The Unrepentant Marxist reviews Savage Mules, which shows how Democrats can playact at the role of “change” without actually doing much to foster real change. In fact, they often actively block and co-opt change, rendering it harmless.

In the words of Peter Camejo in his Avocado Declaration.

When social justice, peace, or civil rights movements become massive in scale, threaten to become uncontrollable and begin to win over large numbers of people, the Democratic Party begins to shift and presents itself as a supposed ally, always seeking to co-opt the movement, demobilize its forces, and block its development into an alternative, independent political force.

In effect, the Democratic Party too often runs interference for the Republican Party, channeling dissent from the Left into itself where it becomes diffused and thus non-threatening to the status quo.

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The Freeway Blogger diversifies. (You can download a PDF of the graphic from his blog.) In his email to me, he said “this one’s a bit severe, but it needed to be said”. It generated quite a few comments. Some said it is too graphic and maybe a flag-draped coffin or wounded vet would be more effective. Others thought to be a fine piece of agit-prop indeed.

And if you missed it, check the video interview I did with him a few weeks ago.

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The Freedom People, Brad and Periel Stanfield, have tirelessly played at many antiwar demonstrations. I got to know them when I lived in L.A., they’re good people. This is the final version of their great “New Revolution.”

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Mullen’s remarks are jaw dropping because they expose the unwillingness of the Pentagon to support an attack upon Iran.

I think the Bushies have been sending up trial balloons to see if there is support for their insane plan. The answer clearly is “No.” I think they are already weakened enough that no attack (even by a proxy Israel) will occur.

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I interviewed the Freeway Blogger today after videoing him putting up antiwar signs on San Francisco freeway overpasses. He’s put up over 6,000 of them on California freeways and thus has reached millions of people with an antiwar message. Yes, millions. One busy freeway alone can get 50,000-100,000 cars a day

He explains how to do this easily, quickly, and at very low cost. Use cardboard, not sheets. Paint one side white. Get a $35 overhead projector on eBay and use that to project the letters on the cardboard to make lettering easy. Then you have a “printing press for billboards” and the cost per sign is minuscule.

He says the Left “organizes too much and does too little” and that we need to get out and just do it. To reach millions, you need the message where they can see it - like on freeway overpasses.

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The venerable War Resisters League was formed in 1923. They are a radical, pacifist antiwar group. They’ve just released a thoughtful report on the state of the antiwar movement after a “Listening Process” of interviewing 90 organizers across the country.

The primary question they want to answer is, why is the antiwar movement currently so anemic and apparently powerless, especially considering that most of the populace opposes the war?

They conclude, as I have, that the antiwar movement too often marginalizes itself, either through believing it is still a voice crying in the wilderness or through trying to out-Left each other and thus alienating the middle they claim to want to attract.

Many of today’s antiwar activists were opposing war when it was very unpopular to do so, and this courage to take an unpopular stand—especially in the time immediately following 9/11—is admirable. The problem is when we become so accustomed to being ostracized or marginalized for our politics that standing against the majority becomes a merit in itself, hard-wired into our circuitry. We cling to an identity of the righteous few who cry out in the desert, with no one listening. We stop looking for common ground and for openings and become resigned to a world in which our hopes will never be realized.

The country is moving to the Left. Sharply. The antiwar movement needs to move towards this and most importantly, listen to what people in the center are saying. Because you can’t have a mass movement until people in the political center are part of it. This also means many Left groups will need to resolve their conflicting motives. Are they organizing to end the war or using the antiwar movement primarily as a way to recruit for their group? The latter approach is self-defeating because the center will never want to be part of a hard Left group, and by only appealing to the hard Left, such groups limit their reach and influence.

The election of Obama, whether he’s liberal or not, presents a opportunity to the Left as expectations for change will be huge. We need to be more optimistic and to genuinely reach to the center and listen to what they are saying.

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We on the antiwar Left have said this for years. Now even former US generals are agreeing.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice are war criminals and need to be treated as such. Congress: You have an impeachment resolution and now a former general has said Bush is a war criminal. What more do you need to impeach?

