causality, critical thinking, and self-reliance. Some mention should be made that whatever negative impact we desperate teachers could be having on today’s youth, it pales in comparison to the “shock and awe” society-at-large, which includes our government, corporate capitalism and its lackey media, and the resulting deterioration of family life. However, it is my contention that teachers have a unique opportunity to provide hope for future generations by standing up to manufactured political “controversies” and discuss head-on the issues that pervade a student’s mind. We must demonstrate a willingness to confront society’s hypocrisies, social injustice, and global crises instead of perpetuating America’s hopeless delusions of exceptionality, success through bootstrap discipline, and our divine blessing.

“Shock” is exactly how I felt when I heard the news that at my high school several kids premeditated an attack of another kid in order to capture it on their cell phone video cameras. The goal was to upload it onto the Internet. The attacked kid went into convulsions and was hospitalized. “Shock” rules the day in an increasingly irreverent and impulsive society. However, the responses and reactions I heard teachers making were equally dismaying. Here is where the hypocrisy of educators begins.

We act shocked and surprised that our youth are acting out and impulsive yet my fellow teachers vapor locked when I asked them to look at the society of “shock and awe,” right down to the language chosen by our leaders to carry out a murderous rampage on innocent lives. Our act in Baghdad was an utter act of irreverence for human life and we titled it “shock and awe.” Shock jock radio and shock jock TV (Jackass) are stepping up their campaigns to shock, including a recent on-air death of a mother trying to win her son a Nintendo by drinking two gallons of water without urinating. She died from drowning her own tissue. (Radio station employees got fired, young child lost mother). One upping and shocking is rapidly devolving the most basic levels of common sense. What could this be saying about the subconscious thinking of our decadent society? Nihilism? Zero sum?...Or are we desperate to wake up from our “idiocracy”?

Enter the teacher. We have an opportunity to teach accountability by modeling it before we demand it from our students. If I was in a student’s shoes, I’d wonder what the fuck kind of hypocrite my teacher was for asking me to act more responsibly and to hold myself accountable when all around me I see the adults in society failing to hold their government accountable for crimes against humanity, and human rights violations. As a student I’d be outraged that a teacher demanded from me accountability when in textbook Orwellian fashion I perpetuated obvious lies for the sake of ideology. A psychological study needs to be done on teens in this country that aimed at assessing the anger festering in our youth on a latent/subconscious level as they must clearly know they are being handed off a much more fucked up world environmentally and geopolitically than we were given.

A common complaint among my colleagues is that “kids today don’t get causality.” As if irony knew no limits, these teachers don’t know why! Just to be snarky and smug, I sometimes ask them why they think that is. Sad to say the usual responses deflect blame from our dear old profession. So I say again, “modeling for students what we expect them to learn might yield fruit.” Besides that we can do a revolutionary thing: we can teach it! That’s right, we can teach causality. I’m pretty sure the kids get that straightforward concepts of causality they learned in science class, but they rarely see it applied by their teachers, let alone the rest of society.

In fact, I asked my students why it was we (our media, educators, government, et. al.) don’t ever seem to discuss the causes of a massive immigration problem, but instead deliberately choose to study and cover the effects down to the very last detail. I am proud to say one of my students was quick to reply, “because we won’t like what we see when we look in the mirror!”

Even if we think kids aren’t listening they are. It’s just they are good at tuning out the bullshit. When a teacher decides to be honest and stop presenting the world as a clean, linear, desexed Elysian paradise for the disciplined few, and instead models how a committed individual should be denouncing hypocrisy, social injustices, and resisting illegitimate authority without utopian illusions, that is when students may start to truly listen. However, for many school is already a lost cause and surviving it is a major struggle. Needless to say, teachers are in a unique position to model accountability beyond faux democratic processes such as voting. Teachers could get their asses organized and pressure the institutions that undervalue education, rather than modeling excuse-making. It’s no wonder students feel powerless and hopeless. Where in society do they see it modeled?

Ecuador's New Government

lonestone revolution: Latin America News Review: Ecuador's New Government Talks Default on Debt: Latin America's New Reality

Non-profits: Help or hindrance?

"In the United States, nonprofits play a critical role. They provide almost all social services, arts and other culture, education, advocacy, religion, pro bono legal services, and free health care. In addition, nonprofits are leading the charge, and in many cases, are the only organizations working on saving the environment, ending racism, protecting civil rights and civil liberties, and promoting full acceptance and recognition of the rights of women, sexual minorities, people with disabilities, and seniors. In general, then, almost everything that is creative, humane, and promoting of justice is brought to us by a nonprofit" (Klein, Kim. Fundraising for Social Change. Jossey Bass: New York, 2001).

