A Small Group of Dedicated People Might Actually Do Something

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=16643A Small Group of Dedicated

People Might Actually Do SomethingDoris 'Granny D' Haddock, AlterNet

August 21, 2003Viewed on August 28, 2003

 

The following is from a speech Granny D gave in Hood River, Oregon on Aug. 16,

2003.

 

Well, you've heard that wonderful Margaret Mead quote about how you should never

doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world, and that,

indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. Well, I think it's time we stopped

repeating that quotation and came to some agreement about what we happy few

might do over the next five years or so. That is the purpose of my remarks

today.

 

You know, there are two kinds of politics in the world: the politics of love and

the politics of fear. Love is about cooperation, sharing and inclusion. It is

about the elevation of each individual to a life neither supressed nor

exploited, but instead nourished to rise to its full potential -- a life for its

own sake and so that we may all benefit by the gift of that life. Fear and the

politics of fear is about narrow ideologies that separate us, militarize us,

imprison us, exploit us, control us, overcharge us, demean us, bury us alive in

debt and anxiety and then bury us dead in cancers and wars. The politics of love

and the politics of fear are now pitted against each other in a naked struggle

that will define not only the 21st century but centuries to come.

 

This struggle is real. A very close friend of mine, a college student, spent

this summer in Guatemala to help small communities prosper in ways that support

their local environments. Those villagers and their environments are under siege

by international big business, using a captured U.S. government to push through

damaging treaties such as the proposed Central America Free Trade Agreement and

the hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas. The villagers of Guatemala

want global fair trade, but the corporations and their captive governments want

free trade. If fair trade wins, a global middle class will rise, as farmers and

craftsmen are paid fairly for their work, and as they gain a voice in their

governance and their environments are protected for their future generations. If

free trade wins, it is colonial exploitation, torture and murder written in

blood across another century.

 

Or do you wonder if it is really an honest difference of opinion as to which

policies are best for the people? On July 24, three armed gunmen broke into the

home where my young friend was staying in Guatemala, dragging her and another

young woman to the ground, covering their heads with blankets. These young women

began to count their lives in seconds. For three-quarters of an hour, the gunmen

went through the biodiversity files in the home. Big business interests in

Guatemala, in league with elements of the military, are trying to push through

the passage of free trade agreements and to do it they must supress all dissent.

Their partner and blood brother is the U.S. government. Not the U.S. government

that we see, but the U.S. government that much of the rest of the world sees: a

world of CIA treachery, the training of death squad leaders in our own Army

facilities within the U.S., and a big business-friendly White House that winks

and nods as great injustices continue.

 

The two women survived, but tens of thousands have not, because they are in the

way of big business. It is not an honest difference of opinion; it is a global

struggle of people versus a global crime syndicate that counts taken-over

governments and multinational corporations among its members.

 

There is a term now in common use in Latin America that is confusing to us

Americans. It is called neoliberalism and it is a very dirty word indeed among

the brave pro-democracy and fair trade groups throughout the Americas.

" Neoliberal " sounds like the happy return of the Kennedys, but it is not. Nor is

it about some resurgence of the liberal values of the Square Deal or the New

Deal or the War on Poverty or any of those great moments when we called upon our

best instincts to cooperatively address our largest needs as a free and

self-governing people. The liberation that we meant then when we used the word

" liberal " was the liberation from poverty, despair and ignorance, the liberation

of the mind through public education, the liberation of the citizen through

universal voting, equal rights and equal opportunity, and the freedom to prosper

from the fruits of our labors. But that is not the liberal that is meant by

neoliberal. It means newly free to rampage. It means free of

government constraint. It means free trade over fair trade.

 

" Neoliberalism " refers to the liberation of a giant beast that we, the ordinary

people of America -- the farmers, the townsmen and townswomen, the trade

unionists -- tied down to the earth early in the 20th century and it is that

beast that has now gotten himself loose again to do great damage to us all. The

deadly meanderings of this beast are most apparent in the most labor-intensive

regions of the world, but the beast is here, too, and he has brought misery and

suffering into your life and mine, stealing our water, blowing up our mountains,

fouling our air and seas, and stealing our lives and our future at every turn.

Neoliberalism is the colonialism department of neoconservatism.

 

How did we handle this evil giant before? The Teddy Roosevelt progressives, and

the William Jennings Bryan populists before him, were part of a successful

effort to tie down the giant. After the Civil War, at the high point of the

Industrial Age -- the age of railroads, oil and steel -- great corporations and

trusts were created that towered high over the human-scaled businesses of

America's Main Streets and cast dark shadows over human liberty and happiness.

