reform

Reform happens in two ways:

Through legal channels and legislatures, laws are altered which make possible that which was formerly impossible, such as total disarmament.

Hermann Scheer, a German Social Democrat accomplished this by mostly single-handedly converting his country to a commitment to 100% renewable energy. Concluding that energy gerneration was the main cause of global climate change early in his career, Scheer worked the rest of his life first laying the legal and economic foundations that would make 100% renewable energy possible, and then getting the laws passed which require it.

That kind of work is extremely difficult at best, and impossible for some of us. It requires sitting in endless meetings, listening patiently to the trumped-up concerns of people on oil company payrolls, and suffering partial defeats while remaining alive to fight another day. Anyone who truly wants reform will avoid from the "politics is bullshit" temptation, because unless someone is willing to submit to the compromises, forced cordiality, and choreographed pecking-order rituals ojf political life, reform can´t happen.

Politics is truly working within the system.

The other thing that makes reform possible is social agitation, disorder, riots, and anarchy. Street war, the weapon of demoralized proles who have nothing left to lose, causes oligarchs and dictators to doubt themselves, and pressures the established order from the outside. The qualities that make an effective agitator are the diametrical opposite of those possessed by an effective politician.


The US is Ground Zero in the struggle for reform, and Ground Zero is doing the best political work I've seen in promoting the necessity of disarming. The political functioning of the Ground Zero organzatin consists mostly of graying rich and middle-class liberals. Some would call them Baby Boomers, and politics is an older person's game. The agitation function of the organization is less clear than I had hoped, and I believe needs to define its objectives. If disarmament is necessary to survival, and I agree that it is, then pressure from outside the established order must be brought, as quickly, forcefully, and unexpectedly as possible. Politics alone won´t get the job done.

Search through history and find the roster of dominant institutions -- governments, churches, etc. -- that reformed themselves from the inside. Such a list doesn´t exist, so far as I know. It never happened.

Next year is the 70th anniversary of the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US was the world´s only nuclear power then, is still the largest by far, and still out of control. The Trident Nuclear submarine base in Bangor, Washington, is home to maybe 1/4th ofthe kilotons with which we have concluded our murder-suicide pact with the world. Eight Ohio-class submarines dock there; each is capable of carrying 24 Trident missiles, each of which can be fitted with four independently-targetable vehicles, each tipped with a nuke. That´s 96 nukes per boat (potentially -- I don´t know what these vessels typically carry) times 8 boats = 768 nukes.

The  problem: nobody seems to know; nobody seems to care. People need to know, and wake up to the danger all of us are in. If the legal groundwork is laid, reform can occcur overnight. It won´t happen without pressuring the oligarchy, to where they can´t sleep at night. Our message to them:
Planet Earth -- love it or leave it.