The late twentieth century is chock full of important and flourishing movements. The African-American freedom struggle always comes to mind, but there’s also the gay rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, etc. However, arguably none of these movements have achieved as much as the New Right. I always tell my students that we have to think about conservatism as a social movement closely related to the movements of the 60s. The New Right came to prominence largely as a response to the 60s, while also borrowing heavily from their enemies’ tactics.

Why has conservatism had so much success? Why have the Tea Parties washed over the American political scene, possibly altering the nation’s history? I suggest two major ways conservatives have outflanked progressives. First, conservatives better understand how to move the levers of power in this nation. Second, conservatives have a defined ideology to guide them and progressives do not. Together, these two issues have done more than any of conservatism’s inherent advantages to make them successful and to push us to the political margins.

Conservatives do have some built in advantages over progressives. The New Right appeals to base values of greed and hate. Progressives certainly can’t emulate that and wouldn’t want to anyway. The conservative focus on maximizing individual wealth has attracted billionaire investors like Edward and David Koch, who have funded the Tea Party. While people like Warren Buffet or George Soros may support some progressive causes, the vast majority of the extremely wealthy act in their own financial self-interest, putting progressives at a severe fundraising disadvantage.

The conservative movement also benefits from an aggressive homogeneity. Not only are conservatives by and large white and quite frequently wealthy, but they actively pursue this as a goal, shunning diversity in their ranks. This is very important for understanding conservative success. Progressives come from diverse backgrounds and have varied interests. Many feel particular passion about one or two issues but support a broad swath of causes. This diversity makes progressive movements so dynamic and it has helped break down racism, sexism and homophobia in this country.

Unfortunately, diversity of background and interests also increases the level of organizing difficulty. While we are holding diversity trainings, conservatives are plotting to destroy Social Security. While we are searching our souls to drive out vestiges of sexism in our organizations, conservatives are gutting science and history standards in schools. This is not to denigrate diversity (quite the opposite!) but simply to state that it makes organizing harder for us than for the homogeneous New Right.

While progressives should recognize these disadvantages, we shouldn’t use them as excuses. More important than money, hate, or homogeneity, progressives have failed because we don’t understand how to leverage power and because we no longer have a consistent critique of capitalism.

Conservatives know how to use power. People keep asking where the Tea Parties came from. People point to their funding, their astroturf roots, their old and white demographics. All true. But people don’t seem to recognize that this movement is six decades in the making. After World War II, conservatives, disgusted by the New Deal, liberalism, and government expansion, began organizing. At first, they operated in fringe groups like the John Birch Society, railing about fluoridized water and communist spies. Most people saw them as lunatics.

Soon however, conservatives began gaining respectability. Shunning the more radical elements, they worked to take power rather than just complain. Moreover, they recognized quite clearly how to reclaim the Republican Party from the soft conservatism of Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller. In the 1950s, conservatives in Orange County, California; Texas, Atlanta, and other parts of the nation began joining local school boards to influence their children’s education. They also started volunteering for their local Republican Party committees and taking on the least desirable tasks within the party and local government. Each one of these people helped build a base within local Republican parties for a resurgent muscular conservatism that openly rejected the New Deal and social liberalism, refusing to compromise for electoral relevance.

Finding themselves newly empowered by their political activism, conservatives quickly rose up the ranks of many state parties and increasingly in the national party. In 1964, they managed to secure the Republican presidential nomination for their hero, Barry Goldwater. Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater and pundits declared the nascent conservative movement dead on arrival. But a mere two years later, conservatives got Ronald Reagan elected governor of California and then pushed Richard Nixon into the presidency in 1968. Building on those victories and Reagan’s enduring popularity, conservatives increased their power within the Republican Party for the next four decades. Today, the entire Republican Party is beholden to the conservative movement.

Conservatives knew how to take power and they started a successful multi-decade effort to do it. Ever since the Carter Administration of the late 1970s, progressives have found themselves as alienated from their party leaders as conservatives of the 1950s. But instead of organizing within the party, by 2000, many progressives decided to support Ralph Nader’s quixotic run for the presidency.

The Nader campaign showed progressives completely misunderstanding to how create change. Change doesn’t begin at the top; it comes from the bottom. A Nader presidency without a massive grassroots campaign to build a Green Party would have been disastrous and short-lived. Similarly, progressive hopes that Barack Obama would herald a new future completely miss that Obama lacks to power to convince Congress to pass a progressive program, even if he wanted to do so. Only the fear of an angry base can move Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln. Centrist Democrats have no reason to fear that base because we aren’t organized within the party structure.

The next time you wonder why Olympia Snowe caves to the right on major votes while Ben Nelson shows no respect to progressives, understand that the answer is sixty years in the making. We have to understand how change happens within the American political system and act upon that knowledge to transform the Democratic Party to our liking. Only then will we hold the power that conservatives do today.

Conservatism has also benefited from its commitment to an ideologically fundamentalist version of capitalism. The teachings of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman have become sacrosanct for conservatives: to stray from orthodoxy threatens excommunication. This ideology, embodied in plans to strip the American welfare state, support the outsourcing of jobs overseas, and export disaster capitalism around the world, guides the conservative movement. It gives conservatives a common language, set of beliefs, and cultural references. In short, it provides them an architecture of activism.

On the other hand, progressives have no clear ideology today. After the Soviet Union’s fall in 1991, progressives lost their answer to capitalism. Even if they disliked socialism, at least Marxism helped shape a critique of capitalism. With socialism discredited, progressives have flailed around for twenty years for organizing principles to unite them.