Ever since I read the preceding words written by one of the most important figures in the field of grassroots fundraising, Kim Klein, I can't stop wondering if in fact nonprofits prevent the possibility for true social, economic and environmental justice. Doesn't the massive nonprofit sector provide capitalists with a philanthropic out? Paulo Freire once said: "In order to have the continued opportunity to express their "generosity," the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well."

When one considers the enormous amounts of human energy through volunteer hours organizing, educating, advocating, and fundraising to provide the most basic of human rights, one must question whether or not American capitalists are avoiding their responsibility for the maldistribution of wealth, resources and power. Nonprofit activists are often caught up in a tense conflict of their principles by asking the wealthy for money to save the environment that they, "the wealthy elites," polluted; or nonprofits often have to ask for the blood money the wealthy earned in their stock portfolios from the profits of companies like Coca-Cola that has a direct role to the murder of union-workers in Colombia; and the list goes on and on.

What if nonprofits stopped providing their services? What if nonprofit activists stopped investing their time, energy and scant financial resources providing basic human services that are the responsibility of the entire society and instead focused its collective energies organizing for systemic revolution? What if the nonprofit sector stopped begging for blood money, closed its doors and forced Americans to look to its government for help? Would that apply the kind of pressure needed to get universal health care? Would that force Americans to start rethinking the myths of American exceptionality and capitalism's benevolent "invisible hand"?

Perhaps the time has come to stop bailing capitalism out and start organizing for a revolutionary future.

The "Hidden Rules" to Ruby Payne's Success

"Freedom without opportunity is the devil's gift." --Noam Chomsky

Ruby K. Payne has been bilking tax-payers, school districts, as well as their administrators and educators for over ten years with little resistance. Payne is the founder and CEO of aha! Process Inc., where she publishes her own work: making academic scrutiny of her ideas and theories impossible. Payne will be speaking in Helena, Montana on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 where thousands of teachers, Title 1 workers and administrators from around Montana will converge to give her the tax-payer’s money. What will the thousands of dollars get them? A classist and racist perspective on poverty…oh yeah, plus her book!

If Ruby Payne is so bad, then how has she been able to get away with it for so long? An education professor from Illinois State University recently decided to do some of her own investigations of Ruby Payne since she had been hearing so much about her. Professor Anita Bohn thought that maybe the next Jonathan Kozol (Savage Inequalities) had arrived to the scene to help lead the struggle against poverty and education’s role in addressing it. Bohn’s initial search in her university library catalog yielded no results. A secondary search again turned up dry. However, as the professor’s story goes, “[w]hen I typed the name “Ruby Payne” into a Google search, though, I hit a jackpot.”

Payne has reached hundreds of thousands of educators across the country “and even in Australia and New Zealand,” yet she is virtually unknown in the academic world. Just to test this theory last night, I called two professors of education at Carroll College (Helena, MT) and the University of Montana (Missoula). Neither knew much of anything about her work. In fact, only I had read her book. By self-publishing, Payne avoids having her “evidence” scrutinized and—similarly—her “theories” steer clear of scholarly analysis. In sum, Payne’s work remains outside the academic pipeline which may help explain her phenomenal success.

Payne charges between $60 and $300 per individual registrant. Missoula County Public Schools is paying $60 per person. The Townsend School District is paying $150 per person. If Payne’s past success in drawing large crowds is an appropriate indicator, Payne can expect to rake in a cool $60,000-$200,000 for her one-day conference! According to Professor Bohn’s research, “[s]ince 1996, Payne and her assistants have been conduction 200 seminars a year training as many as 25,000 teachers and school administrators to work with children from poverty, making her the single biggest influence on teachers’ understanding of children from poverty in the United States.” According to these numbers, if Payne were charging every single registrant the low end $60/head, she is taking $1,500,000 a year from tax payers to misinform the public education system! Bohn asserts that the cost to attend a conference is $300 (at this rate the income would be $7.5 million). Perhaps Montana’s poor got a break from kind Mrs. Payne at $60-$150 per head! P.S. Ruby Payne's aha! Process, Inc. is not a non-profit organization!

