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A SMALL GROUP OF DEDICATED PEOPLE
MIGHT ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING
DRA WINGS BY ANDY SINGER
BY DORIS HADDOCK (AKA GRANNY D)
(The following is from a speech Granny D gave in
Hood River, Oregon on August 16, 2003)
You’ve heard that wonderful Margaret Mead quote
about how you should never doubt that a small group of
dedicated people can change the world, and that, indeed,
it is the only thing that ever has. I think it’s time we stopped
repeating that quotation and came to some agreement about
what we happy few might do over the next five years or so.
There are two kinds of politics in the world: the politics
of love and the politics of fear. Love is about cooperation,
sharing and inclusion. It is about the elevation of each individual
to a life neither suppressed nor exploited, but instead nourished
to rise to its full potential — a life for its own sake and so that
we may all benefit by the gift of that life. Fear and the politics
of fear is about narrow ideologies that separate us, militarize
us, imprison us, exploit us, control us, overcharge us, demean
us, bury us alive in debt and anxiety and then bury us dead in
cancers and wars. The politics of love and the politics of fear are
now pitted against each other in a naked struggle that will define
not only the 21st century but centuries to come.
This struggle is real. A very close friend of mine, a
college student, spent this summer in Guatemala to help small
communities prosper in ways that support their local environ
ments Those villagers and their environments are under siege
by international big business, using a captured U.S. government
to push through damaging treaties such as the proposed Central
America Free Trade Agreement and the hemisphere-wide Free
Trade Area of the Americas. The villagers of Guatemala want
global fair trade, but the corporations and their captive govern
ments want free trade. If fair trade wins, a global middle class
will arise, as farmers and craftsmen are paid fairly for their work,
and as they gain a voice in their governance and their environ
ments are protected for their future generations. If free trade
wins, it is colonial exploitation, torture and murder written in
blood across another century.
Or do you wonder if it is really an honest difference of
opinion as to which policies are best for the people? On July
24, three armed gunmen broke into the home where my young
friend was staying in Guatemala, dragging her and another
young woman to the ground, covering their heads with blankets.
These young women began to count their lives in seconds. For
three-quarters of an hour the gunmen went through the biodiver
sity files in the home Big business interests in Guatemala, in
league with elements of the military, are trying to push through
the passage of free trade agreements and to do that they must
suppress all dissent. Their partner and blood brother is the U.S.
government Not the U.S. government that we see, but the U.S.
government that much of the rest of the world sees, a world of
CIA treachery, the training of death squad leaders in our own
Army facilities within the U.S., and a big business-friendly White
House that winks and nods as great injustices continue.
The two women survived, but tens of thousands have
not because they are in the way of big business. It is not an
honest difference of opinion; it is a global struggle of people
versus a global crime syndicate that counts taken-over govern
ments and multinational corporations as its members.
There is a term now in common use in Latin America
that is confusing to us Americans. It is called neoliberalism and
it is a very dirty word indeed among the brave pro-democracy
and fair trade groups throughout the Americas. “Neoliberal"
sounds like the happy return of the Kennedys, but it is not. Nor
is it about some resurgence of the liberal values of the Square
Deal or the New Deal or the War on Poverty or any of those
great moments when we called upon our best instincts to
cooperatively address our largest needs as a free and self-
governing people The liberation that we meant when we used
the word “liberal” was the liberation from poverty, despair and
ignorance, the liberation of the mind through public education,
the liberation of the citizen through universal voting, equal rights
and equal opportunity, and the freedom to prosper from the
fruits of our labors. But that is not the liberal that is meant by
neoliberal. It means newly free to rampage. It means free of
government constraint. It means free trade over fair trade.
“Neoliberalism" refers to the liberation of a giant beast
that we, the ordinary people of America — the farmers, the
townsmen and townswomen, the trade unionists — tied down to
the earth early in the 20th century and it is that beast that has
now gotten itself loose again to do great damage to us all. The
deadly meanderings of this beast are most apparent in the most
labor-intensive regions of the world, but the beast is here too,
and he has brought misery and suffering to your life and mine,
stealing our water, blowing up our mountains, fouling our air and
seas, and stealing our lives and our future at every turn. Neolib
eralism is the colonialism department of neoconservatism.
