February 20th, 2008
Gorbachev speculates about revolution in New Orleans
From the Associated Press this past October:
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev toured New Orleans on Friday as an emissary of the global environmental movement, but his first view of the devastated Lower 9th Ward inspired a momentary return to his socialist past.
“If things haven’t changed by our next visit, we may have to announce a revolution,” he said thorugh a translator, as he walked the lifeless streets with wellwishers and staff members of Green Cross International, a non-governmental organization which he chairs.
Gorbachev promised to return in five years to measure the city’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina, which has so far been tanhgled by bureaucratic delays.
Deighved H Stern MD says:
He’ll be able to announce that revolution this November: The Obama Revolution!
That’s the difference between Czarist (and then Soviet) Russia, and the democratic republic of the United States. We have built in mechanisms for forcing peaceful and orderly change when conditions warrant it.
February 20th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
ed says:
I too take some comfort in the revolutionary aspects of Obama’s surge.
But I think Edwards’ explicit attack on the corporate class was the most revolutionary message of the season. And this is why the press began to black him out last summer.
More broadly, I’ll believe our mechanisms for republican transfer of power at the federal level are working when I see them work. They were corrupted so badly in 2000 and 2004 that I’m not sure we can recover.
I had a chat with someone in Hillary’s senate office about this in the run-up to 2004, while discussing her decision not to run for Prez then. Why think our institutions are immortal, or immune to attack, or that they bounce back immediately good as new like the evil Terminator in T2? Why assume, in the darkness of 2004, that 2008 will dawn bright? I thought then that Hillary’s complacency about this might prove misplaced (although certainly had no notion that Barack might be the agent of her doom).
The trends dismantling the American republic are deep seated. It would take a revolution in the minds of the owner-operators (the corporate elite) to change direction. Little hope there as of yet. Despite Google and Ben & Jerry’s. Perhaps another Depression will do it.
I guess I’m largely equating effective democracy with effective representation of the working class. (A Bannana Republic is not a republic.) Our globalizing owner-operators have been taking power and wealth from the working class since the first oil shocks of the 70s. And lately things seem to be getting worse:
QUOTE
But what of the rising rich? Our spirit-poor, ill educated but well trained elite?
One perceives in their words and policies the growing godlike guess that the center cannot hold, Fordism is dead, and the devil may therefore be permitted with clean conscience to take the hindmost nine out of ten. Catastrophes of all sorts disturb the horizon. Most people seem unlikely to make it. So why fund their pension and health plans? Why not monetize their water instead?
Thus moralize the conservative children of the Reagantime, in the Wall Street Journal and in sexy TV commercials and shows where the mob mentality stomps triumphant.
February 25th, 2008 at 11:38 am