In two days time, I will be attending Payne’s conference. I was invited by my school district along with two busloads of fellow teachers from Missoula. When I decided to go I had not yet read Payne’s work, but like hundreds of thousands of others, my interest was piqued by Payne’s catchy book title: A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Perhaps most misleading, however, was the title Payne gave herself—thanks in no small part to her ability to self-publish—“The Leading U.S. Expert on the Mindsets of Poverty, Middle Class, and Wealth.” Amazingly, that title was not given to her due to academic achievement or by accomplished educationalists within the field of education or sociology.

Having now read her book, I don’t know what is more disconcerting: 1) that Payne appears to have few detractors which means—for the near future at least—she will continue to exert her damaging influence on public education; or 2) that so many educators have failed to demonstrate the ability to detect the blatant racism, classism, and assimilationism she is being allowed to pontificate. It is a sad state of affairs either way. The academic community must be alerted to her demagoguery and the snake-charmer’s appeal her one-size-fits-all answers profess.

Should Payne be allowed to be heard? Absolutely. If we don’t believe in freedom of speech for those we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. However, Payne’s work has not been exposed to the rigors of true academia. Therefore, she should be judged by peers and professionals, before school districts imprudently dump tax-payer’s money into her coffers. A Framework for Understanding Poverty is overtly emotional and anecdotal making it extremely alluring and seductive to teachers looking for magical solutions to the overwhelming issue of poverty. However, instead of addressing the causes of poverty, she misdirects readers to understand the effects of poverty to be understood as causes. Instead of questioning how the richest nation in the world could have such abject and deplorable scenarios of poverty, she stereotypes poverty with anecdotal scenarios and offers as a solution that educators teach children how to think, act and aspire to be middle class. Give them kids some bootstraps to start pulling themselves up by!

Why should anyone aspire to transcend to the next class level if one had previously experienced that class as oppressive? Should it be a child’s goal to obtain the money and power to oppress those below them? Are we supposed to inspire kids by explaining to them that if they make it to our level they will no longer be on the bottom and then they can have someone else dig their ditches, or pick their fruit? Where is the debate about the legitimacy of maintaining a system that allows for poverty and oppression? Are we to teach kids that poverty is inevitable and that nothing can be done to distribute the “American Dream” equitably? Payne’s attempt to abstract “the hidden rules” of the class system from the unimaginably complex “bigger picture” of economics, society, culture, and politics for observation intentionally ignores our “me-first” society’s biggest dilemma: the equitable distribution of wealth. Instead of offering a solution to poverty, Payne is helping to maintain it. The poor need money, food, housing, health care, and education, not “hidden rules.”

• To read the ONLY TWO scholarly critiques available (please do your own Internet searches and let me know if any other school’s of education are on to her) on Ruby Payne follow these links:

• Savage Unrealities: Classism and racism abound in Ruby Payne's Framework

• A Framework for Understanding Ruby Payne

• Montana educators should also be alerted to a recent Missoulian article expressing contentions that the UM Native American Studies department has with Payne’s work.

• Writer Panned by Educators for Stereotypes...

Please help save underfunded school districts money by forwarding this story.

Diversity of Opinion

I want to thank Che Bob for inviting me to Lonestone Revolution as a contributing author. I am truly honored. Although the bulk of my first post here is not written my me. I do think that it will serve the tone which Che Bob and the other authors have set here.

One of the big differences between myself and the some of other authors is how I arrive at my opinions. Che Bob believes that the crisis is the system, capitalism, and it is here now. My beliefs are more along the lines of; the system is the cause of a worldwide convergence of three crises, global climate change, peak oil, and over population, soon to come. We both agree that capitalism has run it's course and will soon be economic history, and that economies and governance will soon be localized and not global. When and how this relocalization takes place is another differance between us.

So in honoring that we both maybe right, I want to offer the following essay from Mike Ruppert. I believe that it portrays that the two camps of thought on which crisis we are dealing with, are not mutually exclusive and that the end goal is the same for both of us.

Aprilloper

EVOLUTION
by Michael C. Ruppert

© Copyright 2006, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.

