Derrick Jensen

Jensen leads the 2008 class of Press Action’s Dynamic Dozen based on his tireless efforts to inspire us — through his books, essays, speeches, correspondence, etc. — to save the planet. This honor may not rank as high as Utne Reader naming him one of the “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Utne Reader says Jensen is the “green thinker and writer who’s out to tell us not what we want to hear but what we need to hear.” Press Action agrees.

"In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win. She is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything." - Former Barack Obama campaign adviser Samantha Power speaking in March 2008

Barack Obama announced today he will make uber-hawk Hillary Clinton his Secretary of State and retain current President Bush cabinet member Robert Gates, another uber-hawk, as his Secretary of Defense. Those announcements should finally put to rest any hope that an Obama administration would bring substantive change to the White House on foreign policy issues.

By now, we should expect the soft Left (and more than a few radicals) to gleefully guzzle the Democrat Kool Aid every four years. In 2004, it was Anybody-But-Bush. This year, it was Attack of the Obamatrons. Hey, when you’re a liberal, harboring multiple delusions comes with the territory, e.g.

* Sooner or later, the Democratic Party is gonna wake up and help us “take back” the country.

* No matter what we think of war, we must always support the troops because sooner or later, the men and women in uniform are gonna wake up and help us “take back” the country.

Given HSUS’ (the Humane Society of the United States) vast resources and media savvy, they are increasingly perceived by the public as the movement’s voice. There is immense danger in one organization unduly influencing the agenda, as diversity in thought and tactics is the sine non qua of a vibrant movement. Grassroots activists, intellectuals, artists, radicals, students, and all who strive for justice offer a unique language, placing weight on the multifarious pressure points of an apathetic culture. It is difficult to hear other voices when one organization owns the preponderance of microphones.

The increasingly right-wing character of the transition being organized in preparation for President-Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration in January has elicited expressions of concern from the middle-class “left.” This milieu, whose views are reflected in publications like The Nation magazine, played a significant role during the election campaign in promoting Obama’s candidacy and the Democratic Party as vehicles for fundamental political and social change. ...

With the political assistance of the trade union bureaucracy and the Stalinist Communist Party ... the Roosevelt administration did succeed in staving off the threat of socialist revolution.

That period holds stark lessons for the coming struggles of the American and international working class. Unless working people are able to advance their own, socialist alternative to capitalism, the “solution” to the present crisis will be found along simil ar lines of a re-division of the world market through mass slaughter.

Awakened by the muffled, distant howls of slaughtered Indians, Uncle Sam rises from his bed and hits the light switch…blissfully, purposefully unaware of how valley fills enable him to gain access to that electricity day after day.

***

Here’s how The Sierra Club begins its discussion of mountaintop removal mining: “In places like Appalachia, mining companies blow the tops off mountains to reach a thin seam of coal and then, to minimize waste disposal costs, dump millions of tons of waste rock into the valleys below, causing permanent damage to the ecosystem and landscape.” That is a valley fill.

Then comes word—on October 18, 2008—that the Interior Department has “advanced a proposal that would ease restrictions on dumping mountaintop mining waste near rivers and streams, modifying protections that have been in place, though often circumvented, for a quarter-century.” This from a New York Times article, which continues: “The department’s Office of Surface Mining issued a final environmental analysis Friday on the proposed rule change, which has been under consideration for four years. It has been a priority of the surface mining industry … The proposed rule would rewrite a regulation enacted in 1983 that bars mining companies from dumping huge waste piles, known as “valley fills,” within 100 feet of any intermittent or perennial stream if the disposal affects water quality or quantity.”

“This should provide a loud wake-up call to American business leaders that the 111th Congress is not going to play nicely with them on energy rationing policies. The cap-and-trade bill that Chairman Dingell proposed this fall would dramatically raise energy prices for American consumers and producers. Chairman Waxman, who represents Beverly Hills, introduced a cap-and-trade bill in this Congress that would send us back to the Stone Age,” Ebell said in a Nov. 20 statement after the Democrats voted to replace automobile industry water boy John Dingell with Waxman as head of the committee.

Instead, Meyer thinks the best way to make her “good” vampires more likable to her rabid teenage fans is to turn them into “vegetarian” vampires — in the case of the Twilight series of books, though, vegetarian means the vampires only abstain from hunting humans. The wild animals that roam the woods of the Pacific Northwest, however, are fair game for the “good” vampires’ next meal.

No, I don’t mean that Great Depression. I’m talking about the inevitable moment—maybe next week, maybe next year—when the Kool Aid wears off and the Obamatrons wake up to realize their hero offers nothing even approximating hope or change.

The carefully calculated speeches—which have always been filled with empty, hollow phrases—will no longer soothe a battered and desperate populace and the Obamabots will suddenly recognize that the Pope of Hope has never been anything more than a human marketing strategy, a product. This year’s iPhone.

“Yes we can”? Merely the first three words of a longer phrase: “Yes we can continue to work, consume, and obey authority without question.”

Only yesterday on Democracy Now!, Canadian author and social democrat Naomi Klein used the anatomical metaphor during a discussion of the Democrats’ reluctance to challenge the Bush administration on its handling of the $700 billion giveaway to Wall Street.

“So, essentially, what the Bush administration has done is said, you know, ‘We dare you to challenge us and be responsible for the great depression.’ And the Democrats, not known for their firm spines, have so far failed to challenge them in anything other than rhetoric.”