Changing Obama's Mindset.......Howard Zinn

But you don’t respect somebody when you give them a blank check. You respect somebody when you treat them as an equal to you

-snip-

The vision should be of a nation that becomes liked all over the world. I won’t even say loved—it’ll take a while to build up to that. A nation that is not feared, not disliked, not hated, as too often we are, but a nation that is looked upon as peaceful, because we’ve withdrawn our military bases from all these countries.

We don’t need to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars on the military budget. Take all the money allocated to military bases and the military budget, and—this is part of the emancipation—you can use that money to give everybody free health care, to guarantee jobs to everybody who doesn’t have a job, guaranteed payment of rent to everybody who can’t pay their rent, build child care centers.

-snip-

But you don’t respect somebody when you give them a blank check. You respect somebody when you treat them as an equal to you, and as somebody you can talk to and somebody who will listen to you.

Not only is Obama a politician. Worse, he’s surrounded by politicians. And some of them he picked himself. He picked Hillary Clinton, he picked Lawrence Summers, he picked people who show no sign of breaking from the past.

We are citizens. We must not put ourselves in the position of looking at the world from their eyes and say, “Well, we have to compromise, we have to do this for political reasons.” No, we have to speak our minds.

This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, “Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln’s point of view.” Lincoln didn’t believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, “We’re not going to put ourselves in Lincoln’s position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us.”

And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That’s how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

That’s been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.

/Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.” Thanks to Alex Read and Matt Korn for transcribing Zinn’s talk on February 2 at the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington, D.C., from which this is adapted./

More at......
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/16-0

As opposed to rioting.

That's the only way we can work it.

...arranged a lobby day in Columbus to meet with legislators about electricity policy. There was a vote coming up. Legislators gave us twenty to forty minutes of time to meet with them to explain our demand-side reductions agenda.

Such is a great way to make use of the kind of in-depth knowledge that people like you and I have. All that reading of headline stories and opinions are a lot of use. Sort of like writing letters to legislators and the media, but better: the legislators get to ask questions to illuminate their understanding.

organized two anti Bush rallies when he came to fundraisers in the quite rich zip code next door.

I know "lobbyist" is a dirty word for many of us...but given the "system" we need folks who can lobby against the entrenched interests who are for the Corporations that have brought our country down in favor of corporate entitlement leading to greed and deregulation.

I assume you are working for "the average people."

Remember one thing. No matter how bad you want a peaceful world there are at least two people who don't.

The USA needs a military and needs a full military budget. We don't need to let our collective asses hangning out
in the wind with no decent military.

Go back to eutopia buddy because it aint in this world.