Cultural diversity is not only humanity’s hallmark of progress, but an insurance policy against extinction as a species. Diversity gives not only cultural and economic riches derived from different perspectives on natural resources and what it means to be human, but options to problem solving that are stifled in a homogenized society. When such a society is organized around economic goals that are measured by profit margins for private gain by powerful elites, where the demands of those who bear cash as the ticket of admission to the marketplace rule, rather than the needs of people, then those who are deprived – and those who have never been part of such a global economy – must necessarily suffer. The genocide of tribal peoples, therefore, is symptomatic of a deep malaise in the world’s metropolises. Indigenous peoples will suffer the most, but humanity as a whole will suffer the loss of some of its memory, not only of a unique knowledge of the natural world, but of its ability to cope with the future in various, diverse ways.

THY WILL BE DONE, The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett

Harper Collins, 1995, p. 685

November 7th 2006, 4:39PM [PST] – Nature protects itself through diversity. It stands to reason then that when threatened – as it is now on so many fronts – Mother Earth will exert itself aggressively; enforcing rigid boundaries that ignore the lives of individuals – plant or animal – in order to preserve the diversity which protects all life. That human beings as a species also show such characteristics is proof of the connection between man and planet. In some ways this is not unlike the point in time when a child must break with parents in order to fulfill its own destiny, with its own unique life path, thus guaranteeing that the evolutionary process – life itself – is protected; that something better and new might follow.

All individual life ends so that that life as a whole may go on and evolve. As I have said in so many lectures, the human race is now being faced with a choice: either evolve or perish.

Americans tend to think of the Third World as “the frontier”, a place still open to settlement as if it were a divine right just for the willingness to endure a little hardship. With overpopulation and dwindling global resources, the “frontiers” are defending themselves to protect diversity in many ways; ways that are far more effective than any resistance to colonization in previous centuries. Global warming has been characterized as a planet developing a fever to rid itself of an infection. I believe that increasing global tensions might also be mirroring that process.

The human side of this resistance is also organic and, in Latin America, Venezuela is its heart. It has now taken solid root, emerging almost simultaneously in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador. I do not think it can be stopped. It is an anthropological resistance.

Living in Venezuela has been an amazing, brutal, and illuminating lesson. It is a truly alien culture that I find simultaneously beautiful, hard, giving, unfamiliar, uncomfortable and definitely self-protecting to the extreme. That is why I am confident that Venezuela, and most of Latin America, will survive the coming crash of Peak Oil better than any other region of the world. I believe it is already starting to protect itself. It doesn’t need me or any outsider to survive. But as a general rule, only those who are native here will be protected by its blessings.

It is not just that I am blond haired and blue-eyed, which does get me a lot of double takes – some hostile. It is as though I am a fish used to swimming in a different kind of water. The way that I swim affects the other fish here, already swimming too much in a superimposed American cultural blanket that has been enforced by scores of coups, debt enslavement, colonization, exploitation, genocide and war over the course of the 20th century and into today. In order to understand this picture a British citizen trying to drive in super-crowded Caracan traffic where there are few rules. Under stress the Brit might instinctively react in a way that might tie up streets. Now change the image of traffic to a culture adapting to dwindling energy reserves, conflict or panic. The Brit would be singled out quickly and forced off the road so that the rest might “function” in ways they were accustomed to.

However, the powerful lessons and principles of human justice, sustainability, harmony with the land, freedom from the mandate of endless capitalist growth, openness, and localization contained in the Bolivarian Revolution led by Hugo Chavez are powerful survival tools that can and must be studied and adapted to other regions. If one reads Richard Heinberg, Matt Savinar, Megan Quinn, Post Carbon Institute, FTW, or any of the great sustainability writers, one will find those same principles; arrived at through different means.

Forget labels. This is what will work.

The Bolivarian Revolution is different from the main body of sustainability literature in one key respect. It is the practical, hands-on implementation of these principles on local, national and continental levels; something all European and North American sustainability advocates know little or nothing about. How could they? While US and European sustainability advocates write about “shoulds” the Bolivarian Revolution is an evolving process of actual doing. It must be watched closely by all who would learn from it.

The irony is that for the most part, the Bolivarian revolution does not see itself as a sustainability movement but rather as a political and economic one. Now for another of my trademarked quotes: Until you change the way money works, you change nothing. The Bolivarian Revolution is doing just that.

PROTECTING DIVERSITY

The Bolivarian Revolution and Venezuelan culture inherently knows that it cannot make too many exceptions to the rule that diversity must protect itself or else the rule will have no meaning. That’s exactly what I was asking it to do (though I didn’t know it) when I came here. I am not just one migrating gringo. Mike Ruppert could not be assimilated without changing something here: the Tao of politics.

