"Egypt and Tunisia are the first nations to carry out successful revolutions against neoliberal regimes. Americans could learn from Egypt. Indeed, there are signs that they already are doing so. Wisconsin teachers protesting against their governor’s attempts to remove the right to collective bargaining have carried signs equating Mubarak with their governor. Egyptians might well say to America 'uqbalak (may you be the next)."

 - source: Al Jazeera

Today I'll be attending a rally around our capital called "The Rally to Save the American Dream." The rally is planned to support the resistance of public employee labor unions against the attacks of Republican governors on their rights to collective bargaining. Thousands are out on the streets in frigid weather in places like Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and for those of us paying attention something more than web browsing is required to express our solidarity with working people in America.

But there is much more to this. Many more thousands are out on the streets throughout the Middle East calling for the overthrow of repressive governments. In all of these nations the elites have accumulated enormous concentrations of wealth at the expense of everyone else. They have done so with not only the encouragement of our own government but with it's active support in the form of military aid and corporate investment. Meanwhile the same conditions and trends toward grotesque inequality in the name of a 'free' market are driving the current coordinated assault on the rights of the middle class right here in America. 

It's important to realize that the battles being fought 'over there' are intricately entangled with the struggles in our own country. The American attention span is very short and so preoccupied with immediate gratification that we are easily manipulated by those in control of the media. We are coached to see ourselves as individually exceptional and therefore threatened by any social force that involves a sense of common purpose. This has led over the years to the systematic gutting of our sense of community and our connection with either history or the well-being of other people. Any expression of solidarity must recognize these connections or our movements of resistance and real reform will be short-lived and quickly corrupted by those who promote fear and prejudice toward 'others' in order to hold on to power. The tea-party movement, responsible for the elevation of reactionary forces to political power is a prime example of the success of this tactic. 

America since 9/11 more and more appears to act like a reeling drunkard, armed to the teeth and proceeding from crisis to crisis motivated mainly by the forces of fear. Americans are like a herd of panicked cattle, stampeding along a widening canyon, losing more and more people into the abyss of unemployment, poverty and a sense of uselessness and futility. Yet, even if a few are lost, the overall picture still profits those who ride the herd. The prevailing political climate promoted by public media maintains that what we have is threatened by all of those who don't have. Rather than questioning the sources of our own motivations it's simpler to find somebody else to point the finger at.

Much of the reaction to events in the Middle East, by our government and the corporate media, appears bewildered and confused. As Americans we are caught in the contradictions between our idealization of the concepts of 'freedom' and 'democracy' and the bald fact that so much of our own wealth and power has been supported by the very structures which the people in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are fighting to overthrow. All of the great colonial powers have economically profited from the suppression of democracy in the Middle East. With the dictators overthrown there is no more shield behind which to hide this fact. 

So, I go to today's rally with more on my mind than the struggle for public labor unions. I go in solidarity with all of the people in the world struggling to build community under a dark cloud of abstractions that drive the economic engines of neoliberalism throughout the global corporate empire. We in America can be said to be in 'the belly of the beast', but our relative prosperity has allowed most of us to shield ourselves from the devastating consequences of the ponzi scheme of neoliberal capitalism. It is no accident or coincidence that social movements have broken to the surface all over the globe. The actions of elites driven solely by a desire for acquisition without consideration of the effect of those actions led the world into an economic recession. The recession has put unbearable pressure on every government and nation that has supported prosperity with lies. We are now over the brink of the conventional and the boundaries of the possible are being stretched in all directions.