These monstrosities treated humans as slaves. They robbed the public wealth and

were properly called the robber barons of that Gilded Age. These giants freely

stalked, destroying the economics of family farms and family businesses,

corrupting our governments with great bribes and corrupt deals, and polluting

our food, our land, water and air. They tore our families apart and dragged us

into the hardest of hard times, as they have been liberated to do once more.

 

I am not talking about all corporations or all big business. Corporations of

reasonable size are but groups of people. Beyond some point, however, the

humanity falls away from an organization and all that is left is the will to

power and profit. They care not that our seas and atmosphere are rapidly

changing in ways that may lead to disaster and famine of unimaginable scale.

They care not because they are not human and they have moved beyond human

values. They do not need the fresh air or the water or the mountains or the

birds. They are a kind of virus or a cancer, all prettied up with a nice logo

and television commercials to tell us the most outrageous lies, one after the

other. For in reality, they crush us under their boots and they pay off our

political leaders with campaign contributions and other bribes. They trample on

diversity of all kinds, including human personality, as fewer and fewer kinds of

people can prosper in the world they are casting, and more and more of us are

marginalized.

 

The big corporate empires would be powerless if they were not in league with

crooked politicians. I do not mean that the politicians necessarily know what

they are doing. The corruption is so immense that they cannot even see it, even

when it pays their spouse and finances their reelection. These, the happily

blind, populate Capitol Hill and our state capitols like vermin who have been

for generations in deep caves where they gradually lose their vision and there

other senses, too.

 

Well, two and a quarter centuries was a good run for this democracy, but a

rebirth is long overdue, and it is indeed necessary if we are to save our

freedoms and our human values here and abroad, and if we are to protect the

beauty and sustaining graces of nature, including the positive sides of human

nature.

 

What that Republican Teddy Roosevelt understood at the beginning of the 20th

century was that, if the rights and fortunes of the human scale are to be

protected, if the rights and fortunes of average Americans, small businesses,

family farms and Main Street are to be protected from the ravages of overscaled

business giants, then government must grow in size and power to protect us all.

The big business wing of the Republican Party, under Taft, defeated the family

business wing of the Republican and their leader, Teddy Roosevelt. It would take

another Roosevelt and of another party to turn the Square Deal into the New

Deal, under which government greatly expanded to protect the people.

 

That has not been altogether a happy strategy, as large government has its own

costs to us and its own abuses. The Libertarians are our new and brave allies in

the defending of the Bill of Rights from Bush's anti-American attacks through

his henchmen Ashcroft and Ridge. But our friends the Libertarians would have us

do away with most all of our government. Anyone who has paid too many taxes or

dealt with too many rude and overly powerful bureaucrats understands the

Libertarian's feelings, but I ask at least the intellectually honest

Libertarians -- and there are many of them -- to wisely see that government,

which is indeed a system of restraint -- must be matched in strength and scale

to the corporate monstrosities that now have the ability and the willingness to

destroy us -- to blow up the entire Appalachian Range for the profits of coal,

for example, as is now happening -- or to steal for profit the water supply of

whole regions, or to enslave whole regions at low wages rather

than allow fair trade. Or to move every one of our good jobs overseas. These

inhuman and inhumane organizations are stealing our lives and all nature around

us.

 

Only government is large enough and powerful enough to reign in the corporations

whose cold heartedness trades lives for profits all over the world. Republican

Teddy Roosevelt began the buildup of big government solely to protect us from

overlarge corporations so that they might not overwhelm us human beings. In

doing so, he created a split in the Republican Party, and big business interests

won. Perhaps the rational solution is to scale them both back -- corporations

and government -- and let individual enterprise and individual freedom, and its

many middle class treasures and blessings, blossom in the old battlefield. But

there is no leadership for that, and governments are being stripped of all

regulatory powers by the false religion of a new deity, the unfettered,

liberated market. So, no longer protected by governments, we must fight the

battle that is before us: human beings versus monstrous corporations and their

bodysnatched government puppets. It is a battle of human scale

versus monstrous scale, love versus fear.

 

What is happening now, of course, is that the neos in the Bush Administration

(you can call them neoliberals or neoconservatives, though they are neo nothing

except perhaps colonial and lithic) are starving government very much on

purpose, and they tell us as much in their writing.

 

Huge military commitments, huge tax cuts to the wealthiest individuals and

corporations, and huge budget deficits leave no money for the old New Deal

programs like Social Security or newer programs such as Medicare. No money for

schools, hospitals, police, fire, veterans -- no money for anything but the

front lines of a corporatized military and a militarized corporatocracy.