As I will argue in my final column in this series on activism, progressives’ inability to construct a new ideological structure to fight fundamentalist capitalism, and often their ignorance of the need to do so, is the left’s greatest failure of the past two decades.

Check out Erik’s previous pieces on Activism in America here.

You can hit a woman – not in the way she is used to,
You have put away the knuckles before picking them up,
Your fingers are always relaxed.
All you need are words.
Words are all you need.

Come on, she wanted you to, anyway.
She wants you to be the bad guy.
She wants to be able to tell all of her friends -
“And then, when I was just about to put my shoes on,
In the hallway…”
There will be a meaningful pause.
Her blue eyes will well up with tears -
Unshed, but trembling there, as fragile as soap bubbles.
Her friends will find all of the right things to say,
All of the things women say
When men are as obliging as they can be.

Tell her that she is just like her mother,
And will wind up the same way -
Beautiful and underfucked,
Stirring sugar into her coffee somewhere far away.

Tell her that great writers have said,
The sort of things that can apply to her.
And tell her that lately you’ve been thinking
That they really apply to another woman.

One you haven’t met yet.
Or have you?
She’s standing somewhere under her umbrella.
Her eyes are probably dark.

Her tits sag, baby – compared to these things,
That have softened, and not too far
Below my collarbone.
I don’t give a shit about her medical diagnosis.
She doesn’t have my earning potential.
Her legs are HALF as long.
Men don’t turn their heads for her – full of
television and body lotion
- in the street.

Hey, whatever.
You now know how to hit a woman.
I look good in purple.
I always look good.

But I repent.
I repent.
I repent.

It serves no literary function.

Still I repent. I ask
For forgiveness.
Come.
Come back.

As far as it is possible to tell, three trials were conducted on behalf of The Wellcome Foundation (now GlaxoSmithKline), by Professor Irene Hillery and Professor Patrick Meenan, from the department of Medical Microbiology in University College Dublin, and other doctors. The first trial investigated what would happen if four vaccines, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and polio, were combined in one overall four-in-one shot. Trial two measured the effectiveness of a intra-nasal rubella vaccine compared to the standard injection. The third trial was to compare commercially available batches of the three-in-one vaccine, Trivax and Trivax AD, with that of a modified vaccine prepared for the trial.

The first trial was published by the British Medical Journal. Fifty two infants were used as trial subjects, thirty six of whom were subsequently reexamined. The researchers ended the article with

We are indebted to the medical officers in charge of the children’s homes-namely, Dr. V. Coffey, Dr. B. Cullen, Dr. J. Finn, Dr. B. O’Sullivan, and Dr. R. Sutton-for permission to carry out this investigation on infants under their care

That is the crux of the matter. The children were nominally in the care of the state, de facto in the care of the religious orders. Parents were not informed. Consent was not given. Informed consent was non-existent. The Nuremberg code lays out Directives for Human Experimentation and the second standard is as follows:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonable to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment. The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

Children cannot consent. The informed consent of parents was not sought. The children were in the care of the state. The religious orders gave permission for children in their care to be used in experimental vaccine testing. The experiments were a violation of human rights. The survivors, decades later, are only now being acknowledged. The state has not made any expression of remorse or apology. Neither have the religious orders. In addition, these three trials are the known trials. Many others may have been conducted on the bodies of children but have been buried in paperwork.

Rumours of these experimental trials floated for years among journalists but it was not until 2000 that the “Report On Three Clinical Trials Involving Babies And Children In Institutional Settings, 1960/61, 1970 and 1973″ was produced. It is the foundation of all public knowledge regarding the trials. The report is not available to the public on government websites but can be read on The God Squad by Paddy Doyle.

In 2003 the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was deemed by the Supreme Court to have exceeded its mandate by including a division to investigate vaccine trials, following legal challenges by two of the doctors that conducted the trials.

Since then, there has been no further enquiry. For all practical purposes, there was no investigation of why the State and Church permitted medical experiments without consent or information on infants and children in their care. It appears that the state has no interest in investigating severe violations of human rights. Following media interest, the Department of Health and Children has released a statement to confirm that they are in the process of locating their files relating to the trials but Minister for Health Mary Harney has ruled out the possibility of a further investigation.

Mari Steed, a survivor of the industrial school system and the vaccine trials, announced that she and three others are preparing a class action lawsuit against GlaxoSmithKline in the United States because the Irish government will not act to protect its citizens. Mari was nine months old when she was first given the “one-in-four” vaccine. By the age of two, she had received the experimental injection four times. Her mother was told the jabs were routine.

Since her announcement, other survivors have come forward to lobby the Department of Health and Children to release all the files with regard to this violation of human rights. Legal action will be taken against both the pharmaceutical company and the Sacred Heart Order. Through the courts, it is possible that the survivors will at least receive an admission that their human rights were violated because such an admission will not come from the state.

The 1916 Proclamation of the Republic states the necessity of cherishing all the children of the nation equally and article 42 clause 5 of the Constitution reads as follows

In exceptional cases, where the parents for physical or moral reasons fail in their duty towards their children, the State as guardian of the common good, by appropriate means shall endeavour to supply the place of the parents, but always with due regard for the natural and imprescriptible rights of the child.

All the laws and declarations in the world do not change the fact that Ireland did and does not cherish her children equally. The most vulnerable in society have been treated as less than human. That the state will not acknowledge the impact of its decisions or take the necessary responsibility is abhorrent. That children in the care of the state are disappearing to this day; the children are still placed in adult psychiatric wards; that schools are rat infested, underfunded and still under control of the church; that foster parents are not being screened; and that children are left on the street because temporary accommodation cannot be found, only demonstrates that the state continues to violate Irish laws and international human rights laws.

