New Clear Vision

Undoing the Hijacking of the First Amendment

by Robert Reich

A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.

First things first. The Supreme Court’s rulings that money is speech and corporations are people have now opened the floodgates to unlimited (and often secret) political contributions from millionaires and billionaires. Consider the Koch brothers (worth $25 billion each), who are bankrolling the Tea Party and already running millions of dollars worth of ads against Democrats. (more…)

Why I Support the Occupy Wall Street Movement

by Priscilla Stuckey

In a word: health. The health of the planet.

Put simply, a huge gap between the fabulously wealthy and everyone else is bad for the planet. Why? Because such a system is wasteful and costly.

It’s wasteful because it allows some to have way, way more than they need to live well and in doing so to continue raiding the planet for resources. It’s costly because waste is always costly. (more…)

A Nonviolent Approach to ‘Criminal Justice’

by Michael N. Nagler, with Stephanie N. Van Hook

“San Quentin may you rot and burn in hell, may your walls fall and may I live to tell; May all the world forget you ever stood, may all the world regret you did no good.” — Johnny Cash

In Camus’s The Stranger his main character, Meursault, has murdered another man in cold blood on the beach one hot summer day for no evident reason.  Days before his execution, gazing at the sky in his cell, Meursault suddenly realizes that freedom is still possible, still immanent, even with his body in chains. On the exact nature of this realization Camus makes no comment, but as the gates of San Quentin penitentiary closed behind me on May 27, 2011, the scene came to mind and gave me perhaps a similar notion of the absurd, and of truth not served, and the horrible secret of our “democracy”: that there is no such thing as criminal justice. (more…)

Nonviolence Is the Essence of Democracy

by Stephanie N. Van Hook

“The voice of the people should be the voice of God.” — M.K. Gandhi

The prophetic proclamation of the death of God by Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘madman with a lantern’ continues to stir the imaginations of Western society over a century and a half later: “God is dead. God is dead and we killed him.”

I probably first read this scrawled on a building in Paris, and later, sitting in a circle in a room of eager philosophy students in Virginia. This ‘revelation’ from a madman ostensibly conjures the end of religion or the end of morality as immanent, given the trajectory of a society growing new roots in the rocky soil of the machine: destitute, desacralized, and alienated. (more…)

Remaking Our Conceptual Maps of the World

by Harry Targ

I read about the dangers of federal deficit, the connection between markets and democracy, capitalist institutions and human well-being, insurance companies and quality health care, and the historic victories for peace and justice resulting from killing Osama bin Laden, and the son and grandchildren of Muammar Gaddafi.

I am reminded of Antonio Gramsci’s perceptive analysis about how people are ruled as much by what they learn to think and believe as by the use of force. Ideological hegemony refers to the idea systems that ruling classes construct to create willing and pliant citizens in political regimes that lack moral legitimacy or economic rationale.

I am also reminded of theorists from the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, particularly Herbert Marcuse, who wrote about how the fundamental contradictions in peoples’ lives — capitalists versus workers and rule by the few versus the possibility of the rule by all — are transformed into a unanimity of thinking among people whose interests should make them adversaries and not collaborators. (more…)

Learning to Resist, Yearning to Breathe Free

by Matt Meyer

What a coincidence! The day that Cathie Black steps down as Chancellor of the NYC school system, an 11×17 glossy booklet arrives in my mailbox — “Mike Bloomberg: Fighting for our kids.” Really? The message is loud and clear:

Kind, benevolent Mike Bloomberg is fighting the good fight with those up-state Albany bureaucrats to get money into “our schools,” to help “our kids” — a real hero for the working person. Never mind that the whole, fancy flyer contained — along with the misleading information — a total of four sentences (and about five additional sentence fragments). That is all, I guess, they think a working person educated in today’s school system can handle. (more…)

What Celebrating bin Laden’s Death Reveals About Ourselves

by Caty Gordon

In the wake of the announcement that Osama bin Laden has been killed by US forces, his life and death (both saturated in controversy) merit reflection.  He proudly laid claim to killing nearly 3000 people in a single day, and openly touted his financial and military support for numerous other attacks on humankind. The man lived with the intent to oust any person or regime that threatened his goals of a dogmatic Islamic government and a Middle East free of American-sponsored dictators and military occupations. He even penned a fatwa in which he prescribed the killing of Americans as a duty of all Muslims. Bin Laden has also come to exemplify all that is evil about Arabs and Muslims in the corporate American media.  So it is understandable that Americans would react strongly to the news of his death. (more…)