Radical honesty from Mark Robinowitz: It’s showtime, humanity

Presenter: KEPW News regularly speaks with longtime local activists. Today, a look back at the first big anti-Trump protest in Eugene, as Indivisible, 50501, and others drew over 2,500 to City Hall April 5. Mark Robinowitz:

[00:00:15] Mark Robinowitz: There wasn’t really a specific focus of the protest and maybe that’s unrealistic this early in the regime, but it was somewhat all over the place and needs a bit more coherence for the next one.

[00:00:30] If I had been designing the protest, I would have had it at the Federal Building, not at the closed City Hall building, especially since one of the main promoters of Trump in Eugene is across the street. Whole Foods Corporation is owned by the Amazon monstrosity, whose king of the corporation is Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the world after Elon Musk, and he was one of the feted billionaires at the inauguration.

[00:01:03] So a boycott campaign for Amazon and their subsidiary Whole Foods, that’s not going to change the situation, but boycotts are something that everyone can do, and it’s a piece of the puzzle.

[00:01:18] One thing about Trump Version 2 is, it sort of unfortunately vindicates my longstanding view that I am not a progress-ive. The progressives think that we are constantly getting better as a society, and if we just have the right politics, everything’s going to get better.

[00:01:42] My view for most of my life is that ‘peak United States’ probably happened during the Carter administration, if not earlier, and we have been devolving as a society for decades, at the least. That was when we could have taken the ecological crises seriously, instead of getting greenwashed from the Democrats and full-scale denial from the Republicans.

[00:02:09] It’s why the Democrats and their environmental groups advocate for techno-change instead of changing the way we live. And of course, the Republicans pretend there’s nothing that we need to do except maybe buy a Tesla from Elon Musk.

[00:02:24] The idea of limits to growth, that we have passed tipping points, overconsumption, overpopulation, overshoot—there are no political parties anywhere in the spectrum that are willing to even hint at that. And this includes the groups behind the protest, not just in Eugene but everywhere.

[00:02:46] One of the bittersweet things I was thinking after the protest is: If we could coordinate this level of protests all over the country, why couldn’t the liberals win the election? What happened?

[00:02:59] The Democrats spent a billion dollars on the election and built almost no structure to show for their efforts. Except maybe the union people a little bit, they’re not focusing on creating structure that can endure.

[00:03:16] Practically, they probably need labor oversight, government bodies that actually give the union some power versus the bosses. In Oregon, we have that a little bit, but not much. But at the federal level, we might as well be in the 1800s, chronologically, because the Department of Labor, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists, like so many other things in the government.

[00:03:45] And the unions barely exist. It’s encouraging to see them on strike, but they’re going to need a lot more leverage to equalize the power imbalance (is probably a good way of putting it).

[00:03:58] Why does Eugene no longer have cooperatives? There used to be cooperatives in Eugene 30 years ago. There aren’t any (unless I’m overlooking somebody). Our food stores, we used to be food co-ops, and now most of that is over. There were efforts a couple decades ago to block big box stores, which are highly damaging to local economies, from being given permits by the City Council to set up shop.

[00:04:24] The liberal city of Eugene is promoting Walmart, and we’re about to get an Amazon mega-wholesaler out by the airport and there’s no public controversy about it. So yeah, it’s good to wave the flag and go, ‘Yes, we don’t like Donald Trump.’ Join the crowd. But that by itself is just performative. It’s virtue-signaling. And it was fun to do, but that doesn’t stop anything.

[00:04:53] I think at every level, we all need some radical honesty. The Democrats share some of the complicity. Their neoliberal corporate promotion shipped jobs to China or Mexico or wherever, and the increasing economic imbalance has helped create a backlash that the fascists have been able to cynically co-opt. And the Democrats have not really, as a party, been willing to acknowledge any of this. I mean, we might want to rethink what we’re doing. I mean, this is a time for the whole society to be rethinking what we’re doing.

[00:05:32] Indivisible Eugene Springfield says that if there are concerns about participants, especially violating the nonviolent agreement that we are all supposed to adhere to, that one needs to speak up. And I don’t think the so-called Party for Socialism and Liberation, an organization that praises North Korea, praises the government of China, praises Vladimir Putin, the former dictator of Syria Mr. Assad, and Hamas should be given center stage in a nonviolent protest calling for peaceful transformation of our society.

[00:06:16] I much prefer Martin Luther King’s approach to communism where he said in 1967 that we need to move both beyond communism and capitalism. Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And what we need is a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.

[00:06:40] So communism changes who owns the means of production, in theory. Usually it means a different mafia takes it over and runs it into the ground, but it doesn’t change what’s being produced.

[00:06:53] And we live in a time where industrialism is colliding violently with the planet’s ecological systems, as Al Gore said in 1992. We need to change what’s being produced, not just who owns it.

[00:07:08] This is part of the problem of the limitations of unions working for big corporations is, it’s about gaining power as an organized working force, but they’re not involved in creating cooperatives that actually own the means of production. The profits would be run locally, and workers would have a share in the responsibility for how the corporation behaved and made decisions.

[00:07:37] It’s about power, how we can share power. I mean, at its best, the United States Constitution was set up by people who understood that we all have tendencies to misuse power, some more than others. But we need to set up structures to diversify the base of power. Cooperatives enable that much more than even a unionized workplace at some tyrannical corporation.

[00:08:06] The resources we spend on war and domination are the resources we would need to meet the basic needs for everybody in the world. And we all know that. And it is beyond criminal that we have tolerated this. And maybe what is so extreme now with the Trump regime, it’s broken a lot of denial. And if we allow this to be four years long or longer, we might reach a point where we can’t recover.

[00:08:37] I’m not trying to be in denial about the scale of what we’re facing: disappearing people to El Salvador, that’s like 1933 Germany. There’s no way to sugarcoat that. But maybe what they’re experiencing, you know, maybe it’s their sacrifice that will get the rest of us to wake up.

[00:08:59] And as a society, as a civilization, we’re at the point where everything’s unraveling, and yet we have such incredible knowledge that we’ve built up that now we can’t pretend this is something we need to do in the future. It’s showtime, humanity.

[00:09:17] Presenter: A longtime local activist calls for radical honesty: Our economic system has failed to protect the planet, and the Constitution at the foundation of our political system has failed to check the Trump administration. Mark Robinowitz says: It’s now or never.

The views of Eugene’s local activists are featured regularly on KEPW 97.3, resistance radio for Eugene Springfield and the Upper Willamette.

Image courtesy Todd Boyle YouTube channel.