 

A starved government -- once our government -- has no ability to restrain the

liberated giant or to investigate his abuses or prosecute his crimes. And so,

two years after Enron, but one person is behind bars. It is not for lack of

villains, and, as all California cries, it is not for lack of victims. All

right. When did this monster get untied? He did so in the era of corporate

raiding, permitted and smiled upon by the Reagan Administration. Reagan admired

those cowboy businessmen of the 1980s -- the corporate raiders who engineered

hostile corporate takeovers. But those takeovers, allowed by hamstrung

regulators, caused all large and mid-sized American corporations to go on a

rampage of streamlining, outsourcing, wage-cutting, plant closings and job

exporting. They did so to make themselves takeover-proof. It was no longer

respectable to make a respectable profit and to serve your community with good

jobs and fairly-priced goods and services.

 

The new mentality of profit maximization and unlimited mergers and no government

control, was the untying of the monster and it was no accident. The ropes were

further loosened in the greedy and morally corrupt Clinton and Bush

administrations, until we find ourselves now with a government of, by and for

the corporations. The new model CEO was the ruthless costcutter and dealmaker.

CEO salaries went unbelievably high, where they have stayed. For every $100 that

the average American worker makes, these top CEOs make $50,000. It is a moral

outrage in the land of so many homeless and struggling and worried people.

 

A century ago, the ordinary people of America joined together to tie down the

giant. The antitrust laws and environmental laws and the rights of workers to

organize and collectively bargain for wages and benefits all joined to nurture

the restoration of a great middle class -- always the bedrock of democracy. The

robber barons, the great giants, remained tied down, no longer free, liberated,

to do as they pleased in crushing us with their great wealth and political

power. And so it was for a time.

 

And now, loosed again, these giants have taken over our television networks and

most of our newspapers, turning them against our interests and against the truth

itself. These giants send our young people off to fight their commercial wars --

great profitable ventures.

 

How free are we now, friends? Check your bills and your bank account. How much

time and leisure do you have to enjoy your life and friends? How is your place

in your community as a free and equal citizen? Or are we drones that go to work,

go to bed to rest for more work, go to the stores to spend all that we earn and

more, and watch television to receive our instructions what to buy the next day,

if we have jobs at all? Is that freedom by some other name? It is not freedom by

any name and it is nothing to push on the rest of the world in the name of

freedom.

 

These corporations steal our time with their computerized telephone switchboards

and their long waiting lines and few employees. They steal our jobs and our

benefits and our pensions. They use fear at every turn to sell us a little

protection, and a little more. And they steal our senators and congressmen just

when they might have earned their keep protecting our democracy.

 

What shall we do, my fellows, about these corporate giants stalking our earth

freely? How shall we get our children home from their wars and ourselves free

from their captivities?

 

We the people, acting together in the new ways made possible by electronic

communication, must become the large counterbalance to these powers -- the

counterbalance that our government no longer provides. By communicating and

acting in concert, we can reward the good companies and thereby keep our money

clear of the worst. We can make our demand for fair trade products and provide

the shift in market share that will change the practices of those businesses

that now exploit our brothers and sisters here and around the world. We can

agree together which television news channel is the least objectionable, and

agree to watch only that -- for our watching and buying habits are votes for the

kind of world we will live in.

 

By nudging market share, our small group of dedicated people can influence great

changes. We have the tools now to do this now. It will not be an easy task, but

we have no real alternative if we are to save the world, and that is what we

must decide to do.

 

Tell your favorite coffee house that, as of Earth Day 2004, you will only buy

fair trade coffee. Let us give a " fair warning for fair trade " in this and other

areas of products and services. Let us develop the best information about who is

doing what, and let us use our new tools of electronic democracy to come to

consensus regarding which companies deserve our support -- a reverse boycott on

a global scale.

 

I will try to put information on http://www.grannyd.com about who is helping in

this new effort, and I will put some printable cards there you can print to give

a fair warning for fair trade to your favorite shops and other companies. And

let us use each subsequent Earth Day to push for more improvement on every

front, giving our fair warnings to move progress along. Let Americans and other

people of the earth join us or not. But let them decide and know for themselves

which side they are on.

 

Yes, let's continue our efforts to reform our government, most especially with

campaign finance reform. But, with revolutionary new tools, we are capable of

redefining democracy at a critical moment. Let us not be shy about it for time

is short. We stand for love and fairness in the world. That is not gentle work,

nor is it painless or bloodless, as so many people around the world know.

 

This is, after all, our world and our lives. Do you remember those few weeks

after the 9/11 attacks when we, as an automatic antidote to the inhumanity of

those attacks, sought to reassert our humanity again in a million little ways?

For that moment we came out of the hypnosis we have come to live under and we

saw the Eden of human love and cooperation. We must not fall back under that

hypnosis again, as it is a waste of our life. The forces of life and death are

in struggle, for those are the other names for love and fear. Let us choose life

and love, and happily use ourselves up in loving service to one another.

 

To read more of Doris Haddock's writings, visit http://www.grannyd.com.

 

 

 

© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

http://grannyd.com/