Stiglitz spoke at the NDP conference and said some more nonsense about how policy can fix things. I attack his logic here.
In response to a column by the Star’s Rick Salutin on Mayor Rob Ford’s removal from office, I wrote this letter.
At a conference entitled, “The Common Good: Who Decides?”, 350 elites gathered to discuss the rising crisis of confidence in so-called democracy. Well, if our intrepid leaders must ask a question, which democracy answers by its very name, then we may already know the source of the crisis. Democracy means rule by the people, so there is no question of who decides, only how these “experts” will achieve the people’s will.
But we live in a representative democracy, something the Greeks, inventors of true democracy, might refer to as a republic. It has the advantage of allowing the political class to make decisions instead of the people, which makes it much more responsive to the needs of the business class (our true rulers). Is there any wonder that the people lose confidence in their “leaders”? How can we be led by one group’s servants?
What’s the solution? Proponents of our sham of a political process argue that those who are disaffected should run for office and create change themselves. But this asks us to use the immoral and ultimately violent means of state control as our own salvation. We must become what we despise, use the methods of our oppressors, in order to be free.
This is an obvious dead end, philosophically and practically. Instead, as Hepburn points out, people turn to citizen movements. Grassroots solutions are all that will ever work, for the class made to strive in the dirt, while our masters attend well-appointed conferences to decide the “public good”.
Democracy is a lie. Waiting for our “leaders” to save us will not work; they have other priorities. If you want to be free, just see your chains and you will break them. Take your life into your own hands. Stop believing that wage-slavery and servitude are your lot in life. Stop complying with the rule of people who have no legitimate authority over you. Practice counter-economics (peaceful activity which is forbidden by the state). Practice agorism: the peaceful revolution has begun!
Mike Sampat
The Star prints my letter about Stephen Harper.
RE: “If not a lost cause, then what?”, Mar 21/2012, Another letter the Star didn’t print…
Dimanno got this one utterly wrong and the letter writers compounded her mistake. They enumerate the West’s losses in blood and treasure, but it is never acknowledged how much Afghanistan has lost. The analysis is also completely divorced from history. According to Dimanno, the “U.S., Canada and NATO engineered” Afghanistan’s rapid advancement from 19th century practices under the Taliban, with such things as women’s rights. But women’s rights would have been far more modern under the communist regime supported by U.S.S.R. in 1978. That was before America decided to wage a proxy war against the Soviets through their former allies: the Taliban.
It was during this conflict that the Americans began training and arming the fighters of their agent Osama Bin Laden. Once the Soviets had been pushed back, after years of devastating ground war, the Americans abandoned Afghanistan to its own devices, where it became a narco-state, a sponsor to dangerous terrorists, and a breeding ground for anti-U.S. sentiment. Perhaps OBL, America’s rogue operative, planned the terrorist attacks of 9/11 there, presumably the reason we attacked Afghanistan in the first place. Yet even though that culprit has supposedly been assassinated, we continue to occupy the country and commit atrocities against its people. Soon we will abandon them to fate again.
Imperialistic Western foreign policies have brought Afghanistan to its current state and revisionist historical analyses will not right those wrongs. As long as we remain the wind-up toys and apologists of the American military-industrial complex, Canada will continue to tritely defend the indefensible.
_Mike Sampat, Toronto
