Last Straw

Rus­sell Brown reflects on a great win by the All Blacks over the week­end and notes that he doesn’t hold much hope for Live8.

I’m afraid I can’t quite muster the expec­ted hand-waving enthu­si­asm for Live8. I’m uncon­vinced when I see Mariah Carey, her life awash with money and waste and the demands of a diva, plead­ing for an end to poverty. Or when per­formers in Phil­adelphia get $US12,000 goodie bags for their trouble, or wrist­bands that carry the brand­ing of sweat­shop giant Tommy Hilfiger.

People like to feel they’re involved some­how in a good thing — and what more pleas­ant and less oner­ous way to get involved than going to a con­cert in Hyde Park, or wan­der­ing around Edin­burgh on a sunny Sat­urday after­noon? I hope it has some con­crete effect, but I’m not sure it actu­ally will.

I think he’s on the but­ton, maybe more so than he real­ises. One of the greatest poten­tial prob­lems with these sorts of actions, includ­ing, say, the largest protest in human his­tory, is that it can lull people into a false sense that everything’s taken care of. After­wards every­one goes home to din­ner feel­ing good about them­selves that they’ve “done their bit.”

In fact to be effect­ive such actions need to con­stantly build upon each other, and they need to cul­min­ate into the one strategy that has proven itself time and time again through­out his­tory to be effect­ive in chal­len­ging the rich and power­ful: under­min­ing and threat­en­ing their wealth and power. Get a mil­lion people to the G8 sum­mit this week who are ready to go head-to-head with the police and threaten the G8 lead­ers very abil­ity to oper­ate and then you’ll know you have the iner­tia of some­thing effect­ive. Fuck “pleasant and less onerous,” what bet­ter way to indulge in life than to under­mine those who seek to stamp it out?

So next time you see a masked pro­tester going head-to-head with the police on your tele­vi­sion screen, just remem­ber they’re the ones chal­len­ging power using a proven tac­tic, and indul­ging in life to boot.

The USA PATRIOT Act (the Bush gang’s answer to Orwell’s Nine­teen Eighty-Four) makes pro­vi­sion for, amongst other things, the legal right of the U.S. gov­ern­ment to secretly snoop on the lib­rary records of U.S. cit­izens. Amer­ican lib­rar­ian Jes­samyn West has five “technically leg­al” signs for lib­rar­i­ans to hang up in lib­rar­ies around Amer­ica to help warn U.S. citizens.

As the num­ber of Amer­ican and Iraqi deaths con­tinue to rise in Iraq the Inter­na­tional Fed­er­a­tion of Journ­al­ists is call­ing on the U.S. gov­ern­ment to invest­ig­ate three new cases of journ­al­ists killed in Iraq over the past week—all of them at the hands of Amer­ican soldiers—bringing the total num­ber of journ­al­ists and media staff killed by U.S. sol­diers since the inva­sion to seventeen.

Hugo Chávez, accord­ing to Mike Ceaser of BBC News, is talk­ing it up.

Mr Chávez’s warn­ings that the US, which buys most of Venezuela’s oil, might invade, have res­on­ated with his sup­port­ers. They have been sus­pi­cious ever since Wash­ing­ton rushed to endorse the April 2002 coup which briefly unseated the president.

Of course Chávez has every reason to be wary, after all he’s a left­ist, which means he is a threat to the One Way. As Sean Donahue observed, writ­ing for Nar­coNews back in April, such an attempt to over­throw Chávez would most likely be pur­sued using Colom­bia as a proxy. Reader Bill Con­rey responds by point­ing out that the most effect­ive way to repel the Bush gang would be to start their own gang, a united South America.

And on a final note I found a great web­site this week­end. Check out StumbleUpon. It takes a little bit to set up but it’s def­in­itely worth it if you’re on your own machine (you’ll need to use Fire­fox if you’re on Mac OS X). Must go to bed now…