Why Bother? Free Burma. Dawn Star

[dawnstar@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Subject: Re: Why Bother? Free Burma. Dawn Star

You know, ah, I was kinda thinking tonight, well, sort of, after reading
the satirical french newspaper (Le Canard echainé, said to be mostly
leaked news from govt officials and secret service spooks, to launch a
scandal here or a media bomb there...) and thinking about the french
press and how the French national parlimentary inquiry information
report has literally gone unnoticed in the French press, except for ONE
story, in Le monde, the day after the deputy press conference. Kind of,
well, ah, incredible, you would say. And then this story popped up
tonight.

The french press carries, as does now the anglo saxon press, tons of
print by french companies like Total, Air Liquid, Alstom, Elf, Alcatel,
all in Burma 'except Elf', and in France, no one really cares. They dont
care about very much at all. And get this, with Elf now Total, all
french consumers using electricity, pay Total, because Elf holds stock
in the electrical company, 2% of EDF. So everybody, is using the gas,
using the electricity, nuke generated, all with Total interests. Nice,
huh? And the French could care less about it. Isnt that incredible? No,
maybe not all. Why should it be incredible. Why should people care. Why
bother. Day after day, newspapers, news and headlines, cars and planes
and buses and trains, all moving, the companies sucking the gas and oil
out of the earth as fast as they can find it... Why bother right? 

I never told anybody this but my brother in law, a real money man, all
he does is trade oil, futures, makes a fortune, and couldnt care less
about Burma or Angola, Russia or Brazil. Just oil, and gas, and money.
Thats all. Been trading for over twenty years. A pro. Most people like
him burn out. He's MIT, STanford, a pro. Calm, quiet, a pro. Making lots
of money, good investments, a pro. The right clubs, schools for the
kids, the right companies, career moves, a pro. 

And then one day, his little daughter, a beautiful girl, my sister's
youngest daughter, got run over by a Land Rover. Some dumb rich kid,
speeding, car out of control, the violin went flying in the air, and
little Julie was gone forever. They suffered terrible tragedy. And the
guys all came from to the funeral ceremony, they all looked like clones
from a "Company". I got dizzy, had to see them all, pros. 

All that money didnt save the kid. And still today, all that tragedy,
and they just close their eyes and can't believe. And they don't give a
damn about Burma or Brazil... Real pros. 

They all seem to me, as dead as my lost girl. And she was so full of
life, always dancing and singing and playing. Everyone loved her. She
makes me think of Burma now. And what kind of people they are who don't
bother. 

Why bother? America has lost that innocence a long time ago. The culture
doesn't bring happiness anymore. Not really. And the generals in Rangoon
know it. While they hold on to power, like the pros in the market
holding onto their jobs. 

And the kids play. I think in Burma the kids, if only the generals would
go, would have a better life in Burma then in the United States. 

I only wished they were able to keep the gas for the development of
Burma, and not lose it everyday. Everyday all that gas is getting pumped
out, the resources that belong to the people of Burma.

But tell that to the oil and gas traders, tell that to the stockholders, 
and you know what they would say. "Why bother".

And thats why I do.

Free Burma! Dawn Star
> 
> Why Bother?
> By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
> 
> We have been writing this column for a couple of years now. Periodically,
> we'll get a message from a reader that goes something like this:
> 
> "I've been reading your column for a while, but it's all negative. You lay
> out the problems -- problem after problem, week after week -- but give no
> hint at a solution. It's all so depressing. Please take me off your list."
> 
> We and others can advocate more democracy until we turn blue in the face,
> but at some point, we must look carefully at the question of why, given
> the facts on the ground, there is no mass human revolt against the
> corporate control over our democracy.
> 
> We set out recently in search of solutions. And luckily for us, our first
> stop was the Washington, D.C. office of the Sam Smith. Smith is the editor
> of Progressive Review, and is a long- time small d democrat.
> 
> Smith has written a new book, tentatively titled: Why Bother? Reasons for
> Doing and Being. He's searching for a publisher.
> 
> Smith says that during a meeting on a new journalistic enterprise in the
> 1980s, he realized that to a large degree, facts didn't matter anymore. "I
> noticed that truth was no longer setting people free," he writes, "it was
> only making them drowsy."
> 
> We were in an age, as philosophy professor Rick Roderick put it, where
> everything once directly lived was being turned into a representation of
> itself.
> 
> So, Roderick argued, we watched Michael Jordan to remember what a life
> filled with physical exertion was about. Similarly, Smith says, we now
> watch C-SPAN, to remember what democracy was about.
> 
> As we were glued to the television set and computer screen, a culture of
> impunity took hold.
> 
> How does a culture of impunity differ from ordinary political corruption?
> 
> Ordinary political corruption represents the corruption of the culture. A
> culture of impunity becomes the culture.
> 
> "Such a culture does not announce itself," writes Smith. "It creeps up,
> day by day, deal by deal, euphemism by euphemism. The intellectual
> achievement, technocratic pyrotechnics and calm rationality that serves
> as a patina for the culture of impunity can be dangerously misleading. In
> a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values,
> tradition, fairness, consensus, debate, and all that sort of arcane stuff?
> Mainly greed."
> 
> Smith reminds us that the Italians, who invented the term fascism, also
> called it estato corporativo -- the corporatist state.
> 
> "Orwell rightly described fascism as being an extension of capitalism,"
> Smith writes. "It is an economy in which the government serves the
> interests of the oligopolies, a state in which large corporations have the
> powers that in a democracy devolve to the citizen."
> 
> Is there any doubt that ours is a corporate state?
> 
> No.
> 
> And it is our increased consciousness of the corporate state that has led
> us to deeper despair.
> 
> "To accept the full consequences of the degradation of the environment,
> the explosion of incarceration, the creeping militarization, the
> dismantling of democracy, the commodification of culture, the contempt for
> the real, the culture of impunity among the powerful and zero tolerance
> towards the weak, requires a courage that seems beyond us," Smith writes.
> "We do not know how to look honestly at the wreakage without an
> overwhelming sense of surrender."
> 
> In the face of this despair, Smith rejects the way of the reformer in the
> hope that a new activism will arise -- the citizen who will seek the "hat
> trick of integrity, passion and rebellion."
> 
> "We need no more town meetings, no more expertise, no more public interest
> activists playing technocratic chess with government bureaucrats, no more
> changes in paragraph 324B of an ineffectual law, no more talking heads,"
> he writes.
> 
> Instead, we need an uprising of the soul, that spirit of which Aldous
> Huxley described as "irrelevant, irreverent, out of key with all that has
> gone before."
> 
> Smith wants to see Huxley's uprising of the soul. He's asking us to begin
> to fundamentally question the corporate culture that has, step by step,
> unannounced, engulfed us -- junk food pushers in the schools, tort
> deformers educating judges, oil companies cleaning up in public museums,
> big companies of all stripes taking over public interest groups -- the
> list is endless.
> 
> The uprising of the soul will replace the reformer with the rebel, the
> negotiator with the defender of justice, the prevaricator with the honest
> citizen, the diplomat with the radical.
> 
> "We need to think the unthinkable even when the possible is undoable, the
> ideal is unimaginable, when power overwhelms truth, when compulsion
> replaces choice," Smith writes. "We need to lift our eyes from the bottom
> lines to the hills, from the screen to the sky, from the adjacent to the
> hazy horizon."
> 
> Why bother? Smith asks.
> 
> We have no other choice.
> 
> Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
> Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
> Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
> Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common
> Courage Press, 1999; http://www.corporatepredators.org)
> 
> (c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------
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