Throw the Bums Out! (2.0)

By Zack Exley, Reader Supported News

22 October 14

bet I know something about you. You're sick and tired of the idiots who run our government. How'd I know that? Because everyone is sick and tired of the idiots who run our government.

So why do we keep electing them?

That's easy: Because every election, we get the same two choices -- Idiot Republican and Idiot Democrat. And guess what? The idiot always wins!

Why do we even bother voting? Well, when you go vote, you probably don't even know anything about these idiots who are running. Neither do I. (I just got up and polled my local coffee shop to tests this assumption, and out of about 25 people, only one person, a poli-sci undergrad, knew the name of our member of Congress. Try it where you live.) But we at least know something about these idiots' idiotic parties.

So we choose the party that, sort of, maybe, best represents our values. Because voting for these parties at least lets us make a tiny political statement on certain social and cultural issues that most of us care about.

Pulling the party lever is a way of asserting our values. It's like saying, "Hey! There are people like me out here!"

But when it comes to issues, like jobs, that we all care and feel the same way about -- we all want more and better jobs! -- here, we are really left with no choice at all. On that issue, both the idiot parties seem totally committed to screwing the rest of us -- or at least letting us be screwed by the special interests they represent.

For example, both parties voted for NAFTA -- the free trade bill that stuck it to all North American workers. Both parties voted in exactly the same proportion. It's true, and incredible: A full 75 percent of each party voted to pass it.

More recently, when the big banks nuked the economy, both parties had exactly the same solution: Give those same big banks trillions of dollars. Not just idiotic. TOTALLY INSANE.

So how sick of this are you? I'm guessing very sick -- but I'm guessing you're also resigned to it, because you know it will never change.

But what if I told you that, because of a technical change to our political system, it is now possible to throw all the bums out in one fell swoop?

Probably you'd say, "Zack, you're a crackpot!" Right?

Fair enough. But on this topic, I'm not just any crackpot. I am a crackpot who was an insider at the creation of this fundamental change that will let us throw all of Congress out at once.

Here's the change I'm talking about: It is now possible for insurgent, anti-establishment candidates to raise a ton of money from small donors online, and to use that money, plus the Internet, plus old-fashioned organizing, to build nationwide, strong volunteer organizations -- all without any help from either of the idiot parties.

This change started way back in Jerry Brown's insurgent 1992 presidential campaign, when Brown asked America to make credit card donations through his 1-800 number. Picking up the phone was such a bother, though, so that really didn't work. In 2000, the maverick John McCain had this brief moment when it looked like he just might be able to beat the mega-corporate-funded Bush -- and so he asked his supporters to make a donation to his "Website." Most people were like, "Website?" Nevertheless, $2 million flooded in. Unfortunately it was too little too late.

In the 2004 election cycle -- the one I worked on -- Ron Paul, Howard Dean and then John Kerry defined this model. Ron Paul punched way above his weight in fundraising, but still got out-fundraised by the establishment. The insurgent Dean, however, raised tens of millions dollars, leaving the big money establishment candidates in the dust. Nothing like that had never happened before and it totally turned politics on its head.

Unfortunately, Dean's campaign forgot that, back in real life, volunteers needed to be trained how to actually win the Iowa caucuses. And then, there was that scream.

But then, John Kerry, who was an insurgent in the context of the 2004 general election, doubled his budget using Internet fundraising, raising about as much as the Mega-Corporate-Funded Bush. He also mobilized hundreds of thousands of volunteers to knock on doors. I ran online fundraising and organizing for Kerry. We raised about $125 million for Kerry. For John Frickin' Kerry! OK?

But then Obama finally took this thing all the way to victory -- raising hundreds of millions and recruiting tons of volunteers using the Internet -- as the ultimate insurgent candidate, even if, as it turned out, it was in name only. And his campaign didn't forget about the old-fashioned things like getting out the vote... and acting normal on TV.

Even though most Obama supporters are disappointed by who he turned out to be, there's no denying that he campaigned as a radical, anti-establishment outsider, with tons of biases against him, and he won with one of the strongest mandates in a long time.

So how can we use this new power to throw out all the idiots in the Congress and the White House and replace them with normal, honest smart people?

I believe we can use these same proven tactics while thinking far beyond the White House. We can recruit a great candidate for every single congressional district, for every open Senate seat -- and for the White House.

Then we can run them in a unified campaign, with all the same focused excitement that goes with an insurgent presidential campaign -- except that this will be even more exciting because we'll be campaigning to replace not one, but all of the idiots who run the government.

