RESPONSE TO APRIL 15 COUNTER-MINUTEMAN PROTEST; CALL FOR A POPULIST ANTI-CAPITALISM

Essentially this is establishment conservatives in disarray, promoted by Fox News (who will broadcast live from some of the rallies), trying to take advantage of working and middle class popular outrage and fear about the economic crisis. Their anti-Obama/Stimulus Bill position is vague, they have no solutions and they are trying to get taxpayers pissed about the small amounts going help people from losing homes and jobs and not much about the trillions of our money going to the banks and rich.

Golden Gate Minutemen posted to a conservative website that, "Many of us will be in San Francisco, Fremont, Hayward, San Mateo, etc. We encourage all minutemen and citizens to come out on April 15th and bring your anti illegal immigration signs" Who knows how many they will actually turn out and to which of the many Bay Area Tea Party events.
americanconservativedaily.com/2009/04/golden-gate-minutemen-participating-in-bay-area-tea-party-rallies

TEA PARTIES
Agence France-Presse describes the Tea Parties:
Pro-Republican organizers say they are plugging into widespread popular anger at Democrat-led Washington.
An even bigger claim is that the catchy "tea party" idea and heavy use of Internet tools like Facebook, YouTube and blogs signals a historic first attempt by Republicans to rival Obama's renowned e-network.
"Conservatives may be catching up with their liberal counterparts in building a Web-driven, grassroots campaign to push their agenda," the Fox News television network said on its website.
"The tea parties don't represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They're AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects," liberal economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman said Monday.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hIWJB0EBsIRWMzWP5t9irdVFz-Ew

Fox News wrote today:
As anti-tax protesters organize tea parties across the country on April 15, rumors are swirling that a backlash is brewing. Taxdayteaparty.com, which is helping to organize the protests, said more than 250 locations in all 50 states will hold rallies on April 15. Some believe ACORN will try to make the tea parties look like fringe group efforts at best, and racist undertakings at worst. Mekler said he is not concerned with how outsiders may try to portray their efforts. "The people who are involved understand they're not racist, they're not fringe, they're not even partisan," he said.
ACORN said if there are protesters, it won't be from its ranks. "The idea that ACORN is out to disrupt these meet-ups of fringe activists is yet another conservative fantasy," Kettenring said.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/14/tea-party-protestors-gird-possible-backlash/

Anarchist analyst Noam Chomsky discussed this popular anger yesterday on Democracy Now,
It has a potentially positive side, like it could be like the activism of the 1930s or the 1960s, which ended up making it a more civilized society in many ways, or it could be like an unfortunate precedent that quickly comes to mind. Grievances aren't invented. I mean, for the American population, the last thirty years have been some of the worst in economic history. It's a rich country, but real wages have stagnated or declined, working hours have shot up, benefits have gone down, and people are in real trouble and now in very real trouble after the bubbles burst. And they're angry. And they want to know, "What happened to me? If in the next congressional election the economy has not begun to recover, this kind of populist rage could boil over and could have very dangerous consequences. There's a background of concern and fear, tremendous fear, and searching for some answer, which they're not getting from the establishment. "Who's responsible for my plight?" You know, and that can be exploited. And unless there's active, effective organizing and education, it's dangerous.

A POPULIST ANTI-CAPITALISM
We are at a unique moment in history where capitalism has blatantly failed, we the people in the US, Mexico and Latin America and around the world are hurting, and the government is part of the problem. It's the best opening in my lifetime for radicals, who sounded the alarm ten years ago in the street of Seattle while shutting down the WTO, to offer explanations and solutions-- or remain irrelevant as the Democrats continue business as usual and the right taps into popular discontent. Winning over working and middle class folks freaked out about the economy won't happen be yelling threatening and demonizing. We need to be able to counter and win arguments that blame immigrants or poor and working people and be able to explain why things are in crisis, who is responsible and what we can do about it.

