Misguided Rage in Texas (Meditations on the role of the US left in one man’s political desperation)

People are at the end of their rope. Sick of all the lies, deception, and corruption of an exposed and decaying capitalist state set on maintaining its grip on power at any price. This one man's desperate misguided actions against the IRS building in Austin, are but a symptom of the system's own desperate misguided entrenchment. He is one of millions who’ve been betrayed by, and are finally awakening to, the fabricated illusion of living in a noble country and under a just system.

The sentiment of frustration driving this one man’s extreme action is widespread in our society. Sadly, so are the misguided political premises informing his course of action and target. Misguided, in large part, by the misinformation and poison being put out there by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and Fox News. These right wing mass media actors exploit the righteous sense of indignation and anger people are feeling about capitalism’s injustice to fuel hatred of government in a complete economic analysis vacuum (meaning, it is never connected to government’s capitalist handlers!).

The ability for all the media to disconnect government from the capitalist system it maintains and supports is at the core of why some emotionally distressed person convinced he is carrying out a significant political act, would choose to fly a suicide mission into an IRS building filled with innocent government workers, and not into the headquarters of some international financial institution filled with corporate criminals. Both equally politically useless criminal acts, I believe ( so help me god), yet quite different in the political economic analysis leading up to each if they were to be carried out.

It would also be simplistic to place all the blame for this critical shifting of focus of attention away from the corporatocracy and onto government on a handful of fascist wackos on amphetamines on the AM dial. Their dangerous and deceptive work would not be effective if not for the complicity of the ruling political class, and by the absence of an organized revolutionary left providing more constructive and effective courses of action than wanton violence.

In the ongoing right-wing dominated national media political discourse -NPR included- we will never hear mention of the corporatocracy under which we live, or about it's possible link to why we suffer any of our social ills. Instead, the Extreme Right targets the programme of the Reformist Right and the Reformist Right feebly attempts to defend its indefensible positions against these attacks. The Reformist Right, otherwise known on NPR as Left Leaning Democrats, with all their hypocritical double speak and unsustainably false solidarity with the working class, make for a real easy and soft target for the unrepentant Fascist Right. I must admit I draw a sort of morbid pleasure in seeing these major agents of Empire humiliate and drag each other through the mud. Once you are no longer invested in the survival of a a kinder and more compassionate Imperial Rome, you can almost enjoy the Medusa eating away at it own heads. Particularly the heads of those who pretend to be defenders of the oppressed in order to get elected, but who back-peddle at a 100 miles an hour to rally behind corporate dominance once in office. As the corporate stooges that they are, all they can muster is rhetoric that is so timid and convoluted as to have no political clarity or impact in reaffirming the anti-corporate and anti-capitalist rage most Americans are feeling right now.

Enter the real dangerous Extreme Right populists on AM radio beating their politically inflammatory drum. Here you will hear the passionate call being made to millions for any and all left leaning heads to roll; for the blood of the Hummer-burning youth and the child-adopting communist lesbians; for the summary trial and execution of all global warming theory advocates, for the surveillance and closure of every anarchist info shop in the country… for criminal prosecution of anti family, free, homosexual, anti American sex-love!...for ACTION against all these evils that ail our society!!!.

Now, if only they had stopped at thrashing capitalist pigs in the Democratic Party, but noooo!, they had to declare war on our hedonistic, Satan worshipping, anarcho-communist brethren too! So now, it’s has to be all out war against their false, misguided deception and misinformation. Problem is, people want justice, any justice, and if the corrupt political class in DC or the radical left CAN NOT give it to them, Rush will. A justice filled with the hatred of a fat charlatan that ends up driving people to fly suicide missions into inconsequential government buildings killing themselves and other innocent people in the process, instead of delivering real justice blows against Empire….

Ultimately, the core of the problem is that liberal democrats in DC and the fascist AM radio host are really not all that different, and are both beating the same pro capitalist and pro corporate-rule drum. The only difference being that liberals in DC are trying to re-brand themselves and sell us fascistic neoliberalism as humane capitalism. In other words, they are the imperialists with a heart of gold who tagged the unemployment benefit extension to the inflated Pentagon budget last year. So it was that the millions of unemployed Americans, who would otherwise have run out of unemployment benefits on December 29th 2009, got their three month unemployment benefits extension. Not through a comprehensive unemployment and jobs bill, but on the back of the most monstrous military machine the earth has ever known. Of course, AM radio made nothing of this aberration in our legislative process. Happy as clams that the money for more killing was increased, they mostly chose to let the dems get away with it.

The extreme right hates the idea of any sort of diminished control of the power of corporations to rule. So, in the absence of any real threat from a non-existent radical left mass movement, they will fill people with hatred towards whatever radical culture there is and against our reformist corporate pawns, like Obama, Pelosi, or the leadership of the AFL-CIO. While at it, they will also fuel racism and xenophobia against the African American single mom in Detroit and the immigrant worker in Texas. These actors are then presented to mainstream America as the source of the troubles of the displaced white farmer in Iowa. Rush tells these folks nothing about how ADM, Monsanto, and Cargill ordered Bush, Clinton & Bush Inc. to destroy family farming in the US. The Rush tale says that the farm was lost because liberals have allowed immigrant farmers to work here illegally and because all the money that could’ve gone to help these poor white folk went to single black moms on welfare. Neither Clinton, Pelosi, nor Obama will dare to politically affirm such nonsense, but neither can they speak the truth against it, lest they betray their corporate bosses at ADM...So Limbaugh's lies go unchallenged by the top democrats or by real facts every time! That is the key to the success of fascist misinformation. The liberals and their media cannot attack the capitalist hands that feed them and no one listens to Amy Goodman in Des Moines..!

