The
Soft
Revolution
Rather than give way to despair at our current prospect of perpetual warfare (1) and the imminent "privatization" of the social safety net, I would much rather begin today planning what I need to do to build a life I can tolerate.  Maybe I can come up with a few ideas that others would like to try; and maybe if enough people pulled hard enough in the same direction, movement large enough to measure might begin to occur in this sad and bifurcated country.

We needn't revisit, again, the crimes and fictions of the regime.  These were laid out in great detail during the late election campaign, and it's sufficient to pass over them here by simply observing that they consist mainly of murder and theft, which, as Ambrose Bierce noted in the 19th century, "they are pleased to call war and commerce."(2)  We can now add to this catalog the disenfranchisement of nearly half of us; the day after the election Bush spoke of "a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation," but by the next day this had changed to "I'll reach out to everyone who shares our goals." (3)  Presumably this means he, his cabinet and advisors, his Congress, and in the near future, his Supreme Court, only plan to represent the 59 million who voted for him.  Those 56 million who voted against him have no recourse but to represent themselves.  Ourselves, that is.

That some sort of immediate rebellion or revolution against the ruling power is necessary at this time, just for the maintenance of our sanity if for no other reason, goes almost without saying.  And it's equally obvious that any thought of violent resistance against the world's greatest war machine and secret police establishment would be sheer, self-destructive idiocy.

So what, then?
Consider that the current government is really nothing more than the deputized agents of our real rulers, a plutocratic oligarchy of capitalized entities known as corporations.

Any revolution, to be effective, would have to target the economic foundations of our largest corporations.

We need to start by asking:  which are the 100 largest corporations?
Follow me so far?

             Read on.
1.  George Orwell predicted that perpetual warfare would be one of the hallmarks of the totalitarian states of the future in  his unerringly accurate prophecy, 1984, whose only fault seems to have been a 20-year miscalculation

2.  Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary is a collection of humorous and irreverent definitions, originally published as a series of columns in the Wasp magazine between 1881 and 1887.

3.  Cited by Hendrik Hertzberg in his "Comment:  Blues" in "The Talk of the Town," New Yorker, November 15, 2004, p. 36.
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