That is why, after 15 weeks of waiting, after only one interview, a formal petition and a lot of pressure from influential Americans and Venezuelan-Americans (some with direct government connections) I have not heard a word on my request for political asylum. Venezuelans are inherently suspicious, let alone of a blond gringo who is an ex-policeman who came from a US intelligence family. It is possible that within the massive and glacially slow bureaucracy, some who are not loyal to Chavez have buried my request under a pile of papers. In Latin America things take much longer and I can see now that the waiting process, never guaranteed to be successful, is part of a natural selection.

My thirty year record of activism and sacrifice in the US means little in Venezuela. Those deposits were made in a bank belonging to a different ecosystem. There are no ATMs for that kind of withdrawal here.

The first real kindness shown to me by a full-blooded Latin American with government connections, came about two weeks ago as “Tano”, a bearded artist and long-time revolutionary who had worked with Salvador Allende in Chile, looked at me with true compassion and said, “Venezuela will run you through a gauntlet. It will ignore you. It will make promises and never call you back or fulfill them. It will mistrust you even if you have lived here for ten years, twenty years.”

It took me 12 weeks to get to Tano and it was not by a linear, logical path.

Tano is a famed artist and thinker knows Hugo Chavez personally. He has traveled with him. His kindness and sympathy was abundant and visible. Kittens slept on his massive belly as he spoke from behind a desk cluttered with papers. Two dogs gravitated to him as though he was a magnet. He offered to open doors and make some introductions in certain ministries. As opposed to many other unfulfilled promises since I have been here, he meant it. Promises are made quickly here and soon forgotten, even between native Venezuelans. But it was already too late. My health was gone, I could not make one important event and I had already been rejected like an invading organism; rejected by the differences in culture and an environment I had trouble adapting to.

I was introduced to Tano by my young Venezuelan friend Ivan, who, at 27, who had just quit his job as a trader at J.P. Morgan because it was too stressful. He was too Venezuelan to live the life of a Venezuelan posing as an American. Good for him.

It would be embarrassing to many people if I named the names of all of those back “home” who, learning that I had come here, told me that they had been considering the same move. They said that when things got intolerable in the States, or the UK, or Canada, they would just move here; or to Costa Rica, or to New Zealand, or to someplace else. My pains and troubles here will serve as an object lesson for all that the time to relocate in advance of Peak Oil has, for almost everyone, long passed.

DISTINCTIONS

The important distinctions about adaptivity are not racial at all. US citizens come in all colors. American culture is the water they have swum in since birth. A native US citizen of Latin descent who did not (or even did) speak Spanish would probably feel almost as out of place here as I do. They would look the same but not feel the same. And when it came time to deal collectively with a rapidly changing world, a world in turmoil, a native-born American’s inbred decades of “instinctive” survival skills might not harmonize with the skills used by those around him.

Another one of my trademarked lines is that Post Peak survival is not a matter of individual survival or national survival. It is a matter of cooperative, community survival. If one is not a fully integrated member of a community when the challenges come, one might hinder the effectiveness of the entire community which has unspoken and often consciously unrecognized ways of adapting. As stresses increase, the gauntlets required to gain acceptance in strange places will only get tougher. Diversity will become more, rather than less, rigid and enforced.

As energy shortages and blackouts arrive; as food shortages grow worse; as droughts expand and proliferate; as icecaps melt, as restless, cold and hungry populations start looking for other places to go; minute cultural and racial differences will trigger progressively more abrupt reactions, not unlike a stressed out and ill human body will react more violently to things that otherwise would never reach conscious thought.

Start building your lifeboats where you are now. I can see that the lessons I have learned here are important whether you are thinking of moving from city to countryside, state to state, or nation to nation. Whatever shortcomings you may think exist where you live are far outnumbered by the advantages you have where you are a part of an existing ecosystem that you know and which knows you.

If the time comes when it is necessary to leave that community you will be better off moving with your tribe rather than moving alone.

Evolution is guaranteed. Useful knowledge gained by ancestors is incorporated into succeeding generations. It may not be used in the same way that it was when acquired. It may lie dormant for years or decades, safely stored in DNA or the collective unconscious. But it is there, and it will always be available should the day come when it is needed.