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The Freeway Blogger has put over 4,000 antiwar posters that are visible on freeways. These global warming banners are among his most brilliant.

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“Now is the time for unity in the antiwar movement, ” says the video, and I agree.

Will there be a mass protest in DC this fall? If so, plans and organizing need to start now. The presidential campaign and particularly Obama has siphoned off huge amounts of energy from the antiwar movement. And while Obama certainly seems the least hawkish of any of the candidates, progressives need to keep the pressure on.

Reading the tea leaves a bit, this appears to be an effort by the less radical wing of the antiwar movement to do an end run around the oft-squabbling primary antiwar groups, the ANSWER Coalition and United for Peace, who aren’t speaking, much less organizing towards the common goal of ending the wars. My take: leadership of the movement is shifting from those two organizations to groups as yet undetermined.

It’s time to look at other means of protest besides just more mass marches and rallies. The media ignores them now, as do many of the Left. New ideas and approaches are needed, something I’m sure that will be discussed in Cleveland.

National Assembly June 28-29. Cleveland, Ohio.

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“Dad” is slang for Baghdad.

Out in the desert there’s a soldier lying dead
Vultures pecking the eyes out of his head
Another day that could have been me there instead

You hit the booby trap and you’re in pieces
With every bullet your risk increases
Old Ali Baba, he’s a different species

I’m dead meat in my HumV Frankenstein
I hit the road block, God knows I never hit the mine
The dice rolled and I got lucky this time

I’ve got a wife, a kid, another on the way
I might get home if I can live through today
Before I came out here I never used to pray
Nobody loves me here
Nobody loves me here

Dad’s in a bad mood, Dad’s got the blues
It’s someone else’s mess that I didn’t choose
At least we’re winning on the Fox Evening News
Nobody loves me here

Dad’s Gonna Kill Me
Dad’s Gonna Kill Me

Full lyrics.

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“The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings,” Yellin said.

Except now even Scott McLellan says the war was based on lies and deception.  Considering that plenty of Left  news sources and blogs were printing the truth then, those corporate executives had to know what the actual truth was.  They deliberately repressed the truth,  and a free press along with it.

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In BushWorld, Condi Rice is a moderate because she opposes war with Iran. She apparently is being purged.

Why? The neocons want a more “forceful pursuit of the President’s aim to make history.” Which means they are both desperate and dangerous.

Perhaps this time, the mainstream media won’t be compliant cheerleaders for war.

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Foreclosures within 10 miles of military facilities in the US are four times higher than than in other areas.

“Think about how much stress comes with a foreclosure, and then imagine you’re walking the same tightrope while being employed in Baghdad,” said Paul Rieckhoff, 33, the head of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and a former 1st lieutenant with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division.

Steve Earle - Rich Man’s War

Bobby had an eagle and a flag tattooed on his arm
Red white and blue to the bone when he landed in Kandahar
Left behind a pretty young wife and a baby girl
A stack of overdue bills and went off to save the world
Been a year now and he’s still there
Chasin’ ghosts in the thin dry air
Meanwhile back at home the finance company took his car
Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war

Tip: The Blue Voice

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This version of The Band Played Waltzing Matilda is masterfully done by Liam Clancy and Robbie O’Connell.

In the song, an Australian soldier is badly wounded in WW1, losing both legs.

So they collected the cripples, the wounded, the maimed
And they shipped us back home to Australia
The armless, the legless, the blind, the insane
Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla
And as our ship pulled into Circular Quay
I looked at the place where my legs used to be
And thank Christ there was nobody waiting for me
To grieve and to mourn and to pity
And the band played Waltzing Matilda
As they carried us down the gangway
But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared
Then turned all their faces away

And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
And I watch my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reliving old dreams of past glory
And the old men march slowly, all bent, stiff and sore
The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask, “What are they marching for?”
And I ask myself the same question.

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… is to insure there will be no more of them. End the wars. Bring the troops home now.

Photo by Will North of Arlington West at Santa Monica Pier.

