Although this was written before the latest revelations about government spying on its own citizens thanks to the heroic actions of Edward Snowden, this author's message is now more relevant than ever.
It has always been clear to me that most Americans willingly collaborate with their oppressors whenever they anticipate short-term benefits by doing so. Over the years I kept rationalizing with every ruling class crime that maybe these events would ultimately be good because people will eventually wake up when things get bad enough. Since then I've witnessed one US invasion after another, many assassinations of anyone who stood in the way of a growing shadow government, contrived shocking events like 9/11 and the Boston bombing all engineered to take away more civil liberties, Wall Street bailouts after they in their reckless gambling schemes have wrecked the economy for most of us. In other words, things have continued to get worse and worse, and still very little reaction. This author expresses my frustration very well.
At the same time, I have not given up hope for change...especially now when people are fighting back against the forces of capitalist elites in many places in the world, especially when whistle-blowers like Snowden, Bradley Manning, and Julian Assange are risking their lives for us, when writers like Andrew Gavin Marshall and Sibel Edmonds have dedicated their lives to waking us up.
It is mostly leftists ensconced comfortably in universities and subject to ruling class discipline who disappoint me. The latter seem to be most of the people who write for publications like Monthly Review and New Left Review who confine their writings to abstract theoretical critiques of capitalism. As for CounterPunch, it features too many liberal commentators who like to rant and rave about superficial aspects of a growing police state while decrying any form of protest that goes beyond simply marching down the street with a protest placard.
We can and do at CounterPunch and in similar publications, such as Monthly Review and the New Left Review, publish analyses of capitalism and its inherent vulnerabilities, catalogue its predations and wars of military conquest and imperial exploitation. But where is our capacity to confront the daily horrors of drone strikes, kill lists, mass layoffs, pension raids and the looming nightmare of climate change?
It is a bitter reality, brought into vivid focus by five years of Obama, that the Left is an immobilized and politically impotent force at the very moment when the economic inequalities engineered by our overlords at Goldman Sachs who manage the global economy, should have recharged a long-moribund resistance movement back to life.