And on Saturday, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and a host of other conservative politicians and political figures, including Michele Bachmann and (sigh) Alveda King gathered with hundreds of thousands of their conservative supporters for a “non-political” rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. (Beck insisted that the date selection was purely coincidental.)

I watched with equal parts outrage, sadness and amusement as the Restoring Honor march/rally/hullaballoo-making unfolded on Saturday. With so many politicians spearheading and keynoting the event, if promoting a political agenda wasn’t the goal, then what was?

Here’s an answer:

The event’s website says the rally is to pay tribute to America’s military personnel and others “who embody our nation’s founding principles of integrity, truth and honor.” It also is to promote the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which provides scholarships and services to family members of military members.

Well, okay. Fair enough. “Support our troops!” is a nice and fairly innocuous concept, a nifty little sound bite that doesn’t stir up controversy. Regardless of your feelings about the war(s), you really do appreciate the efforts of all those brave men and women (because it’s always laid out just like that, “men and women”) who are risking their very lives to help keep freedom free or somesuch.

There’s an idea that a whole lot of folks, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, can feel confident in getting behind. Hell, it’s a bumper sticker. But it’s a sentiment, after all, and standing alone it’s not enough to get hundreds of thousands of people off of their couches and onto the Mall. It’s clear that these people are upset, truly upset, about. . . something. But what?

Ummmmm...

Like so many things in life, the real story behind Beck’s rally, and the true nature of what has continued to propel the Tea Party movement since its inception, lies in the subtext. Several “on the ground” reports featuring interviews with rally attendees revealed a bizarre amalgamation of concerns, from budget spending and the deficit to health care reform to prayer in schools to a general disbelief in climate change. Once again, apolitical rally, extremely political concerns:

“Want to know why I’m here?” asked a the first person I talked to–Nick, a 61-year-old retired nurse anesthetist from Sidell, LA in a rally-themed t-shirt–in the line for a port-a-potty off the Mall. Sure, I said. “As Popeye would say, that’s alls I can stand and I can’t stand no more.” What couldn’t he stand? “We’ve got czars running everything.” And health care reform. “It was unconstitutional, for one thing.”

Ah, the czars. They’ve haunted the Tea Party’s political imagination and appeared sporadically in their protest language for a while now. No one ever seems to remember that czars were what Russia had before the Bolshevik Revolution. They’re the ultimate manifestation of the notions of God-and-country that Tea Partiers seem to like so much. No one also ever seems to remember that the Bush Administration was pretty czar-heavy; maybe they were more constitutionally-minded and less possibly socialist.

Oh, and less Muslim. A Christian Beck supporter in attendance with her prayer group had the following to say about President Obama:

“I don’t believe in peaceful Muslims,” she says. “Before you know it, we’re gonna be overwhelmed by Muslims.”

You see, the coming Muslim tide, threatens to annihilate Christianity, Christian values, and Christians in this country. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party ideology are the only things standing between us and the coming caliphate. This individual’s clearly taken a page from the Nicolas Sarkozy book on interfaith relations.

I wish the sentiments I pointed out were less common. But as I read various news articles, reaction pieces, and op-eds about the Restoring Honor rally, they kept popping up. The ideas that united these people who didn’t agree on everything are reactionary and fear-based. Tea Partiers are almost universally anti-Obama, but if you ask them why, their answers gleefully skim along a veritable motif of ignorance and misinformation. Beck himself famously exploited racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic elements among his supporters earlier this year when he said this:

He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion.

Many of the rally’s overwhelmingly White attendees could agree on one thing, even if they couldn’t express it on signs: they don’t like or trust President Obama. At all. They don’t like or trust his agenda. They don’t like the way he talks. They don’t like what he has to say. They don’t like the way he respirates, all through his nose and stuff. Oh, but don’t get them wrong! It’s not that they don’t like Black people per se. That gospel choir standing behind Beck was wonderful, and Martin Luther King’s message was generally positive and color-blind. It’s just that they don’t like the direction that this country’s headed in. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact there is a Black man at the helm when he should be down in steerage. Where he belongs.

When he took the stage on the same steps and same day as Martin Luther King all those decades ago, Beck didn’t deviate from his promise of an apolitical message. His speech was consistently religious and patriotic. Beck had donned the mantle of the itinerant preacher, and in spite of his insistence that the rally’s timing was merely serendipitous, most of what he had to say was distinctly and consciously reminiscent of King. The methods are the same, and the language – “freedom,” “love” – are obviously co-opted from the Civil Rights movements.

The difference, as several actual civil rights leaders pointed out, was that where King had lead through courage of conviction and inspired through love, Beck’s motivational arsenal is firmly rooted in fear: fear of economic uncertainty, fear of loss of privilege, fear of an uprooted status quo:

“This is going to be a moment that you’ll never be able to paint people as haters, racists, none of it,” Beck says of the event featuring Sarah Palin and other conservative political and cultural figures. “This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement.”

It’s pretty clear that Beck’s “we” doesn’t look like me, or anyone of the countless people who fought and died for civil rights that first time around. In Beck’s funhouse mirrored perception, though, King’s march for equality and his own march for privilege are the same.

As irritated as I was by Beck and his shenanigans, I was more upset on my 68-year-old mother’s behalf. She didn’t march with King, but she was involved with various Black liberation movements in her youth. We watched live coverage of the event. As the camera panned out over a sea of White folks draped in red, white and blue, and cut to Beck on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, she sighed.

“Is that where we’re at now?” she asked.

“Looks like,” I replied. And changed the channel.