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Family members and friends come to Arlington West, find the cross for their fallen soldier, and leave remembrances on it. Some are written and are quite moving. The crosses are handmade and set up by volunteers from Veterans for Peace every Sunday at Santa Monica Pier. The remembrances are of course saved and accompany the cross whenever it is set up again.

This video was taken April 1, 2007. They used to have a cross for every US soldier killed until there were too many, so they now have 1,000 crosses to represent all of them.

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Donald Rumsfeld says another terrorist attack could restore the neo-con agenda.

Reader DJ Mitchell often blogs about this at Asymptotic Life, about how if participants in a supposed peace process never somehow manage to achieve peace, then quite probably they don’t want it. The process of war and conflict rewards them in some way, and peace would end that.

His thoughts on this are not theoretical, he has spent considerable time in Sri Lanka working with an organization to end the decades-old civil war there.

Do Rumsfeld’s comment sound like a man who wants peace? Not hardly. Instead he almost seems to hope for another attack.

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Sgt. Matthis Chiroux, who served in the Army until being honorably discharged last summer after over four years of service in Afghanistan, Japan, Europe and the Phillipines, today publicly announced his intention to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq.

He says

This occupation is unconstitutional and illegal and I hereby lawfully refuse to participate as I will surely be a party to war crimes. Furthermore, deployment in support of illegal war violates all of my core values as a human being, but in keeping with those values, I choose to remain in the United States to defend myself from charges brought by the Army if they so wish to pursue them. I refuse to participate in the occupation of Iraq.

Chiroux deserves our full support for his courageous and principled opposition to an illegal and unjust war.

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If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route.

That should settle it, particularly for those who have experienced smooth flights, train rides and road travel, and speedy communications networks in, say, Beijing, Paris or Abu Dhabi recently. The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness.

Doc Searls notes that Obama has a plan to rebuild our transportation infrastructure while McCain does not.

Another problematic area is the Internet. European nations, Japan, China, and Singapore often have vastly faster and more reliable net infrastructures, and they’re cheaper too. This country needs to stop spending hundreds of billions to destroy other countries with insane, pointless wars, and spend the money here instead, rebuilding the decaying infrastructure.

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From a new study by Oil Change International on the greenhouse gas emissions and opportunity costs of the Iraq War.

Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends.

Insanity, isn’t it?

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The US will spend $5 billion in 2008-2009 for world food aid or about about $210 million per month.

The Iraq War costs $12 billion per month.

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Socialist Unity in Britain wonders, as do many of us, about the steadily diminishing numbers at antiwar protests given that the majority of the populace opposes the war. They hope unions might somehow revitalize the movement, but I’m doubtful unions have the clout or the willingness to do so in mass numbers, especially in the US.

The key reason why attendances at marches are down and why the health of the anti-war movement overall has taken a sharp downward dip is because there is no domestic organising focus for the anti-war movement. The war is still there, but we have no way at the moment to really hit back at it.

There’s no draft and returning body bags are carefully kept out of public view. So, the immediacy of the war now isn’t like it was during Vietnam. Also, mass demonstrations no longer have much effect. They’ve been done so often that the mainstream media barely considers them news anymore. And if it doesn’t have mass impact, then you’ve not accomplished much except make protesters feel good and (don’t overlook this, it can be a major reason groups organize protests) recruit for your organization.

If you want a protest to be huge in size, then you have to organize within the public at large, not just within Left enclaves. Few, if any, groups are doing this. Which is another reason the protests are getting smaller. The Left base is finding them to be routine while no outreach is happening within the larger population.

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He’s right. If one person in every city put up as many antiwar signs as he does, you couldn’t drive anywhere without seeing one.

Tip. Lefti.

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I just published dozens on new photos on Flickr. Subjects include kittens, Maui, protests, and more.

Here’s two of my favorites.

I took this photo of Eddie Vedder with a cell phone camera at an ANSWER LA antiwar protest in 2003 or 2004. It is by far the most viewed photo I’ve blogged. Polizeros was getting just a few hundred visits a day then. I posted this photo and got 7,000 visits in two days. Also got photos of Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Pedro Almodovar (visible in this photo too) speaking at the rally.

Surfboard fence. Maui.

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