Organizing Notes

Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....

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Location: Brunswick, ME, United States

The collapsing US military & economic empire is making Washington & NATO even more dangerous. US could not beat the Taliban but thinks it can take on China-Russia-Iran...a sign of psychopathology for sure. We must all do more to help stop this western corporate arrogance that puts the future generations lives in despair. @BruceKGagnon

Thursday, December 20, 2012

YOUR TIME TO CHOOSE


Social Security or Military Empire?
 
 
You have likely been receiving many email appeals to call Congress about the so-called "fiscal cliff variety show" now running in the media.
 
I am convinced that it is a largely scripted process whereby the two corporate controlled political parties do their dance and then continue to hack away at social progress.
 
We had just recently heard the Congress and Obama talk about the need for $50 billion in Pentagon cuts each year for the next 10 years.  Chump change in the grand scheme of things.  Now even that slim number is being cut in half in order to please their military industrial complex masters. It could be even lowered still to virtually no military cuts.  After all, the Pentagon is targeting Syria and Iran next and needs all the $$$ it can get.
 
We've each got to do more.....and this will be an ongoing process.  Just see Greece and other nations where the bankers are re-accumulating cash as they break societies down to the bone.  We are being hollowed out as well and we will virtually all be brought onto the reservation.
 
I urge you to do something immediately - even if you feel like it is a waste of time.  We have to get the people out of their frozen state and each time we crack the ice a bit we move just a bit further along.
 
I'd first ask you to sign the petition to Congress here.
 
Write a letter to editor of your local newspaper. The free weeklies often have larger circulation than the daily papers do. My letter was published in my local paper yesterday.
 
Organize a meeting locally and statewide to bring all the losing parties together so that we can begin to know one another and begin to work together.  The old business model of organizing - every organization for themselves - is not going to make it for us any more.  We've got to continue the work Occupy started of connecting the dots.  Except this time one of the dots that often gets left out - the U.S. military empire and its insatiable fossil fuel diet - has to become part of the organizing equation.
 
Hopefully your organizing will lead to action.  Here in Maine, just last Saturday, 40 keys local leaders met in our state capital of Augusta.  We named ourselves the Maine Alliance for the Common Good.  There were people in the room that we don't always work with.  Not everyone we invited came but it was a good start.  A demonstration at the state capital was planned for January 8 and we intend to connect all the dots this time.
 
We also have to make a pledge to one another that we will stop swallowing the B.S. from the media and the two corporate political parties.  We have to pledge to each other that we won't serve two masters at the same time.  People have to choose between being apologists for the corporate agenda or get onboard for all of humanity and the environment.
 
We have serious problems and an honest assessment cannot leave one to be overly optimistic.  But we have a little two-year-old running around the kitchen as I write this.  She is a part of our house's extended community.  She is a bright and joyful child who we've come to adore like our own.  We have to be fighting for her now.  And our Mother Earth is in toxic shock.  One day she is cold with shivers and the next day she is sweating in fever.  The weather here in Maine has never been so strange.  We must act and act again.  Nothing is more important.

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