this is not barack obama or hillary clinton…

it’s trevor dodge, andy mingo, and howard zinn, three men who DO NOT suck monkey balls.

from the prince, or andy mingo:

www.andymingo.wordpress.com

Andy says:  “Ok, I’m a little miffed by all the attention spent defining race and gender in the current presidential primaries. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all very important, but at the same time, isn’t that what us white people do? Debate gender and race so that in the end we can come out at the other end verifying that we are not indeed racist or sexist? Our hearts surge with tolerance and benevolence as the perfect economic storm threatens to hurl the world into a global depression. This, on the other hand, isn’t something we want to say out loud or even hear. What I do see instead are magic incantations where such a catastrophe can be averted if only we hope enough, if only we say that we are coming together for change. Might it be time to break out the puppets and silk scarves for a role playing session to discover our inner child as well?

So let’s just say that we have achieved peak oil. You know what I’m talking about; here we all are locked down in a mighty roller coaster riding that sickening last second before we plunge down the backside of Hubbert’s Peak. It could sound fun if it didn’t carry with it the ramifications that nobody is willing to talk about: diminishing supplies, greater and greater demand from nuclear powers like China and India, an American elite class circling the wagons with their oil profits and private security forces… It’s gotten so bad that none of us really look at the price at the pump anymore. We simply pull up, pay with a credit card, and when the nice man hands you the receipt (granted I live in Oregon), it’s just better to throw it on the floor by the passenger seat than admit that gasoline will only become more and more expensive, prohibitively so. Too expensive to drive to work. Too expensive to transport goods and services.

Indeed, as the mortgage and credit crisis swirl around us, the only ingredient missing for another global Great Depression would be an oil shortage. Even Alan Greenspan is now saying that we are heading into “the worst US financial crisis since World War Two.” This while George W does a soft shoe routine on the steps of the White House, and oil thirsty gangs with Mohawks on stripped down motorcycles scour the roadways for unsuspecting victims to jack while we all could have been driving electric cars for the last decade.

Wait. The motorcycle gang is just a projection, an extension of my own negative illusion that has enveloped a world where anything is possible, like “hope” and “change,” a world that focuses on race and gender when it should be thinking about its own survival.

At least we have another season of American Idol.

and from the MALE HIPSTER LEERING, trevor dodge:

www.trevordodge.wordpress.com

Trevor says:  “If there remains any doubt that the US is in the full throes of a new golden (or, more appropriate yet, platinum) age for the megarich and the megaricher, consider some tidbits from the business community today:

1) JPMorgan Chase acquires Bear Stearns for a paltry $2/share–barely one-tenth of its trading value just last Friday–backed with the full faith of the Federal Reserve and the obvious blessing of even the European media. (Because I’ve often lamented that JP needs to have an even stronger influence on the US economy than it already does…)

2) Former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio’s 19 convictions on insider trading were overturned today by the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. (Nacchio was charged with 42 counts and convicted on less than half of them. Oh, sweet sweet justice…)

3) Oil hit an all-time trading high today at nearly $112 a barrel. (I fielded two frantic emails and phone calls from students just this morning who are having difficulty affording the drive out to the commuter campus where I teach in order to turn in their final projects, and essentially being forced to choose between their educations and their gas tanks…)”

and from HOWARD the man ZINN:

Howard says:  “The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.

Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic political system won’t allow them in.

No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.

I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.

But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.

Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.

The unprecedented policies of the New Deal-Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing-were not simply the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army-thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit , Chicago , Boston , New York , Seattle .

In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis , a general strike in San Francisco , hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.

Without a national crisis-economic destitution and rebellion-it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.

Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.

They offer no radical change from the status quo.

They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.

They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.

None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.

So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.

Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their homes-they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and refused to allow the auctions to take place.

The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of what people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.

Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”

…some white men are worth it.