Playing the Game

People are failing to appreciate the system that oppresses them and continue to believe—wrongly—that a politician such as Barak Obama is the solution. Obama is being called a "unifier," and people are swallowing this shit up. Obama smiles at us, and talks to us, and makes us feel all good inside, but we know nothing about his policies. And this is very intentional. This helps maintain the wide gap that exists between public opinion and public policy. Along with keeping the public out of the policy-making arena and leaving that business to elected elites, the American political system degenerates any possibility of making meaningful elections possible by engaging the public in a tense battle of voting for personalities and forgetting about the issues. So how do we narrow the gap and make the political system respond to our demands? Do we play the game and risk expending valuable energy and money on politicians or strike out in our own direction of local organization that can lead to powerful direct action? Do we need to take more personal risks in the spirit of civil rights activists from the 60s or turn of the century workers fighting for the right to organize, or do we sit back and wait for Obama, Clinton and Tester to “deliver us from evil”?

Just like Bill Clinton before him, people see this charming personality in Obama and hear his rhetoric of unifying a divided country, but the true divide exists not between conservatives and liberals, but between public policy and public opinion. Policies in this country are generally more conservative than the American public. A prime example is that Americans want universal—even socialized—health care by a wide margin (70%), but we can't get our politicians to even recognize this demand. When we hear politicians talk of “mandates” one is in danger of dying from laughter unless they say they have the mandate of the American people to institute universal health care.

Too many assumptions are being made that a woman (Hilary Clinton), an African-American (Barak Obama), or a Carhartt-wearing farmer (Jon Tester) are going to level the playing field, based deceptively on their roles as minorities or as members of the working class. However, we never hear their proposals, their policies, etc. We only hear about how they are going to unify a divided country, but they can’t put the slightest dent in unifying the rest of their fellow policy makers in D.C. with the majority of opinions held by Americans. Most Americans believe we shouldn’t be fighting a war in Iraq, that we should be respecting the Kyoto Protocol; paying teacher’s more money; protecting the border with Canada (not Mexico); engaging antagonistic countries through diplomacy not war; respecting the international rule of law; punishing crooked politicians the way they punish other criminals; investing in alternative energy in a meaningful way; reforming campaign finance laws; narrowing the gap between CEO and worker pay; etc.

An equivalent to an “activist” doesn’t exist on the Republican side of affairs; they are just called “the base.” That which would be considered the concerns of right-wing activists (were they to exist) are simply taken up by the Republican Party since they are in line with the American political spectrum that is shaped by the wealthy, property owning class. However, non-profit and activist causes from the left exist because of gaps in public policy and a system that fails to provide for its society. Therefore, activists must dig deeply to find politicians (even from the supposed “left”) to take up their causes, and since these causes from the left generally fall outside the accepted political spectrum a champion from within the political elite is hard to find. This reality results in social justice causes dividing their energy and money between their cause and a politician that they hope will risk mentioning it on the floor of congress. On the other hand, a right-winger simply gives their money to their cause through one easy-payment to the Republican Party.

Americans need to look at the system and critically assess their blind faith in the American political structure to bring about meaningful change. Included in this assessment should be the role modern marketing and money plays in shaping elections and political decisions. A deeper and more honest analysis would surely reveal the evidence and reason to demonstrate how social justice and the American economic and political system are irreconcilable. Depending on the coddling of our American founding fathers and “heroic” politicians has only served to perpetuate on-going violence and injustice. Making a sound decision to organize oneself locally in order to give a voice with power to public opinion is just a start. Consistent and creative organization that forgoes institutional dependency and seeks to maximize pressure on the system would serve two purposes: 1) reveal the illusion that American elections equals democracy, 2) that direct action and participatory democracy are the most effective means for meaningful social change.

Granted the question of protecting oneself, society, and the world from vile politicians such as Bush, McCain, et. al. by “playing the game” and helping to elect center-right democrats is a valid one. What do we risk if we fail to participate in elections, their campaigns, etc. while working on our genuine concerns? While working for social revolution how much energy and money do we give to helping elect more moderate conservatives such as Obama and Clinton? Giving/wasting donations on Tester, Obama and Clinton in order to toss out the neo-cons means donating to the system in lieu of donating to organizations that are seeking to change the system. How can we ensure that “playing the game” doesn’t become tantamount to perpetuating it? If you look at the places in the world with meaningful democracies such as Venezuela and Bolivia, one cannot ignore the roles extreme poverty, oppression, and violence have played in prepping that society for social revolution. What do we do with complacent and morally apathetic Americans? What will motivate them? Four more years of reactionary neo-con train wrecks? Or a “democratic” revolution that lulls us further back to sleep?