“Who hurt you?” Two security guards getting off their shift at the corner grocery store asked. I shook my head without taking my hand from my mouth, and kept walking. “Whoever hurt you is an idiot!” One of them shouted at my back. I shrugged, and kept walking.

Still, I couldn’t help but notice that their small intervention made me feel better. Popular wisdom suggests that Moscow is a pretty harsh city – not just in terms of the lifestyle, but in terms of relationships. A girl walking down a street in the dark and crying appears to be somewhat of a rarity. I’m sure it happens, but then again, I suspect that when I see it happening, I avert my eyes and refuse to see it – and I’m on autopilot the entire time I do it.

A city is harsh not because of people who don’t cry in its streets, but because other people tend to look the other way when it happens.

In 1981, “Moscow doesn’t believe in tears” won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and today, it’s somewhat of a cliche, among expats and locals alike.

“I spent all day crying in bed!” I shout at a friend and colleague via SMS.

“But Moscow doesn’t believe in tears!” He replies, thinking it might cheer me up.

So much of Moscow is firmly ensconced in concrete (something that made this summer’s record-breaking heatwave so ridiculously unbearable), that it is indeed hard to imagine the possibility that the city may have a soft heart or two, beating beneath the paneling and bas-reliefs.

Maybe, the possibility isn’t just hard to imagine – maybe it’s painful to imagine. Because where was that light when you needed it most? Where was that person who randomly – or not so randomly – told you exactly what you needed to hear in that moment?

I think that if Moscow believes in anything – it has to be fate. Fate is the one thing you never really can control, unlike tears.

Meanwhile, the man the security guards were calling an “idiot” had finally caught up with me. Even when there came a breach in the autumnal clouds, the sky above our heads remained starless, due to light pollution. We didn’t act like movie heroes – or maybe we did, I don’t know. All I know is that we were standing on the sidewalk together, in Moscow, and that is good enough for me.

But that’s not really true. I visit my exes all the time (and not just because the Internet has made drive-bys a lot easier; you can do them on Facebook instead of having to have a car and be in the same town). I have to see for myself that they’re OK.If they aren’t, I just can’t handle it.

I had made tentative plans to go to New Orleans this year, though, and then the Deepwater Horizon well blew and oil saturated my beloved Gulf and I thought about a New Orleans with another haze of depression, tragedy, pain hovering over it, the threat of hurricane season not just possibly breaching levees that still, five years on, are not up to snuff, but pouring crude oil all over the city, coating still-devastated areas in toxic sludge far worse than the swampy cocktail that soaked into the city in August and September, 2005.

I couldn’t do it. Like that cliche love, who’s got new bruises, new wounds, has been beaten up again, I can’t bear to see it.

But then I feel bad because it’s selfishness on my part, after all. New Orleans has handled it. Without much help from the outside, Brad Pitt and HBO notwithstanding, the city’s slowly coming back. The police department is starting to investigate itself after the indiscriminate murders in the storm’s wake, and the music scene just won’t quit.

That’s what I hear, anyway, from friends who come to New York, from phone calls and articles and yes, Facebook updates. Because I couldn’t go back. Can’t. I wonder sometimes if I’m afraid of what I’ll see or afraid I’ll want to stay.

New York is my home now. Brooklyn. Sometimes I walk down a side street here and trip over a broken, jarring sidewalk and it’s like being back there. The houses look similar, sometimes.

I’m more healthy and whole now and I look back at the time when I loved the beautiful brokenness of that city and I want to cry. But I don’t cry now like I used to then. It’s hard to. The tears get stuck in my throat. Is this growing up? I don’t know if I like this part of it. Or maybe it’s just that in the last five years, the last eight years really, I’ve had so much to cry about. Or maybe I can feel New Orleans shrugging at me and saying “Don’t cry for me, what good will your tears do?”

New Orleans is stronger than me; it doesn’t need me. It’s full of people who didn’t leave or who came right back, buoyed by the love of people across the country who would return if they could, who go back as often as they can.  That’s what community means, really. Rebecca Solnit wrote this week, in The Nation:

A disaster unfolds a little like a revolution. No one is in charge, and anything is possible. The efforts of elites, often portrayed as rescue or protection, are often geared more toward preserving the status quo or seizing power. Sometimes they win; sometimes they don’t. Katrina brought many kinds of destruction and a little rebirth, including the spread of green construction projects, new community organizations and perhaps soon, thanks to the work of Thompson and others, some long overdue justice for police crimes. It’s too soon to tell what it will all mean in a hundred years, but it’s high time to start telling the real story of what happened in those terrible first days and weeks.

We who love New Orleans tell the story over and over and the story we tell is of people taking care of one another, of authorities and officials who failed the people and profiteers and mercenaries sweeping in to enforce some vision of Order, usually a whiter, wealthier, more tourist-friendly one. After all, Barbara Bush’s infamous words, that the storm was working out quite well for the city’s poor, were actually true for the disaster capitalists as well.

It’s been five years since the levees broke, and at the moment huge swaths of Pakistan are underwater and our reaction is slow, small, frightening in its very calm.  Why does this disaster simply pass us by? We know firsthand what it looks like when a city drowns; why did we rush to Haiti’s aid and not Pakistan’s?  The deaths on September 11 launched a global war on terror, one that includes drone strikes in Pakistan even as the flood waters destroy homes, but the deaths in August and September of 2005 didn’t launch a global war on floods, on climate change, on much of anything.

Maybe even more so than the poor black people of New Orleans (or Haiti), the people of Pakistan have been so effectively demonized that we don’t care if they drown (we’ve certainly seen the shards of Islamophobia reanimated like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice’s broom with the Cordoba House controversy).

