Wisconsin recalls, the Komen Foundation repudiation, the Internet blackout...

Not everything can be categorized so neatly.

of the 60s and 70s.

We're facing tens of millions in outside money which is supporting the Walkerites as a portal to mining (and other) deregulation, union-busting, and just plain buying the State at discount rates. Just think Koch.

But Wisconsinites are fighting like hell to keep their union rights. That's what I mean -it wasn't primarily about money, it was about the erosion of collective bargaining rights.

The fight is being waged in the legislature, not against the monied. Yes, the monied are involved but I don't think they will win the day.

True, money is only a part (albeit a big part) of collective bargaining rights, but when one side consists of the working class and the other side consists of the owners and their toadies, yes it's about money. And the class struggle.

Respectfully.

I'll go back to using election "results" as a measure of the popular will.

Probably out of print, but used the model of natural vibrations throughout nature, starting at the molecular level, to talk about how everything is cyclical. That the wave is built into the fabric of things. So we're due for another swing. What was most interesting to me in his observations was that, at the moment the pendulum reached the top of the swing, just before it started moving in the opposite direction, it was motionless, defying the laws of gravity and physics. That was when anything was possible. That's where I think we are.

On the one hand, there's OWS (and it's equivalents around the world), Murdoch and Limbaugh are finally getting the hammering they deserve, there's much more talk of income inequality.

On the other, Europe has shifted rightwards electorally, and is currently shafting itself with disastrous austerity measures (and in the UK an unhealthy dose of pointless privatisation), and the US right is the maddest it's ever been in its long, undistinguished career of being very mad indeed.

I think the tide is turning, but there are still some very big waves in the other direction.

Exactly.

We had about 20 years of Progressivism ("Permissiveness&quot in the US after WWII. We've had over 30 years of this right-wing crap. That's the problem with cyclical explanations of reality. Of which there are many. Seems like there's another one every generation or so.

-- Mal

I've heard it said that the healthcare bill was the first significant bill in decades that benefited the middle class. While I don't think it's a shining example of victory for the middle class, I think the point is made that legislation generally makes things work better for the 'players' first...

Think tanks, media consolidation and ownership by multinationals, corporate profits funneled to lobbying, private financing of campaigns, patriot act, willingness of one party to lie cheat polarize smear and generally go low, possibility of election count control, voter suppression, denigration of science and truth and education, diminishment of an educated powerful middle class...this is a partial list of things that have been deliberately put in place over decades and with billions of dollars so that pendulum swings and apple cart upsets are nearly impossible.

We are still in a very deep hole, despite the 2008 elections, with respect to the big picture. The hole isn't as deep as it could have been, but it's still a hole.

Sorry for mixed metaphors of holes, apple carts, and pendulums!

and now that I say that, a quote from Thomas Jefferson is starting to come to mind.... I'll go look it up.

“Every Generation Needs a New Revolution”
― Thomas Jefferson

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
― Thomas Jefferson

but it's still not exactly the one I remember (and, of course, my memory may be playing tricks with me.)

peaceful dissent impossible make violent revolution inevitable?

It was Kennedy:

""Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable."

The Rush phenomenon is a small part of the general surge of disaffection for the right, particularly among women, over issues such as the contraception controversy (and beyond that, the underlying devaluing of women).

Yeah, I do think changes are occurring. But not all changes are pendulum-swings. For example, the pendulum never swung back to hunting & gathering once a given society got agriculture. Likewise, I think we're on the edge of a HUGE societal change--the information revolution. Information is power, and the people are gaining access to information at unprecedented rates.

As an old scholar, trained many years before the Internet age, I can only look in wonder at how the world is changing. I spent years in university libraries and gigantic computing centers.

Now I can do all that from my laptop, sitting in my old farm house surrounded by fields and woods. With a few memberships in professional organizations, I have access to hundreds of journals, and with membership in a few listserves I have access to colleagues who can and will get any articles I need for me upon request, usually within a few hours and often within minutes.

Anyway, I think all this information is the ultimate defense against the Corporate State, which seeks to rule through the twin tools of force and information control (secrecy, disinformation, propaganda).

When they (as they shortly will) finally lose the information battle, the Corporatists will have nothing left but force, and when they try that, they will be overthrown. The overthrow must and will be nonviolent in nature. General strikes, simple noncompliance, all the old tactics and some new ones, all linked in a worldwide network of information transmission, like a planetary cerebral cortex, will do nicely for the purpose.