So, where is the non-governmental “Left”?!!! Not organizing poor white folk in the heartland, that's for sure.. Mainly, they remain stationed in large urban centers working hard to protect the status quo of the Democratic Party. Playing into the two party system, and fueling the same old tired liberal illusion about how real change can come through electoral politics and reform at the hands of the liberal Intelligentsia.

Having worked inside the non-profit "social justice" sector for 17 years within organizations that have prided themselves as being at the forefront of the struggle against social and economic inequality, the one critical impression I am left with, is that the vast majority of these organizations serve mainly as radical action “derailers”. Fabricating the illusion of movement building through the marketing of their own services, sapping the momentum out of truly radical historical conjunctures and co-opting emerging radical alternatives. The last organization I worked for, sadly proved to be exactly this type of organization, and sadly also the rule, not the exception! Does this sound frighteningly familiar? An organization that wasted hundreds of thousands in overhead, nonpolitical support staff, insular and elitist national reform campaigns, useless meetings and conferences, lengthy reports working class people will never access, tokenizing people of color (some who are more than happy to be tokenized), exploiting interns and their own workers under hierarchical structures, fueling a culture of white middle class privilege, dominance, and supremacy, all the while patting themselves on the back about what great work their non-representative, insular organization is doing to "shift the balance of inequality". Additionally, also as a general rule and in order to maintain their respectability in the eyes of their corporate handlers, this so-called progressive non-profit sector has also intentionally disconnected themselves from any other organization or individual that has been labeled as radical and is really working for radical change against capital. They actually compete with the radical left as they attempt to control and monopolize all  grassroots socio-political spaces to advance their own interests and reformists agendas which is how they stsy open for business and employed. And that is that...Or ask your local leftist radical!

To create a real radical leftist movement, we will have to not just fight the extreme right wing and the capitalist political class, but will also have to stop lying and deceiving ourselves and others about the true nature of the so-called progressive non-profit sector. The political price of this self-deception is too high and it's costing the radical political struggle dearly, here and abroad...The non-profit industrial complex will have to be dismantled and the truly progressive workers within it, now serving as professional activists, must reinvent themselves as real community and anti-capitalist activists for their contribution to real revolutionary change to begin.

Hats off to the few organizations promoting grassroots, bottom up, authentic resistance. There are still a handful of those across the country in spite of the massive onslaught by the bigger, more powerful corporate funded organizations to control their agendas and all aspects of their movement building work. It is from these remaining strongholds and other community based organizations that we could build a real solidarity founded movement free of the control of professional activists and  their parasitical “experts” and “consultants”. At best, these are well-intentioned, but self serving technocrats representing no one but themselves and their own economic interests. At worst, they are real enemies of  authentic revolutionary movement building. The hearts and minds of middle America have been surrendered by the liberal left and their organizations to the fascists on AM radio and Fox news and it is time for the remaining independent radical left to start the fight to win these minds and hearts back.

Reformist organizations in Boston, NY, DC and San Francisco will not ever get their heads out of their self-deceiving asses or put some of those millions in foundation money to work in educating the working class about how capitalism is fucking up their lives. That's not what they do! They will instead go to the US Social Forum, jockey each other for prominence, co-opt or discredit whatever authentic autonomous radical spaces are created, politically masturbate each other there for a week and then pretend to have partaken in some significant radical political act and see if they can catch themselves in the 6 o'çlock news. Their media recorded presence in the spectacle could add brownie points with the Ford Foundation for that next grant proposal.

I truly believe that the large majority of “progressive” NGO’s in this country have indeed become this horribly disconnected, opportunistic, and exploitative of their own chosen causes. As long as the political philosophy and directives of the NGO's which are presently self-proclaimed leaders of “the movement" -with absolutely no mandate from the masses- remain non-revolutionary and reformists in nature, completely disconnected from the everyday realities of the people, and with paychecks paid for by the very corporations and wealthy philanthropic elites that we need to eat for lunch, we will never achieve real change, only fuel more deception. Not unlike the deception of the Limbaughs of this world, but perhaps left leaning enough to let this quasi-vanguard we’ve allowed to control the left's political direction sleep well at night deceiving themselves-and us- about how they are really fighting against social injustice.

The gloves must come off and we most dare to declare capitalism our common enemy or we will be nothing but its agents. By telling the American people that reform will cure the disease that is a system designed for and built upon oppression, you might as well be working for the Right. The sad consequence of this complicity will be more desperate and confused acts by the working class turning its righteous anger against the capitalist system on themselves and on the innocent instead of organizing in solidarity with each other to build a new economic and social order.

Don't Mourn, Organize!
La Lucha Sigue
Zapata Vive....

Adrian Boutureira

Houston, February 20, 2010