But disaster fatigue can be a real thing, and after this summer’s grinding, draining news every day of more oil filling the Gulf, perhaps most Americans feel as I do, that they just can’t take any more. What good will our tears do, anyway, without a commitment to real change, a change that requires more than just quick donations? We have to relearn, most of us, what New Orleans already knows–that it’s community that can rebuild, that saves people, and that in the world we have now more than ever, where we can talk to people across the world with a few keystrokes, that community can stretch across oceans and include people who look nothing like us.

Numerous commentators have pointed out the historic parallels with other white American movements in response to black civil rights gains—from the Know Nothings to the Dixiecrats. Yet it is arguable that the movement is also a response to the traumatic stock market crash of October 2008 and the global financial crisis.

It is for this reason that the galvanizing issue, indeed the very name of the movement, is the apparent raising of taxes under the Obama administration. On one level this is counter-intuitive. CNN reported this year that American tax levels are comparatively low worldwide, and are at all time lows for middle and lower class people. Obama’s modest proposals effected only the wealthiest elite of this country. Why therefore would there be any kind of a popular working-class movement aimed at lowering taxes for this country’s obscenely wealthy?

My suggestion is: because neoliberalism itself is under threat. The Tea Party was necessary partly because institutionalized neoliberalism has so utterly failed, at a historical juncture when even dyed-in-the-wool neoliberals from Barack Obama to former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan have come to recognize that some form of state regulation of the financial markets is necessary. Among many economists, there has been a surprising turn towards long-disdained Keynesian economics, where the social democratic state creates the stability necessary to absorb the volatility and unpredictability of the financial markets.

The near-theological faith in the self-corrective power of the market from economists like Greenspan through the 90s and the early part of this decade has been irrevocably shown to be a sham. In response to epoch-shaking decline of economic orthodoxy, the Tea Party is a hysterical denial of concrete reality, suggesting instead that the solution to crisis is its cause and that only scorched-earth post-government libertarianism will fix the very problems it created.

To understand why this, we need some historical perspective on the American economy and its slow change from a social democratic state in the Roosevelt era to the current neoliberalist one. “Cut taxes” has been the mantra of neoliberals from Reagan onwards, Republicans and Democrats alike, one of a slew of policies (deregulation, privatization, downsizing, outsourcing, cutting labor costs) that over the 30 years of the long Reagan revolution have made the American economy vulnerable and heavily reliant on the volatile financial sector. As a result of that turn towards financial speculation, the comparative income share of the top 1% of the country has increased exponentially, shown graphically in a recent report from Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez. [PDF]

The point is, the financial crisis was a long time coming, and when the bubble finally burst once and for all, the American economy had been made immeasurably weaker by white-anting neoliberalist policies. Business Insider recently listed twenty-two staggering statistics that show the middle class is being systematically wiped from existence in the US. These included: 83% of shares being in the hands of the top 1% of the country, 66% of income growth going to the top 1% of the country between 2001 and 2007, only the top 5% of the country earning enough income to match the rising housing costs since 1975, record job search times, 40% of the country working in low-paying service industry jobs, the top 1% of the country owning twice as much of the country as they did only 15 years ago, and the bottom half of the country only earning 1% of its assets.

And yet the Tea Party rails against the evils of Big Government, against a backdrop in which the social democratic elements of government have been immeasurably weakened, with socially and economically stabilizing government programs steadily downsized over the years (except in the military/intelligence arena) and expenditure on public infrastructure has become reduced and politically unpalatable—and a widening gap between rich and poor in which more of the general population need government assistance.

The New York Times reportedly recently on America’s substandard infrastructure, with mediocre health and education systems, sidewalks crumbling to dust, and electricity blackouts increasingly common. At the same time, the $700 billion Bush tax cuts for the country’s wealthiest citizens are being fiercely argued for by the Right, especially the Tea Partiers.

Ronald Reagan’s infamous 1981 Inauguration statement “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” statement has been thus taken to its logical conclusion. Nevada Tea Party candidate Sharon Angle has said that

[social security] entitlement programs…make government our God. And that’s really what’s happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We’re supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government.

For a government to have any social functions, for some Tea Partiers, is idolatry itself. Julie Ingersoll, associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Florida points out the religious roots of this critique of institutions, saying:

“Angle’s criticism is Christian Reconstructionism in a nutshell.

As Reconstructionists see it, there are three spheres of institutional authority established by God: the family, the church and that civil government. Each of the institutions has specific responsibilities and when “men” look to the State to meet needs the State was not intended to meet, they are looking to the State for salvation and making the State God.

This is the source of their views on helping the poor (it’s the responsibility of families and churches) and education (a family responsibility). For them the civil government has no legitimate role in either function so they advocate dismantling the welfare system, eliminating the Department of Education, and ultimately “replacing” public schools.”

It is clear, then, that the Tea Party is nothing more than the bastard child of Ayn Rand and R.J. Rushdoony. But doesn’t that accurately describe the Republican party anyway?

The Tea Party’s approach to institutions is nothing more than bog standard neoliberalism taken to its conclusion—destroy most of the functions of government except the military. This is, again, far from new, former President Bush proposed to privatize Social Security, and mainstream Republicans have attacked the unemployed (primarily victims of the crisis) by looking to deny extending unemployment benefits in the crisis and characterizing them with undisguised contempt. New York Republican Tea Party candidate Carl Paladino recently proposed housing welfare recipients in prison dorms.

