Thursday, December 9, 2010

Imagine! Cyber Wars INSTEAD OF Battlefields

In a belated salute to John Lennon, imagine we stop all death and destruction involving humans and duke it out on computer sites.

Hail to the hearty hackers who’ve taken on the powers that be in the only way they understand, by preventing them from move money around so that it rains one day and snows the next on the rest of us.

Wikileaks has been a long time coming  - at least since the days of McCarthy, when the American press was disabled for life.  All our precious sources of information, from The Nation, to In These Times, to Mother Jones etc. cannot do one tenth as much to move the world off dead center as the gzillions of leaked cables that put our noses in governments’ secrets.

My friends say: diplomacy is about lying and secrecy. Pace Machiavelli, it’s also supposed to be about solving mutual problems.

The most significant thing about the leaks is the extent of arm-twisting, blackmail, threat, and downright setting-up of allies by a United States bent on ruling the world to the everlasting glory of capitalism and imperialism.

Compared to what goes on behind our backs, at least the Somali Pirates are in the open. It’s time more people realized that each downtrodden group will use the weapons it has - and that they are right to use them since most of what is hurting them is taking place behind their backs - see no evil, hear no evil, don’t ask, don’t tell on a planetary scale.

Three cheers for the British students: there are too many highly educated people to fill the jobs capitalism has created for them, but a better way to avoid having an army of overqualified people is to cut the work day in half, meeting the climate challenge half-way by a hard left to a policy of no-growth.

Cancun’s follow-up to last year’s Climate Conference in Copen-hagan, was intended for no-show presidents and prime ministers, and consequently ignored by the world press (except for Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, it seems). Indigenous people did show up and were restricted to obscure locations, far from the crowd that wasn’t there.

A salute to the murky dealings brought to light by Assange and his cohort - heroes all - and to all those who have found new weapons to fight the darkness.

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