I realize that this idea sounds wacky the first time you hear it. Please just bear with me as I walk you through how this will work.

The first step is of course to recruit good, honest leaders for every seat in Congress plus one stately candidate for the White House. I'll admit, that's going to be a huge job -- and that this is the one part of this plan that's never been done before. But in the age of Internet organizing, it has become common for many teams in different places to work in a coordinated way on a shared project using Internet tools. I'm talking about common tools such as Google docs and discussion forums, but also custom tools made specially for doing this kind of work.

I've seen projects as big as this recruitment task carried out successfully with just those tools and some willing volunteers. I really believe we can do this.

I'm going to put the specifics of the plan to recruit the candidates in a separate article, so for now, just take a leap of faith with me that it might be possible... and sign up to help right here.

We just need one volunteer in every congressional district to start. And the first step is easy: Just get together a handful of interested people for an informational meeting that will be tied in, through your computer, to a nationally facilitated meeting. A ton of you have already done this kind of thing at a political or campaign house party. Slow and steady wins the race, so we'll give ourselves a few months to complete this first task.

If you're dreaming of an end to idiocracy, please sign up now!

Canada, At War for 13 Years, Shocked That 'A Terrorist' Attacked Its Soldiers

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

22 October 14

n Quebec on Monday, two Canadian soldiers were hit by a car driven by Martin Couture-Rouleau, a 25-year-old Canadian who, as The Globe and Mail reported, “converted to Islam recently and called himself Ahmad Rouleau.” One of the soldiers died, as did Courture-Rouleau when he was shot by police upon apprehension after allegedly brandishing a large knife. Police speculated that the incident was deliberate, alleging the driver waited for two hours before hitting the soldiers, one of whom was wearing a uniform. The incident took place in the parking lot of a shopping mall 30 miles southeast of Montreal, “a few kilometres from the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean, the military academy operated by the Department of National Defence.”

The right-wing Canadian government wasted no time in seizing on the incident to promote its fear-mongering agenda over terrorism, which includes pending legislation to vest its intelligence agency, CSIS, with more spying and secrecy powers in the name of fighting ISIS. A government spokesperson asserted “clear indications” that the driver “had become radicalized.”

In a “clearly prearranged exchange,” a conservative MP, during parliamentary “question time,” asked Prime Minister Stephen Harper (pictured above) whether this was considered a “terrorist attack”; in reply, the prime minister gravely opined that the incident was “obviously extremely troubling.” Canada’s Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney pronounced the incident “clearly linked to terrorist ideology,” while newspapers predictably followed suit, calling it a “suspected terrorist attack” and “homegrown terrorism.” CSIS spokesperson Tahera Mufti said “the event was the violent expression of an extremist ideology promoted by terrorist groups with global followings” and added: “That something like this would happen in a peaceable Canadian community like Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu shows the long reach of these ideologies.”

In sum, the national mood and discourse in Canada is virtually identical to what prevails in every Western country whenever an incident like this happens: shock and bewilderment that someone would want to bring violence to such a good and innocent country (“a peaceable Canadian community like Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu”), followed by claims that the incident shows how primitive and savage is the “terrorist ideology” of extremist Muslims, followed by rage and demand for still more actions of militarism and freedom-deprivation. There are two points worth making about this:

First, Canada has spent the last 13 years proclaiming itself a nation at war. It actively participated in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and was an enthusiastic partner in some of the most extremist War on Terror abuses perpetrated by the U.S. Earlier this month, the Prime Minister revealed, with the support of a large majority of Canadians, that “Canada is poised to go to war in Iraq, as [he] announced plans in Parliament [] to send CF-18 fighter jets for up to six months to battle Islamic extremists.” Just yesterday, Canadian Defence Minister Rob Nicholson flamboyantly appeared at the airfield in Alberta from which the fighter jets left for Iraq and stood tall as he issued the standard Churchillian war rhetoric about the noble fight against evil.

It is always stunning when a country that has brought violence and military force to numerous countries acts shocked and bewildered when someone brings a tiny faction of that violence back to that country. Regardless of one’s views on the justifiability of Canada’s lengthy military actions, it’s not the slightest bit surprising or difficult to understand why people who identify with those on the other end of Canadian bombs and bullets would decide to attack the military responsible for that violence.

That’s the nature of war. A country doesn’t get to run around for years wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering and bombing others, without the risk of having violence brought back to it. Rather than being baffling or shocking, that reaction is completely natural and predictable. The only surprising thing about any of it is that it doesn’t happen more often.