In summary: the economic crisis is a crisis of capitalism at its core. Over the last 30 years, inequity in the United States has stretched towards the breaking point. Recently, the Washington Post found compelling evidence that the much-mooted economic recovery is essentially a jobless recovery, with profits among the 175 companies on Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index up 43.3% last quarter. And yet, as columnist Harold Myers pointed out, “today, wages are still down, employment remains low and sales revenue isn’t up much, either. But profits are the outlier. They’re positively soaring.” Profit without workers, without revenue, is not a sustainable system.

There is something fundamentally wrong with an economy so dependent upon the financial speculations of its top 1% that it requires a trillion dollar bailout, above and beyond the subprime mortgage crisis. Yet the Tea Party response to the bailout was, once again, a simplistic denial of both crisis and the necessity of government intervention, leavened with a hearty dose of American “bootstrapping” individualism and racial paranoia.

Since the collapse of the communist alternative in the late 1990s, we have been told that there is no alternative to exploitative, inequitable job-cutting wage-cutting tax-cutting program-slashing capitalism, and that any alternative will mean that ordinary citizens will lose everything, especially to cheaper migrant workers (hence the revival of racial xenophobia among the Tea Party in places like Arizona). Yet this conceals the way that low minimum wages and weak labor laws have weakened the system from within, so much so that Indian companies are beginning to look to the United States for cheaper call center workers.

With the miserable failure of neoliberalism in promoting widespread prosperity in the US it is unsurprising that some people would come forward to argue ferociously for its continuation as a dominant reality principle, despite the overwhelming evidence that such policies have centralized wealth in the hands of but a few.

This is nothing more than a “radical” movement advocating that things stay the same, a collective bout of magical thinking in which only repeating the behavior of the past will bring back the boom. Sadly, life is more complicated than that, and only a true change in economic policies will bring a true cure for the country’s ills. For the Tea Party, however, it is undoubtedly better to have the devil you know.

This case follows an eerily similar precedent in South Carolina: in 1994, Susan Smith, a white middle-class mother of two boys, strapped both children into their car seats before submerging her car in John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina.  Like Duley, Smith initially lied about the incident, claiming that her car had been stolen by a young Black man. 

However, unlike Smith, Duley was never granted the benefit of the doubt.  Orangeburg County Sheriff Larry Williams told CNN that Duley’s “clothes were dry… and there were no skid marks or other indications of an accident at the scene.” Physical evidence in Smith’s case may have suggested similar discrepancies in her story, yet in 1994, Americans were instantly sympathetic to Smith’s racially-loaded tale of carjacking.  Certainly, the police were not commenting as openly about the details of the Smith case as they have with Duley.

This story has received extensive national coverage in the U.S. and much of it shames her for being unemployed.  Never mind that South Carolina’s unemployment rate increased to 10.8% in July 2010, even as the nationwide unemployment rate in the U.S. during the same month.  Also, please ignore the fact that Duley was employed for several years as a cashier at a Dairy-O fast-food restaurant.  Duley is, after all, a Black woman, required by birth to fulfill the mythical and ever-pervasive strong Black woman stereotype and thus supersede the state’s alarming unemployment statistics.

Otherwise, she’s little more than a “welfare queen,” another stereotype of Black women which continues to plague the nation’s consciousness, even as the majority of U.S. welfare recipients are white.  There have been no comparisons of Duley to the white men who killed their families after losing their jobs in the ongoing U.S. recession.  Instead, Duley has been singled out as “lazy” by conservative legal pundits.  You’ve got to hand it to the conservative pundits: at least they’re consistent in their used of tired and racist tropes.

It is crucial that readers also consider the ways in which Duley’s mental health is portrayed, as ableism plays a huge role in the media’s coverage of this story.  Even mothers are unsympathetic to Duley’s story: Café Mom, a mothers-only online community, calls for the death penalty.  Nowhere, in any of the above coverage, is the term “postpartum depression” discussed.

Admittedly, neither Duley nor her legal representatives have publicly discussed the possibility, but surely, the public at large has entertained the notion that Duley may have experienced this illness.  Or are we more comfortable when a white celebrity like Brooke Shields is the face of this movement?  Postpartum depression is also intimately connected to job loss and financial problems.  Are only middle or upper-class women accorded sympathy for their experiences with postpartum depression?  Or do we assume that as an unwed mother, Duley deserved the anguish of raising her children without a support system?  Our collective silence on the topic of Duley’s mental health speaks volumes, as does our willingness to condemn her without a trial.

It seems only natural that the public reacts with shock, disgust and outrage when faced with the deaths of two young boys, particularly when their deaths occurred at the hands of their own mother.  Their lives are gone, their potential extinguished, and we are left to decide the fate of Shaquan Duley.  Yet the facts have not been fully presented and we are already ready to sentence a young mother to death for her confessed crimes.

As we consider the racism, classism, and able-bodied privilege which is invoked in the coverage of Duley’s actions, we are each responsible for refusing to take the stereotypes as truth.  We must insist on hearing all of the facts before coming to a conclusion.  We must demand a fair trial without bias or preconceived notions of Black women, unemployed women, and mothers.  Justice for Shaquan Duley is justice for mothers.

I was working a series of activist groups in this place and time. We planned a labor teach-in, which included speakers such as Richard Trumka, now AFL-CIO president. We wanted to use the event to confront the University of Tennessee on their exploitative labor practices. In the weeks leading up to the event, we held meetings, publicized the event around campus and the community, and held actions preparing for the big protest. We also spoke to the lowest-paid workers. These dormitory housekeepers, maintenance workers, and library staff jumped on the chance to protest their poor wages and unsafe working conditions.

