View From The Left Coast

But our corporate-owned society condones it. All the more reason I and a few other contrarians are trying to think about ourselves and our society outside the box of the corporatocracy. Some things, like torture, mass murder, and a whole political system based on bribery, are not OK with us, so we’re trying to live our lives differently.

And that’s why I was more than a little shocked yesterday to get a phone call from Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County. The computerized voice of DUHC Director Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap was telling me that if it was not OK for her computer to call me when it felt like it, I had to wait until she was finished talking to push a button saying so.

To me, this was like a midwife doing a c-section.

Alright, she wasn’t asking for money: it was an update on the schedule of what DUHC was doing in the coming week. But for an organization that is doing its best to wean people away from corporate-owned technological control to use one of the most pernicious weapons their foes have is hypocritical at least. It reminds me of another “progressive” organization, until recently called Working Assets Long Distance or WALD, which offers credit cards through one of the more regressive and pro-Bush companies in the US. The idea is that WALD gets to wet its beak while the regressive corporation profits bigtime, and gets all this personal, highly-marketable information about you, and the profits go to UNDO everything WALD-supporters back.

Come on, people, you can’t practice the same methodology your opponents practice without becoming them. If the Democrats practice the same bribery and support the same inhuman and fascist causes the Republicans do, how are they any different? Let’s have “progressive” organizations that practice what they preach, not ones that say “It works for the bad guys, but if WE do it, it’s holy.”

Doesn’t work that way folks: if you run your organization like a regressive, invasive corporation, it IS one.