How did we handle this evil giant before? The Teddy
Roosevelt progressives, and the William Jennings Bryan pop
ulists before him, were part of a successful effort to tie down
the giant After the Civil War, at the high point of the Industrial
Age — the age of railroads, oil and steel — great corporations
and trusts were created that towered over the human-scaled
businesses of America's Main Streets and cast dark shadows
over human liberty and happiness. These monstrosities treated
humans as slaves. They robbed the public wealth and were
properly called the robber barons of the 'Gilded Age'. These
giants freely stalked, destroying the economics of family farms
and family businesses, corrupting our governments with great
bribes and corrupt deals, and polluting our food, our land, water
and air. They tore our families apart and dragged us into the
hardest of hard times, as they have been liberated to do once
more.
I am not talking about all corporations or all big business
— corporations of reasonable size are but groups of people.
Beyond some point, however, the humanity falls away from an
organization and all that is left is the will to power and profit.
These bloating corporations care not that our seas and atmos
phere are rapidly changing in ways that may lead to disaster and
famine of unimaginable scale They care not because they are
not human and they have moved beyond human values. They
do not need the fresh air or the water or the mountains or the
birds. They are a kind of virus or a cancer, all prettied up with
a nice logo and television commercials to tell us the most
outrageous lies, one after another. For in reality, they crush
us under their boots and they pay off our political leaders with
campaign contributions and other bribes. They trample on
diversity of all kinds, including human personality, as fewer and
fewer kinds of people can prosper in the world they are casting,
and more and more of us are marginalized.
The big corporate empires would be powerless if they
were not in league with crooked politicians. I do not mean the
politicians necessarily know what they are doing. The corruption
is so immense they cannot even see it, even when it pays their
spouse and finances their reelection. These, the happily blind,
populate Capitol Hill and our state capitols like vermin who have
been for generations in deep caves where they gradually lose
their vision and other senses.
Two and a quarter centuries was a good run for this
democracy, but a rebirth is long overdue, and it is indeed
necessary if we are to save our freedoms and human values
here and abroad, and if we are to protect the beauty and
sustaining graces of nature, including the positive sides of
human nature.
What that Republican Teddy Roosevelt understood
at the beginning of the 20th century was that, if the rights and
fortunes of the human scale are to be protected — if the rights
and fortunes of average Americans, small businesses, family
farms and Main Street are to be protected from the ravages of
overscaled business giants, then government must grow in size
and power to protect us all. The big business wing of the Repub
lican Party, under William Howard Taft, defeated the family
business wing of the Republican Party and their leader Teddy
Roosevelt. It would take another Roosevelt (Teddy’s cousin
Franklin) and another Party to turn the Square Deal into the New
Deal, under which government greatly expanded to protect the
people.
That has not been altogether a happy strategy, as large
government has its own costs to us and its own abuses. The
Libertarians are our new and brave allies in defending the Bill of
Rights from George Bush's anti-American attacks through his
henchmen Attorney General Ashcroft and Homeland Security
Czar Ridge. But our friends the Libertarians would have us do
away with most all of our government. Anyone who has paid
too many taxes or dealt with too many rude and overly powerful
bureaucrats understands the Libertarians’ feelings, but I ask at
least the intellectually honest Libertarians — and there are many
of them — to wisely see that government, which is indeed a
system of restraint, must be matched in strength and scale to
the corporate monstrosities that now have the ability and the
willingness to destroy us — to blow up the entire Appalachian
Range for the profits of coal, for example, as is now happening;
or to steal for profit the water supply of whole regions; or to
enslave whole regions at low wages rather than allow fair trade;
or to move every one of our good jobs overseas.These inhuman
and inhumane organizations are stealing our lives and all nature
around us.
Only government is large enough and powerful enough
to reign in the corporations whose cold heartedness trades lives
for profits all over the world Teddy Roosevelt began the buildup
of big government to protect us from overlarge corporations so
that they might not overwhelm us human beings. In doing so he
created a split in the Republican Party and big business interests
won. Perhaps the rational solution is to scale them both back —
corporations and government —and let individual enterprise and
individual freedom, its many middle class treasures and bless
ings, blossom in the old battlefield. But there is no leadership for
that and governments are being stripped of all regulatory powers
by the false religion of a new deity, the unfettered, liberated
market. So, no longer protected by governments, we must fight
the battle that is before us: human versus monstrous corpora-
tions and their bodysnatched government puppets. It is a battle
of human scale versus monstrous scale, love versus fear.
What is happening now, of course, is that the neos in
the Bush administration (you can call them neoliberals or neo
conservatives, though they are neo nothing except perhaps
colonial and lithic) are starving government very much on
purpose, and they tell us as much in their writing:
KNEE
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