That April morning witnessed an event never before seen at that conservative southern university. Approximately 400 people came to the university’s plaza. They included a couple of hundred workers, students, faculty, community members, and visitors to the event. Trumka spoke, others spoke. Even I spoke. The energy in the crowd grew each second. We ended by marching over to the administration building and demanding a meeting.

The administration put us off for that day. But that protest led to a growing series of actions and organizing that created the first union in university history. Now affiliated with the Communication Workers of America (CWA), the union still has to fight for survival because of Tennessee’s anti-labor laws. But that protest started a process where long-suffering workers began standing up for their rights and claiming power over their workplace.

Nothing binds activists together like a shared history of suffering. The most vibrant and successful activist groups over the past century have organized around this history. This was true with the labor movements of the 1930s, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and the gay rights movement, as well as the workers at the University of Tennessee, today.

For example, the Chicano/Latino rights movement has flowered since the 1960s. Latinos have organized around defending their rights ever since the United States stole half of Mexico through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War. Like many underprivileged groups, Latinos, inspired by the African-American civil rights movement, experienced an upsurge of organizing for their own rights beginning in the 1950s. Individuals like Corky Gonzales, Reies López Tijerina, and César Chavez led the Mexican-American population in the Southwest in fighting for their locally specific issues. Meanwhile, organizations like The Young Lords led the Brown Power struggle in northern cities until the FBI’s anti-radical COINTELPRO program crushed them.

Ever after the African-American civil rights movement lost steam in the 1970s, the Chicano movement only gained strength. Increased migration from Mexico and Central America and the terrible treatment these migrants often face in the United States galvanized the movement into the present.

The annual May 1 immigrant rallies that began in 2007 as a response to increased racism demonstrated Latinos’ increasing power. In 2010, Latino communities began facing their greatest challenge in many years, as racist whites in Arizona passed SB-1070, the draconian anti-immigrant law that gives law enforcement the power to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect may be undocumented.

But I think the Latino community is going to put up one hell of a fight against America’s resurgent racism. Latinos are already well organized. As opposed to labor unions whose complacency after World War II made them completely unprepared to deal with the challenges of globalization, Latinos already have an active and ever-evolving organizing architecture that will help motivate their community into action.

To explore this further, let’s look at a single group. The Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP), based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, started organizing the region’s Latino community since 1980. Nationally, they are most famous for calling out the environmental movement for ignoring people of color and environmental racism. But SWOP has made a greater difference by organizing the Albuquerque poor on a variety of issues, including environmental racism, housing, police brutality, bilingual education, voter registration, and immigrant rights.

None of these campaigns made national headlines, but this kind of community organizing builds networks and personal connection, allowing people to react quickly for new crises. SWOP has responded strongly to America’s recent xenophobic surge by playing a leading role in Albuquerque’s immigrant rights rallies and loudly announcing that they will do everything to ensure New Mexico does not emulate Arizona. My last column fretted over the extent to which we can rely on internet organizing as opposed to face-to-face organizing in public spaces. SWOP has an important online presence, but its effectiveness ultimately rests upon its ability to get people in the streets, into city council meetings, and to the gates of corporate polluters.

Like with the University of Tennessee workers, the immigration protests galvanized people previously afraid to stand up for their rights. The chants, the spirit of feistiness, and the shared solidarity between people who had never previously met helped create long-term activists.

While shared suffering provides a base of common interests that supports much organizing, it isn’t a necessary ingredient for a successful movement. Maybe it was the zeitgeist of the 1960s, but what made activism so dynamic during those years was how those who organized around their historical suffering had support from hundreds of thousands of people who joined social movements not because they personally suffered, but because they saw the pain of others and felt moved to create change. Whites joined the civil rights movement because they were sickened by racism. People unaffected by the draft fought against the Vietnam War because they didn’t want Americans or Vietnamese to die.

The environmental movement is a prime example of this kind of organizing. Environmentalism became a popular movement in the 1970s because people were fed up with pollution in their communities, but in the conservative decades since 1980 it has relied on wealthy white people interested in protecting the world’s last wild places. Despite environmentalism’s less than ideal racial and class history, it serves as an excellent example of organizing outside of the shared suffering paradigm. We can debate environmentalism’s ultimate effectiveness in fighting climate change and other systemic problems. But I bring this movement up not to relive its history, but to note how powerful a movement can be even if most of its supporters don’t share a history of suffering. In Tennessee, a great deal of our movement’s success came from tenured professors who had nothing financially to gain by our union but who provided invaluable knowledge about the workings of the university and how to pull the levers of power.

People’s tepid response to the economic crisis inspired me to write this series on the state of activism. We have an ever-growing community of people suffering from the extremist capitalism that has reigned over the world economy in the past three decades. Not only have the vast majority of Americans failed to recognize that their suffering is part of a structural problem inherent to global capitalism, but labor unions haven’t either. It seems that those who are screaming loudest about the structural problems with free-market capitalism are, like environmentalism, those who are less affected by the economic downturn—academics and left-leaning journalists.

Only when people recognize that globalization and free-market capitalism won’t take care of them, that buying into free trade, cheap consumer goods, and houses as a sure profitable investment won’t lead to the good life, can we effectively organize to take the system back. Hopefully, labor unions and the rest of the activist community will be prepared for this scenario.

I would indeed have to be a certified lunatic if I had meant a word of the above. Yet, the only difference between my disease of the mind and that of the millions of Jews who claimed to have “returned” to Palestine, is that in my case, at least the monuments and Arab names I am referring to are real and do actually exist today, and it is not contestable that the direct ancestors of my people did actually build that great civilisation.

On the other hand, all Zionist archaeologists have failed – after digging up every conceivable corner of Palestine for the last 62 years – to come up with a single credible Jewish teapot or tablespoon, let alone excavate an alleged Jewish temple remotely matching the grandeur of any of the visible relics of Andalucía.

