Democracy’s NOT for Export
American democracy follows the dollar.
Resistance to coerced taxation and unwillingness to obey the rules of
Tax Rebels and Smugglers! Our current movement for an American Revolution
recaptures democracy when we begin to get control again of our taxed dollars and
our spending dollars.
Our perverted commercial version of democracy is purely in the service of
making the rich richer in a society where money can buy everything. This is the
American Democracy we make in places like the
The case of
Argentina is the poster child for a nation state that sought to be an American
Democracy by guilelessly submitting to the WTO, the IMF and operations like
Monsanto. The resulting Argentinean Revolution – created by a people totally
bankrupted and poisoned by the Global Corporate Order – regained some of
people’s sovereignty by having neighborhoods and towns seizing a portion of
their tax burden, to the tune of 15 to 20%. This money was redistributed
through democratically run Assemblies. If we would establish revolutionary
democracy at the American grassroots, one way would be to redirect our federal
tax money into independent accounts under the democratic control of a Chamber
of People.
At the core of such a tax rebellion is the strong moral outrage at unacceptable
paths taken by the feds, or “the state” (as in
That’s the political revolution. In the economic revolution we don’t spend our
money with corporados. We are scrupulous as we scan our sales receipts and
start conscientiously refusing to buy obviously toxic products. We go on to
boycott corporations which are anti-social and anti-ecological. We stop buying
from sweatshop regimes and ones which are criminally abusive of human rights.
Shopping independence means rejecting the war economy as too expensive to
ourselves and the Earth.
Instituting instead a Peace Economy means ending our violent
war on nature and each other. We then support local businesses and coops
that understand their “ethical” obligations in providing us with goods and
services. The American revolutionaries acted as Gandhi did in their common
struggle against the
That’s the economic revolution. There’s a fundamental
social revolution as well. It entails reducing the numbers of overwhelmingly
white old rich men in positions of power. It is a demand for social equality,
not submitting to the “free enterprise” quota system where an
elite has the privileges of wealth, gender, class, age and race all
rolled up into an affirmative action system still in full force and represented
perfectly in the race of Senator Skull versus President Bones.
That social revolution leads to the civil revolution. In the civil revolution,
we disarm. The military “reform” we imposed on
The culmination of the political, economic, social, & civil revolutions is
the establishment of the ecological revolution where all life has a voice. In
the sovereign assembly, that voice is listened to with the concentration that
the Romans showed when they consulted the flight of birds and the livers of
animals. A revolutionary ecology submits to the Earth’s sovereignty expressed
at the level of watershed, village, neighborhood, and town. The ecological
revolution ca leads us to the deep democracy once practiced by our ancestors
from whom we took the land.
In native hands, the land belonged to those who cared for it. The good Father Flotsky once said that “when you buy land you pay for killing
Indians.” Unfortunately, with American Democracy only those
willing to keep “killing Indians” own the land, supplanting those who would be
caretakers and not profiteers. When we can no longer abide the murder
and enslavement of people as a means to fun and profit, then our American
Democracy will have returned to its revolutionary heritage and will be
something fit to export.
Paul Encimer
to a Nonviolent
Working
on a timescale to match the THOUSAND YEAR REICH envisioned by our
Autonomous affinity groups – stick together in workable small groups, do
things against the war persistently;
Outreach to the poverty draftees required to fight this corporate war
- support
counter-recruitment in schools; special GI events; actions at military centers
to reach GIs directly; encourage resistance to enlistment and registration for
the draft;
Protest and resist military taxation – wars will end when we refuse to pay;
Form Communities of Resistance – maintain solidarity with imprisoned resisters, political prisoners
and all victims of the prison-industrial complex;
Initiate Divestment campaign against
Alternative economics –
cut back our use of the dollar through community currencies and barter in the
underground economy; create coops, partnerships and family businesses; offer
workers rights hotlines and switchboards tied to counselors trained in the intricacies
of OSHA, labor law, medical welfare bureaucracies
Sharing funds – move our
tax money into democratically controlled escrow accounts ;
start paying directly to the sustaining of our communities health, education
and welfare infrastructure;
Reduce our ecological footprint – create a peace economy which reduces and eliminates our use of
products which contain petroleum, sweat, and toxins – boycott products which
contain military and police violence – which damages the health of the
environment, workers and consumers; substitute products which are harmless and
quickly biodegradable, produced as close to home as possible.
Mobilize regularly, targeting the corporate, political and military
evils we struggle against; strategize
on ongoing series of themed actions in our local & regional communities, operating our of
Convergence Centers housing legal and medical teams and providing a permanent base for activists and others -with
housing, communal meals and meeting rooms; simultaneously carry-on teach-ins at
churches, schools, labor temples, offices in opposition to corporate
militarism.
If you think this smacks of Revolution, well,
revolution is only evolution at high speed and neither our civilization or the ecosystem has much time. On one
side are corporate gamblers who have already stolen the Presidency, knowingly
solicited or planned mass murder against their own people; and waged an
imperial war of aggression with no one’s permission in order to establish a
police state. . On the other side are terrorists eager to sacrifice innocent
lives to their vision of a tyrannical theocracy. Only the Peace Movement can
defend our civil societies and it must mobilize on all fronts.
Peaceful, Resolute Resistance now! Paul Encimer emerald@mail2green.org