The issue here is not justification (very few people would view attacks on soldiers in a shopping mall parking lot to be justified). The issue is causation. Every time one of these attacks occurs — from 9/11 on down — Western governments pretend that it was just some sort of unprovoked, utterly “senseless” act of violence caused by primitive, irrational, savage religious extremism inexplicably aimed at a country innocently minding its own business. They even invent fairy tales to feed to the population to explain why it happens: they hate us for our freedoms.

Those fairy tales are pure deceit. Except in the rarest of cases, the violence has clearly identifiable and easy-to-understand causes: namely, anger over the violence that the country’s government has spent years directing at others. The statements of those accused by the west of terrorism, and even the Pentagon’s own commissioned research, have made conclusively clear what motivates these acts: namely, anger over the violence, abuse and interference by Western countries in that part of the world, with the world’s Muslims overwhelmingly the targets and victims. The very policies of militarism and civil liberties erosions justified in the name of stopping terrorism are actually what fuels terrorism and ensures its endless continuation.

If you want to be a country that spends more than a decade proclaiming itself at war and bringing violence to others, then one should expect that violence will sometimes be directed at you as well. Far from being the by-product of primitive and inscrutable religions, that behavior is the natural reaction of human beings targeted with violence. Anyone who doubts that should review the 13-year orgy of violence the U.S. has unleashed on the world since the 9/11 attack, as well as the decades of violence and interference from the U.S. in that region prior to that.

Second, in what conceivable sense can this incident be called a “terrorist” attack? As I have written many times over the last several years, and as some of the best scholarship proves, “terrorism” is a word utterly devoid of objective or consistent meaning. It is little more than a totally malleable, propagandistic fear-mongering term used by Western governments (and non-Western ones) to justify whatever actions they undertake. As Professor Tomis Kapitan wrote in a brilliant essay in The New York Times on Monday: “Part of the success of this rhetoric traces to the fact that there is no consensus about the meaning of ‘terrorism.’”

But to the extent the term has any common understanding, it includes the deliberate (or wholly reckless) targeting of civilians with violence for political ends. But in this case in Canada, it wasn’t civilians who were targeted. If one believes the government’s accounts of the incident, the driver waited two hours until he saw a soldier in uniform. In other words, he seems to have deliberately avoided attacking civilians, and targeted a soldier instead – a member of a military that is currently fighting a war.

Again, the point isn’t justifiability. There is a compelling argument to make that undeployed soldiers engaged in normal civilian activities at home are not valid targets under the laws of war (although the U.S. and its closest allies use extremely broad and permissive standards for what constitutes legitimate military targets when it comes to their own violence). The point is that targeting soldiers who are part of a military fighting an active war is completely inconsistent with the common usage of the word “terrorism,” and yet it is reflexively applied by government officials and media outlets to this incident in Canada (and others like it in the UK and the US).

That’s because the most common functional definition of “terrorism” in Western discourse is quite clear. At this point, it means little more than: “violence directed at Westerners by Muslims” (when not used to mean “violence by Muslims,” it usually just means: violence the state dislikes). The term “terrorism” has become nothing more than a rhetorical weapon for legitimizing all violence by Western countries, and delegitimizing all violence against them, even when the violence called “terrorism” is clearly intended as retaliation for Western violence.

This is about far more than semantics. It is central to how the west propagandizes its citizenries; the manipulative use of the “terrorism” term lies at heart of that. As Professor Kapitan wrote yesterday in The New York Times:

Even when a definition is agreed upon, the rhetoric of “terror” is applied both selectively and inconsistently. In the mainstream American media, the “terrorist” label is usually reserved for those opposed to the policies of the U.S. and its allies. By contrast, some acts of violence that constitute terrorism under most definitions are not identified as such — for instance, the massacre of over 2000 Palestinian civilians in the Beirut refugee camps in 1982 or the killings of more than 3000 civilians in Nicaragua by “contra” rebels during the 1980s, or the genocide that took the lives of at least a half million Rwandans in 1994. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some actions that do not qualify as terrorism are labeled as such — that would include attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah or ISIS, for instance, against uniformed soldiers on duty.

Historically, the rhetoric of terror has been used by those in power not only to sway public opinion, but to direct attention away from their own acts of terror.

At this point, “terrorism” is the term that means nothing, but justifies everything. It is long past time that media outlets begin skeptically questioning its usage by political officials rather than mindlessly parroting it.