Not only that, but they needn’t have bothered digging. Two years ago, Israeli Professor Shlomo Sand argued, with meticulous scholarship in his earth-shattering book, The Invention of the Jewish People, that the claim that the Jews of today are the ethnic offspring of the biblical Jews is yet another Zionist myth, because all records tell us that the current Jews are the descendants of Khazar tribes who converted to Judaism, and have no genetic link whatsoever to the Jews who lived in Palestine during Roman times. The latter, he concludes, are, most ironically, none other than the Palestinians of today who converted to Islam (or Christianity), because the Romans apparently never exiled anybody. Moreover, Sand demolishes the myth of the kingdoms of David and Solomon by proving they are pure legends that never existed. What is astonishing is that, to date, no Israeli historian has been able to debate, let alone refute, any of Sand’s devastating findings.

Yet, not only would I need to be in a straitjacket if I was serious about reclaiming Spain for the Arabs – irrespective of our real history there – but the Spanish people would have the right to laugh at the sheer absurdity of my hallucinations, if not get gravely offended by their audacity.

I cannot, for example, visit the magnificent Hall of Abencerrajes (Ibn Sarraj) in Al Hambra and then, after explaining to my children that it was Muslim Arabs who constructed these wondrous architectural miracles, go on and indoctrinate them that this piece of real estate should belong to them. I cannot do that any more than an Italian tourist can visit Jerash in Jordan, and thereafter decide to build a settlement and live there because, he says, it really belongs to his great uncle, a certain Mr Julius Caesar.

This is the case simply because, in this modern world, we do not go around stealing other people’s land by attributing our crime to an ancient historical link to such land, or because we believe that we belong to the same race or religion of the people who once lived there.

But the Zionists get away with it the whole time, and have been doing so for far too long – despite the total lack of any real historical connection to the land of Palestine (not that it matters or makes it any more legitimate if they did have such pre-historic connection).

For who can, in their of heart of hearts, credibly deny the blatant repugnancy of the whole underlying premise of Zionism, the very madness upon which Israel was founded? Indeed, any person who happens to support the immorality of the theft of the land of Palestine under such religious or forged historical pretexts would in reality be making up excuses for blatant colonisation that are far more ridiculous than my demented ranting about returning to the gardens of Cordoba.

So why do these Zionists get away with such a ludicrous monstrosity?

We all know why. The hegemony over world media exercised by a handful of Zionist Jews is crucial so that no one can ever challenge the Zionist narrative or point out the naked, unadulterated lunacy of the whole Zionist enterprise. Coupled with a world conscience shrouded in a cloud of Holocaust guilt, an event that is forbidden to even debate, you get an oppressive atmosphere that has suffocated the ability of Western civilisation to deconstruct Zionism down to its most basic insanities.

For how is it conceivable for otherwise rational populations to even entertain, let alone accept and adopt, the twisted Zionist logic about the Jews “returning” to a promised land after so many thousands of years of supposed separation? And how can these same people acquiesce to Israeli politicians openly using such religious nonsense as a justification for the contemporary and ongoing catastrophe inflicted upon the millions of guiltless Palestinian inhabitants of that land?

Take for example, José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister, who recently gave a solemn warning on the pages of the London Times:

“anger over Gaza is a distraction. We cannot forget that Israel is the West’s best ally in a turbulent region … if Israel goes down, we all go down…”.

Well, Mr Aznar, we do not advocate for Israel to disappear or go down anywhere, because, despite the evil deeds accompanying its creation, Israel is a fact that we have to live with today. Likewise, the Israelis are fellow human beings upon whom I do not wish to impose the televised barbequing of the eyes and flesh of their children using white phosphorus, nor shall I ever tolerate such horrendous barbarity to be inflicted upon them.

But, hey José, if you see nothing wrong with what Israel is, and regard its Goldstone-documented war crimes as a mere “distraction”, while ignoring that it is the source of all the “turbulence” of the region you mentioned, then you might as well give us back Malaga and Marbella. After all, in Andalucía, no Christian or Jew was ever persecuted or burnt at the stake, nor had his bone marrow fried by any other means.

Yet, the travesty continues unabated. Take this most recent manifestation of the mental illness enveloping the racist state of Israel (branded by Jewish US Media Inc. as “the only democracy in the Middle East”). Hillary Rubin is a US Jew from Detroit who decided to move to Israel in 2006, something millions of Palestinian refugees can only dream of. But that is not the story. Rubin happens to also be the niece of Zionist leader, Nahum Sokolow, so you would’ve supposed that she is a Jewish notable, revered in Israel for her noble lineage. Last month, she fell in love and wanted to get married to a nice Jewish boy from Herzliya. According to Ha’aretz newspaper, after filing for a wedding licence, she was refused and was told that she needed to prove the Jewishness of her maternal lineage for – listen to this – four entire generations. This is not 1933 Germany, but modern day Israel. So she got letters from four Conservative rabbis and one Chabad rabbi attesting to her Jewishness. But the Herzliya Rabbinate still wouldn’t have it. To allow her to marry her sweetheart, these men of God stipulated she comes up with the birth or death certificates of her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother, something she of course failed to do. This is not an isolated incident, but the official applicable Israeli law on the books. Oh yes, Adolf Hitler is turning in his grave at this news. “And they dared crucify me for the Nuremberg laws?”, the Führer is muttering to himself.

Well, there you have it, Ladies and Gentlemen. Didn’t I tell you that Zionism is nothing but a terrible, incurable disease of the mind?