At this point do we have to be hoping for a revolution?

Are they starting the revolution without us? First there were the French workers, now the British students.

"It’s clear at this point that America is only the shell of a democracy, and instead is run by a self-perpetuating oligopoly whose only law, whose only imperative, is its own survival and aggrandizement."

-- Ian Welsh, in his blogpost "An American Future"

by Ken

Last night Howie shared his airport's-eye view of the confrontation between British students and the police agents of the burgeoning British-coaliltion security state.

At Heathrow passengers had been clustered around the TV sets watching the demonstrations against the move by the right-wing Conservative/Lib-Dem government to raise the cost of university tuition in the name of "austerity," the term the servants of the wealthy use instead of "concentrating the nation's wealth in fewer and fewer hands." I kept hoping the students would really go for it and spark a worldwide uprising against the international ruling elites. By the time we had to board our plane, they hadn't.

The above clip of a 15-year-old British student fighting back is getting a lot of attention, and understandably so. I should add that it's attracting a certain amount of backlash from people who dismiss him as a snotty young elitist, calling police "stupid." It's an accusation that seems to me made by people who are too lazy and/or senseless to watch what's before their eyes. The speaker is talking about police who, at least in his view, are serving as mindlessly thuggish, violent enforcers of an authoritarian regime.

It helps that the U.S. is a country now in the throes of a hatred for knowledge, education, and the pursuit of understanding of the world around us, amounting to a worship of ignorance and imbecility, all of which handsomely serves the economic interests of the people who increasingly own us, or at least act as if they do. Just how bad it's gotten was laid out in a remarkable piece our friend Ian Welsh wrote recently, called "An American Future," which I encourage you to read in its entirety. I'm offering just some bleeding chunks here, and even these without the links you'll find onsite:

So, I’m peering into my looking glass today, or rather tonight, as the snow eddies down, the first snowfall of winter, and it’s winter I see for America, and for the world.

It’s clear at this point that America is only the shell of a democracy, and instead is run by a self-perpetuating oligopoly whose only law, whose only imperative, is its own survival and aggrandizement, no matter what the cost to America, to American citizens, or to anyone else in the world who is not part of the western elite class. The same is, with America switched to Europe, true of the oligopoly who run Europe. . . .


They have created a surveillance state where they track in real time, without warrants, the movements of citizens through cameras and by tracking credit cards, debit cards and even loyalty cards. Their servants stare at the naked bodies of everyone who wants to travel by air or grope their genitals, inflicting sexual humiliation on the public as a matter of course.

When embarassed, as with Wikileaks leaks of diplomatic communiques, their response is a deranged manhunt combined with a truly Soviet-style screaming of “I can’t hear you” as they try and ban soldiers, the Library of Congress and public servants from reading information everyone has access to. This isn’t just authoritarian, it isn’t just jejeune, it is delusional. Every principal and teacher knows that if you tell people they shouldn’t read something, that will make them want to read it. If they wanted people to think they shouldn’t read these revelations, the reaction should have been muted, “ho, hum, nothing there”, not a deranged attempt to shut down anyone who mirrors the Wikileaks site and threats against anyone who dares read the information. . . .


[I]f you have to stay, make sure you’re on good terms with your neighbors, your spouse, your friends and your family. Figure out how to grow food wherever you are and how to reduce your dependence on anything but people you trust. (Don’t trust any corporation.) And, if you can, organize. Organize locally, organize at the State level, organize nationally. Understand the age of compromise is over. It is now too late to save the old system. It’s over. We tried, and we failed. It is beyond “reform”, it is going to flame out, the only question is how many people it will burn to death as it does so.

Yet, as Ian has been the first to note, there are pockets of resistance. There were the French workers striking against the high hand of the Sarkozy government. And now there's the developing support rising for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, about which Ian has written a piece called "Why Assange and Wikileaks have won this round":

The odd thing about Wikileaks is that their success has been assured, not by what they leaked, though there is some important information there, but by their enemies.

The massive and indiscriminant overreaction by both government and powerful corporate actors has ensured this, and includes but is not nearly limited to:

* Shutting down Wikileaks servers, starting with the Amazon server
* Stopping domain name server propagation
* Paypal refusing to send payments
* VISA and Mastercard refusing to process payments
* The Swiss Bank PostFinance shutting down Assange’s account
* Senator Lieberman pressuring firms over Wikileaks
* The odd behavior of prosecutors in the Assange rape accusations/case

Wikileaks and Assange have now been made in to cause celebres. If corporations and governments can destroy someone’s access to the modern economy as they have Wikileaks, without even pretending due process of the law (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, etc… were not ordered by any court to cut Wikileaks) then we simply do not live in a free society of law, let alone a society of justice. . . .


To be just, law must be applied to both the big and the small. Thousands of executives at banks who engaged in systematic fraud were never charged, out and out war criminals are actively protected, and Wikileaks and Assange are hunted like animals?

This has enraged, in particular, the Hacktivist community, with Anonymous forming Operation Payback and shutting down both Mastercard servers and the Swiss Bank PostFinance’s website. As they themselves say, what enraged them was multiple companies attempting to shut Wikileaks down, both on the web, and financially. . . .


It has proved that the West is run by authoritarian thugs with completely twisted priorities. Kill hundreds of thousands of people and engage in aggressive war? No big deal. Cause the greatest economic collapse of the post-war period sending millions into poverty? We couldn’t possibly prosecute the people who did that, but we will give them trillions! Reveal our petty secrets and lies, and that we know the war in Afghanistan is lost, have known for years and continue to kill both Afghanis and our own soldiers pointlessly? We WILL destroy you, no matter what we have to do. . . .


Because of the massive overreaction to Wikileaks, the [rape] case against [Assange] is completely tainted. He might be guilty as sin, but justice can no longer be seen to be done, because it is far too evident that too many powerful people, corporations and governments want him taken out.

And so he has won. Whether he winds up free, in prison in Sweden or the US, or winds up dead, he has won this round. He will be a martyr and an icon, and his child, Wikileaks, whether it lives or dies, will become a rallying point and a symbol of how corrupt and unjust western society is.

And now there are the British students.

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