What we would do to stave off a coup? I have worried about this more than ever, especially after seeing the repub pres. contenders. All of them are lightweights. All of them would stand aside for a Cheney or a Bush.
Firedoglake has an essay A “Presidential Coup,” The Continuity Of Government, And Blackwater Watching Midtown Manhattan from which they take a number of sources that are beginning to understand a coup is possible. Would you be willing to get out of your comfort zone to do something about this?
More on flip:
I’ve tried writing and calling Senators and Congresscritters but nothing has changed. Repubs still stonewall and have their talking points and dems cave seemingly needlessly. I’ve marched but there never seems to be that magic number in the marchers that tips the body politic. What can make the difference?
I postulate that we only have the time between now and next November to make a difference. I figure that Bush will call into place his artificial crisis and put off elections “for our national security”. A coup may come less dramatically with Blackwater recruits checkpointing any meaningful election. But I figure Cheney will not want Ghouliani to take over for HIM.
But even if we do not worry about that, what about the environment closing down around us. That timeline is shortened as well.
My questions:
- What are your guesses about the timeline of a possible coup? Environmental catastrope?
- What are you willing to sacrifice in order to stave off a possible coup? Environmental catastrope?
- How many people will it take to break through the DC indifference?
- We don’t have time, so what do you see is quality in the “money/time/quality” meme?
Crossposted at the Orange Place: What to do to abort a coup? w/Poll
at the Orange place taking over a TV station is leading the options.
But I am bitterly disappointed that nobody really wants to talk about what he/she would be willing to do to stave off the event. They will take the poll, but their comments are so unattached, for the most part.
What am I willing to do? That is hard to think of in the hypothetical. Somedays I see myself imprisoned, a la Nelson Mandela. Somedays I see myself walking into the woods and staring at the natural beauty for however long it takes for my spirit to leave my body.
After the last five years of having my feet in the street, writing letters, making phone calls, making donations, lobbying at the state Capitol, I fear that some of us are going to have to make serious sacrifices to right the course this country is on. Do I have the courage to do so? That is a truly uncomfortable question.
What WILL work is a harder question.
Naomi Klein’s call to action at the end of her article misses the point. In essence the coup has already happened: Only the unveiling has been delayed. If the powers that be want Bush to be in office beyond 2008 then he will BE in office after 2008. And if they want him gone, he WILL be gone.
Can you do anything to make them want him gone? Probably not, at least not directly. What you can do is understand their purposes and quit co-operating. There may be many tactics for this, from confrontation to evasion, but the main thing must be to quit supporting the political economy as it is. All of it. Money, industry, politics, power–all of it is corrupt and none of it is reformable. Look for ways to quit supporting every institution, especially the largest–national and international.
For starters, take the batteries out of your cell phone when you are not using it (to frustrate global positioning tracking). Once you start thinking about what you do that contributes to the system, you will think of ways to stop. Discussing ideas (face to face) is good too.
of setting up a parallel government was very good, but in the US we are still far, far from anything like that.
company a month and refused to buy their products?
“We” will elect another segment of the same PermaGovernment. Accommodations will be made between the two wings of the same right wing establishment, and business will continue as usual.
Until the crash.
Bet on it.
AG
There won’t be a coup here as long as the US is a major economic hub of the world. When our economy declines to 3rd world levels, them we might have a third world style coup. Until then, it’s much better for business for the PermaGov to steer a little to the left, then a little to the right, as their needs require.
An environmental collapse is bad for business, so this election they’ll tack a little to the left, and Hillary will be the next president, barring some unforeseen dirt arising that changes their equations.
They always have contingency plans within contingency plans, and options are probably already being plotted out for the 2016 elections. Plotting out farther than that in any detail would be an unsound investment – too far to see ahead clearly. But the upcoming crops of Skull & Bones types (not to mention prep schools) are already planted, like a Weyerhaeuser tree farm.
Blackwater patrolling Manhattan is sooo bad for the upcoming holiday shopping season, you know. Occupying troops are only ever used in poor minority neighborhoods, a strategy most recently used in the 1960’s uprisings, but with roots in addressing the Whiskey Rebellion and opposition in the North to the Civil War draft.
The only exit from an empire, once in place, is the collapse. The best we can hope for is something like the collapse of the British Empire, but history shows the more probable path is like the collapse of the USSR or Imperial Spain or Venice as a world power, with the collapse of Rome or Nazi Germany or Byzantium being typical worst-case scenarios.
Peak Oil and ecological disasters – not to mention an overdue pandemic (whose likelihood is increased by ecological desrtuction) will help trigger some kind of collapse and restructuring, likely in the next generation or two. It probably is no fluke that this administration reminds many of a later Roman emperor: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it usually rhymes.” (attributed to Mark Twain)
But then again, I recall having similar conversations about whether our flight path will resemble a glider landing or a meteor falling back in the 1970’s, right before folks threw up their hands in despair and went to study Eastern wisdom or EST or Rolfing or whatever. The latest reincarnation of Shirley McLaine, coming soon to your nearest Borders or Barnes & Noble… You heard it here first.
And Jerome a Paris notes a factor that one could interpret as a less benign reason than “self-interested environmental protection” why the PermaGov might decide to let the Democrats win a round…
I couldn’t be more serious about this:
TAKING BACK OUR VOTE.
The only reason Bush is in office at all is because we got sloppy with our voting. Now, we’ve invited the mechanism of coup in the front door with electronic voting.
The only way to put the coup back outside is to require machines to produce and read paper ballots, make the paper record the legal ballot, and ideally, ban DREs which are so bad that even if people check their receipt, they may miss a vote recorded incorrectly.
There is ONE BILL that can help solve this for us, if we realize how important this is and see how this bill is the only thing standing between us and dictatorship. It’s the bill Sen. Bill Nelson introduced last week. I’ll update with a bill number once it’s available.
There is no other legislation pending this session that comes anywhere close to protecting our vote. If we don’t get this passed, we’ve enabled not just a coup, but actually false elections to placate the masses, with no way to know if the results are accurate or not.
The coup has already occurred. But we still have time to do something about it before the fences go up.
Seriously. THIS IS IT. THIS is the one thing we should all be able to support. Because if we can’t, we can kiss what’s left of our democracy goodbye.
In the event of an actual coup, the only thing that is going to matter is firepower. Nonviolent protests only work when there is an outside world ready to intervene with, at the very least, major economic sanctions. And contrary to the childish fantasies of 2nd Amendment advocates, the firepower that matters will be that of factions within the military. Since the bulk of the military is currently abroad, that will mean the remnants of the national guard.
Frankly, I don’t think a coup is terribly likely. Coups are only practical in highly centralized states in which all of the functions of government are concentrated in a few people in a single location. In the US, state, county, and municipal governments operate the day-to-day affairs of the country and could continue to do so for quite some time regardless of who’s shooting whom in Washington, DC. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine much popular support for suspending elections, even among Republicans. The religious right has completely lost faith in the Bush administration, and even the handful of remaining Bush supporters are as jealous of their voting rights as the rest of us.
SHUT THE WHOLE COUNTRY DOWN FOR AT LEAST A WEEK !!!!!
THEN WE WILL BE THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA ; )
DOJ threatens takeover of New York’s elections