Our Invisible Revolution?

October 31, 2013 in Montana

by lizard

What do you do when you can’t eat? What do you do when the food banks and the churches and the soup kitchens can’t fill the void left by slashing 5 billion dollars from the SNAP program?

One of every seven Americans will take a hit on Friday when a $5 billion cut in food stamps, the first across-the-board reduction in the history of the decades-old federal program, takes effect.

But if conservative Republicans in Congress get their way, this week’s pullback may be just a taste of what’s to come for some of the almost 48 million Americans who receive benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

What do you do when the combination of Republican obstruction of medicaid expansion merges with up to 20,000 Montana policy holders receiving notice their coverage has been discontinued by Obamacare?

What do you do when Congress refuses to do anything save wait for the next manufactured crisis and the president plays dumb about spying on world leaders?

I could keep going, but you get the point.

Chris Hedges also gets the point, and though I cringe when I read or hear the word revolution, Hedges’ latest piece—Our Invisible Revolution—is a must read. Because this:

It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a question of which ideas will capture the public’s imagination.

Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable.

The house of cards recovery is past teetering. The Fed is in a liquidity trap. And the rest of the world is slowly side-stepping away from the dollar.

There is some good news, America just surpassed Saudi Arabia in oil production:

While the White House spied on Frau Merkel and Obamacare developed into a slow-moving train wreck, while Syria was saved from all-out war by the Russian bell and the Republicrats fought bitterly about the debt ceiling… something monumental happened that went unnoticed by most of the globe.

The US quietly surpassed Saudi Arabia as the biggest oil producer in the world.

You read that correctly: “The jump in output from shale plays has led to the second biggest oil boom in history,” stated Reuters on October 15. “U.S. output, which includes natural gas liquids and biofuels, has swelled 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd) since 2009, the fastest expansion in production over a four-year period since a surge in Saudi Arabia’s output from 1970-1974.”

Instead of asking some rhetorical question like will that mean a break at the pump and immediate abandonment of the Keystone pipeline? I’d like to offer a poem about one of my most favorite petroleum products, Legos.  Happy Halloween!

~

I tell my son
the insects aren’t necessarily
the bad guys

I suggest joint missions
between Lego Galaxy Squad
and the insects

we have a dialogue
about territory
and colonization

I don’t say anything
about refugees
as we launch plastic projectiles

at each other

I don’t say Galaxy Squad
will enact genocide
against the insects

for whatever precious spice
hides beneath
plastic surfaces

—William Skink