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We Are the New Radicals, Sung to the Tune of "We Are The Monkies"

We have seen grassroots political ferment evacuated from philanthropy, leaving Philanthrocapitalism, in which business will save us from its own excesses and injustices without assistance from government, good taste, moral traditions, or the people it saves.  Philanthrocapitalism has pretty well been debunked by Michael Edwards', Just Another Emperor. What are we to make, then, of We Are The New Radicals? Julia Moulden, author of a book by that title, is now writing a weekly column for the Huffington Post about how to save the world with love sweet love and without getting your nose broken, risking a stay in some government run Hell Hole, or even getting on a no fly list. It is all pretty much coming up roses in the world of The New Radicals. The cachet of social organizing extruded from venture philanthropy has now been nicely packaged and commodified in its own right.   

Just Another Emperor

Just Another Emperor, a 95 page monograph, on The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism, by Michael Edwards.  Well worth reading.  Has anyone noticed any minds it has changed, informed, or opened? I noticed a copy on my generous patron's granite desk, under a plant, to soak up any water that ran through the hole in the pot. Asked her whether she had read it. "I couldn't get past the masculinist title," she said, "Empress;  the one and only.  Get that straight, little man. Momma is going to save the world and keep it all for herself."

Advocacy 2.0

Advocacy 2.0 wiki:

This is a collaborative resource. Created by activists, for activists. We are discussing the basics of organizing loose groups of people.

Very promising matrix from within which activist networks may assist one another, learn, link, and grow.

Media/Politics

Joe Bageant:

The global takeover of media and politics -- those inseparable Gemini twins of the new world order of things -- is one of the most profound phenomenons in human history. And by corporate take over I do not mean in the strictest corporate consolidation sense, though that is happing too. I mean it in the sense that capitalist corporatist values have been internalized by all participants in both politics and media to the extent that they can only operate toward its ends. It constitutes their very unconscious in that it is the operating instructions for their daily lives, world view and behavior. As it does for so many ordinary Australians and Americans and just about anybody else on the planet with an extra buck in their pockets that can be extracted.

I recently attended the National Conference on Media Reform in America. There I met hundreds of sincere Americans putting out great energies in an effort to reverse the consolidation of media and create a place for alternative views exist in the public eye. All of them were "working within the system" for change. At the end of it all I felt sad. Sad because working within the system means working within a system owned, governed and operated by our adversaries.

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Philanthropic Tisch Family Unloads Tobacco Stock Profitably

CorpWatch:

Separating tobacco from Loews is a timely step for the socially and philanthropically prominent Tisch family, as Newport menthol cigarettes have lately been criticized by black antismoking advocates and others. While antismoking activists have long had difficulty reconciling the relationship between cigarettes and the civic-minded Tisches, the anti-Newport flare-up has added heat to the controversy.

Profile of Laurence Tisch here. 

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Shaming The Vicious in High Places

C.A. Fitts reviewing Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine:

One of our greatest powers to create true transformation is our ability to withdraw our approval and intellectual and financial support from the companies involved and financially benefiting from disaster capitalism. To see and gather this power, it is essential to understand that so many seemingly “reputable” people and companies are intentionally engaged in activities that are this destructive of real wealth.

Catherine has a kind of Quaker-style moral clarity and courage that I find exhilerating - at a safe distance. If disaster capitalism consists of firms, and those firms have leaders, and those leaders are wealthy and "philanthropically inclined," Catherine suggests we burn them on the hotseat, rather than give them humanitarian awards or name the library in their honor. Me, I would take the perp's money, and engrave the brick, but I admire Catherine's integrity. I may be a Moral Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, but I am not going to get on their bad side. That could get me killed.

Torture Started at the Top

LA Times:

...the current Senate investigation has established definitively that the drive to make torture an instrument of U.S. policy originated at the highest levels of the Bush administration -- mainly in the circle that included Cheney, Rumsfeld and Addington. This group had come to Washington determined to implement its theory of "the unitary executive," which holds that presidential powers of all sorts have been dangerously diminished since the Vietnam War. The fact that these guys seem to have defined executive branch power as the ability to hold people in secret and torture them pushes the creepy quotient into areas that probably require psychoanalytic credentials.

Did Carl Schmitt or Leo Strauss seem creepy? They may not be George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but they are first rate political thinkers, only one rank below Machiavelli, who stand behind our neoconservative powers that be. We had better read the realpolitik theorists carefully since we living in a world where Freedom cloaks their purposes. You would not want to sleep through this philosophy class, lest ye never wake.

Bonhoeffer's Gift

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian, writing from Flossenberg prison prior to his execution for plotting to kill Adolph Hitler:

We have been silent witnesses to evil deeds. We have become cunning and learnt the arts of obfuscation and equivocal speech. Experience has rendered us suspicious of human beings and often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word. Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? Geniuses, cynics, people who feel contempt for others, or cunning tacticians, are not what we will need but simple, uncomplicated and honest human beings. Will our inner strength to resist what has been forced on us have remained strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves blunt enough, to find our way back to simplicity and honesty?

Cited by Dr. Larry James. Living with the fear of reprisal, writing and speaking under surveillance, in a state of exception, with the Constitution suspended in order to protect it, intricate becomes the langauge of the oppressed. The pariah speaks in tongues, in parables, fables, allegories, and dark sayings. Comes the moment when plain truth flashes out, and the consequences are irrevocable. If you compare Bonhoeffer's moral biography to that of our philanthropists, you see how paltry a thing is wealth. The Journey from Success to Significance took Bonhoeffer to the gallows. That in my experience is not how philanthropists see things panning out for them. When Dr. Paul Schervish, a former Jesuit, writes of the wealthy and their moral biographies, I wonder if figures like Bonhoeffer, or for that matter Christ, cross his mind, and make him pause, sick at heart, and full of disgust at what we do to flatter the delusions of wealth. We will not cure our time until we cure ourselves. Not that I am anything but ill: afraid, weak, an ennabler still. 

Philanthropy in Support of Oppositional Networks

Jay Taber on the topic of fighting armed bigotry:

Part of the problem is that philanthropy in this country does not provide any infrastructural support for building and maintaining regional pro-democracy networks, where authentic activists can meet up and find mentors.

I can understand why the revolution will not be funded, but the pro-democracy movement? Surely, these are not the same?

Executed Today

Executed Today:

Executed Today is a daily chronicle — each day the story of an historical execution that took place on this date, and the story behind it.

Execution as a category seems to be limited to lives taken by the duly constituted authorities in a given time and place with the appropriate forms observed. I did see what looked like a legalized lynching of a black man, William Johnson, by Union forces in the civil war.  I did not see on the blog any executions or legalized lynching, or even torture, following upon or preceding secret US Military Tribunals in the present day. My sense is that if such procedures were to be privatized we as taxpayers would get a better deal.