Oh there\'s only a few of us in here - that\'s for sure. . ZNet blogs used to be wide open and you\'d do a post and get hundreds of comments in some cases. You felt like you were writing for  a mass audience that might be some sort of left alternative to the liberal centrist "netroots" blogomaniacs over at places like DaiyKos and "MyDD" and so forth. Then ZNet changed so that it\'s only for Sustainers. Friends have written me to say, "sorry, can\'t read your blog anymore.  Would love to pay but I can hardly sustain myself at this point."\'

Obviously  this was about desire to find some revenue and help pay for the re-do of the  Web Site...

Really my first comment is just tryintg to spark some of the few readers here to think a bit more critically about the role of the electoral extravaganza in advancing a truncated and toxic definition of the politics that matter.  That\'s what this is about.  Put JM v. BO (v. BB and CM and RN) aside for a moment and deal with the broader nature of the whole diversionary madness of the game ("that\'s politics"), which has consistently yielded disastrous results while consigning stories like this to the margins of even left consciousness. The articles i linked at the end are good for context/ackground.

     Hey Paul—maybe you think you’re swinging your rhetorical axe to grind in a crowded room… but maybe there’s only a few of us in here?

     Personally, I’ve been busy (wrapped up with arguments in my head, yet with no Star Trek fight music going on)—and I’ve felt I’ve been commenting too much here lately as it is.

     But maybe some people aren’t commenting because they don’t know as much about the hideous insidious sight of a public park in a local poor community being bulldozed over for the wealthy to make a golf course.  (I don’t golf, and on my annual $7884, I don’t think I’d be able to afford to golf anyway).  Or maybe some just don’t have some national news show, or favorite scholar, telling them what to talk about and how to talk about it—no buzz phrases for “Benton Harbor & Klock Park.”

     Is this an eminent domain issue?  It sounds really gross.   In Oregon, we made all the beaches public awhile back.  Oregon in particular has a beautiful coast, but as a kid, exposed to California (I lived in East L.A.) and New York (I lived in the Bronx)—I had a hard time understanding why the parks systems there (private beaches, playgrounds with only cement) sucked so bad.  It makes me think of those experiments where rats go crazy when crowded in together… but suburbia is as for the environment as city life can be stifling—parks are essential in urban areas… just to have some space to breathe.

Losing the Present Moment to Corporate-Crafted Candidate-Centered Hope and Fear

The silence here is interesting and predicted.  Nobody in the educated class gives a flying fuck about something like this beneath and beyond the big candidate-centered corporate-crafted electoral extravaganza. This (Benton Harbor and JKP and ecological and racial justice and sustainability v. Whirlpool and Jack Nicklaus) is boring but the election...now that\'s politics and that\'s exciting.  

If I had wirtten something more about Obama\'s imperialism or corporate centirsm or racial accomodationism (the number of angles I could pursue on those topics are endless) , there\'d be eight comments from "progressive Obamaists" on how bad McCain is and how we have to \'be real and how I really think he has our interests at heart and so on and so on.  As if ZNet sustainers were into McCain and needed to be persuaded against voting for him. And of course some left electoralists would write in to pitch Nader or McKinney or the Trot and to denounce "lesser evilism" (as if there were absolutely NO differences that matter at all between the candidates) of the year . The debate --- the quadrennial intra-leftist bloodletting on how to repond to the narrow candidate choices offered to us by the ruling class ---- would be on...again. - now that\'\'s politics. 

Notice how the extravaganza crowds out everything, subordinates all, and comes to define "politics" --- a charade that takes place in a deadly  vacuum of popular organization around basic issues like defending scare ecological and recreational sources and racial justice in the lived local material here and Now : the present moment, not  a non-existent future defined by the dialectically inseperable principles of Hope (pie in the sky) and Fear (die in the sky).

In Iowa (the ultimate presidential politics state where the election madness took over everything in April of 2007!),  I notice that progressives have for 1.5 years now sacrificed the present moment of stuggle (against the depradations of Empire and Inequality Inc.) to to the future promise (hope) and dread (fear) of the Great and Holy Election - something that most of us will "participate"  in for what..three minutes at most . It\'s not just that they approach Obama with often childish failure to see "the world of power as it really is and not as they wish it to be" (to quote John Pilger from the back of my Obama book).  It\'s also that they subordinate meaningful struggle on issues (nation, state, and local) to a candidate-centered politics that is decisively shaped and determined from above. 

I should have added that Michigan\'s Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm (a key Whirlpool ally and leading corporate pollution agent) is a leading player in the rape of Jean Klock Park with the felling of its beautiful 90-year-old  Cottonwoods. 

Please get through this fucking election spectacle and come back ready to fight whatever the outcome.