As far as Europe and the rightward swing goes, I see that as driven by desperation on the part of the international bankers. They are trying to grab everything, just like here, and they know that the endgame is approaching. They must terribly fear the Icelandic solution, and are pushing as hard as they can to nail things down before the PIIGS countries (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain) escape from the control of their politicians.

I hail Anonymous and Wikileaks for tearing the lid off the cesspools of the world's power centers so that we all may see what floats within.

For decades, there's been a Big Money push to convince us that, while you may not agree with the Right, enough of your countrymen do and that's why seemingly unpopular policies rule the day.

By and large, that was a lie crafted to serve the interests of the wealthy.

And I think such a lie can be maintained for only so long before it becomes absurd on its face. And that's happening now.

when the tectonic plates do move, it'll be a mag 8 or 9 quake.

People can see that tens of thousands of other people don't agree with, say, withdrawing funding from Planned Parenthood, or letting banks charge fees to let us use our own money, and so on.

What makes this time DIFFERENT is the widespread communication network. In the old days, the powerful had the ability to communicate one-way to the many. Now we can all communicate to the many. If you have a brilliant insight, you have as much chance as anyone of having it go viral. It's an information revolution, and it's in its infancy.

I agree about the information revolution being the defining characteristic of the Brave New World we are stumbling into. I am not so sanguine that the Corporate State (to use your term) is going to "lose" the battle to control access to information. Look, access is pretty open right now, and yet a vast number of people do not use that access for anything but porn and screeds from the people who are saying what the user wants to hear. What happens if access is not an important-enough topic to enough people to guard it from encroachment?

I am also not sanguine about the certainty of a "bloodless" revolution. (Pardon the pun) Stipulating that the revolutionaries will continue to be nonviolent, what makes you so sure that the reactionaries will be? There are precious few examples of true bloodless revolution on the record -- the fact that there are some such examples is a cause for hope, but what makes you so sure the coming revolution will more resemble the USSR in 1991 than, say, Syria in 2012? The police of the world have already richly demonstrated that they will gleefully club and gas anybody they are told to (some exceptions apply). What makes you so sure they won't just as willingly use lead bullets as rubber ones? And if you think the US military will not fire on US civilians, then you obviously weren't paying attention in 1970. I think the attitude of the military is one of the most important imponderables for any upcoming revolution. If they have a "breakdown of discipline" resembling that of the army of the USSR in '91, then we're golden, but if they decide to kill us all and let God sort us out, it will get ugly very fast.

-- Mal

The rebels must remain nonviolent, though. That is the proven path to winning in these things.

Check out this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Civil-Resistance-Works-Nonviolent/dp/0231156820/ref=sr_1_fkmr2_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331065485&sr=8-1-fkmr2

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories.

Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment.

Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

But you fail to refute the accusation of optimism. Can you demonstrate that the revolution winning the information war is a necessary event given the attention various legislators are paying to restricting and monitoring the internet? Can you demonstrate that if/when the reactionaries become violent and start actually killing people the revolution will a) continue, and not be crushed, and b) continue to be non-violent? Especially in the US, where we tend to resort to personal violence much more quickly than in other parts of the soi-disant civilized world. I don't suggest such results are impossible, just that I think they are a bit more "iffy" than you seem to think.

The fact that the movement does not show the same ethnic distribution of the US population and is treated with apathy or hostility by many who should support it gives me cause to ponder if it will grow enough, and show enough stamina, to hang in when the going gets rough. And when I see all the "just wait 'til Spring" posts, I ponder that the current Winter is the mildest on record...

-- Mal

isn't the worst thing I've been accused of--nor the most common.

I'm not much into the school of thought that depends on cycles but rather of one that believes real change is hard fought and depends on properly constructed systems to act as vehicles for new pardigms.

Most of what we are seeing as positive signs are more of the nature of if you squeeze too tightly the more likely that things will slip between your fingers than anything else. They over played their hands and did so too quickly which creates blowback.

Their avarice is at the same time the greatest threat to us and our best hope at escape from their designs, they will always over play their hand.

buy politicians, the pendulum will still be stuck somewhere on the right.

The more I think about it, the tectonic plate analogy I used in Post #14 & #20 is probably more accurate:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002390475#post14
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002390475#post20

(tip of the hat to Jackpine Radical for making me rethink that)

You can hold back (and sometimes reverse) human progress for only so long.

cracking so to speak. I hope we can take it all the way to the left, at least where it used to be before corporations took over and basically made themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves.

and or jobs) even the most "clever" propaganda tactics become painfully transparent and people are forced to act.

The wheels of Justice grind slowly, but exceedingly fine.