Last Saturday April 11 the 75 city protest against the bank bailout were organized in online meet up groups in two weeks through the progressive website "A New Way Forward." They describe the problem:
12 million unemployed. Foreclosures up 81%. Wall Street has taken over. We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.
They describe their solution:
DECENTRALIZE: Any bank that's "too big to fail" means that it's too big for a free market to function. The financial corporations that caused this mess must be broken up and sold back to the private market with strong, new regulatory and antitrust rules in place -- new banks, managed by new people. An independent regulatory body must protect consumers from predatory practices. As Wall St. corporations grew bigger and bigger until they were “too big to fail,” they also became so politically powerful that they led to distorted and unfair policies that served companies, not citizens. It’s not enough to try to patch up the current system. We demand serious reform that fixes the root problems in our political and economic system: excessive influence of banks, dangerous compensation systems, and massive consolidation. And we demand that the reform happen in an open and transparent manner.

While A New Way Forward, in the tradition of the populist anti-trust movement a hundred years ago, criticize corporate capitalism's excesses; they don't take on this system at the root of our problems. In the US there are lots of signs of resistance, ACORN and others resisting foreclosures, protests against cuts in services, school closings, and layoff’s? But there is no one organizing nationally taking on the system. Two weeks ago at mass protests in London, a general strike in Greece and protests around Europe there was clear anti-capitalist message to the organizing. The main direct action coordinating alliance, G20 Meltdown, wrote:
G20 Meltdown calls for the G20 ministers to own up to their mistakes and admit that their global dominance– the dominance of finance capitalism – is the problem, not the solution to the current economic, ecological and political meltdown. Of its nature, capitalism seeks short-term profits, looking for the fast buck. Logically, we cannot expect from it the vision needed for humanity today.

While 2 million are now out of work in Britain alone, the G20 ministers still resist nationalizing the banks, instead continuing to pour trillions into the black hole of bankers’ bad gambling debts. That money should be put into the hands of those who would spend it immediately on the high street – single mums, students, children in poverty – not on reequipping hedge fund managers’ million-dollar yachts. Those ministers should now make way for government by the people, for the people, of the people, across the planet. Let’s be patriots for the only country we have got: Planet Earth. Only then can we adequately respond to the message of the climate scientists about the clear and present danger to our biosphere, investing in life for our grandchildren, not in death and oil wars. We call on President Obama to remove all US troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan with immediate effect. This will demonstrate his intention to cooperate in establishing a world under the rule of law.

After the London protests establishment columnist Hugo Rifkind criticized the protesters in the UK Times challenging them to, "Propose some sort of feasible alternative to the world economy, instead of just bitching about it and blowing your bloody whistles?
Anti-capitalist and "participatory economics" writer Robin Hahnel responded, "Our answer is simple: we want to empower people to protect themselves and the natural environment from the damage caused by neo-liberal capitalism. But we also want to replace the economics of competition and greed with the economics of equitable co-operation so we are not forever fighting defensive battles to mitigate environmental destruction and economic injustice, and so we need not fear that a crisis such as this will happen again."

More importantly, ideas on how to engage in equitable co-operation have been tested in various real-world experiments over the past few decades. Worker participation and partial ownership in capitalist firms, producer and consumer co-operatives, community-supported agriculture, participatory budgeting (pioneered in Kerala, India, and Porto, Alegre, Brazil), egalitarian and sustainable "intentional" communities, solidarity economics, alternative currency systems and other developments have been stimulated by networking at world and regional social forums, by friendly governments in several Latin American countries , and now by an economic crisis that has abandoned billions to fend for themselves. Most of this has gone unreported in the mainstream media, partly because it does not fit neatly into the framework for economic debate defined by the Cold War so badly, for so long.

Meanwhile, we are also busy building a new economics of equitable co-operation. Some of us build in the realm of ideas, so that when a majoritarian movement is ready it will have a wealth of thoroughly vetted ideas on how to facilitate equitable co-operation to choose from. Many more of us are creating living experiments in equitable co-operation to meet needs that increasingly are going unaddressed by a moribund economic system. Ridicule us if you like. Or you can pitch in and lend a hand."