SAP takes our anti-megacorps campaign to India (or vice versa) - the unreported misadventures of the last half year

Mindful of Bastille Day, the lateness of the hour & a lot of friends to whom word is long overdue, we hereby revive our Sacred Animals blog with tales of our 2013 return to India, the sensual wisdom & simmering rebellion(s) here, its potential as a SAP anti-megacorps citadel, and other strange attractor news.

Will devote a few initial posts to our journey back to refuge and relevance in Udaipur, including the unforgettable entry via the great human torrents of the Kumbh Mela (where on Feb 10 in Allahabad 30 million faithful turned out to greet us and also wash their sins, angst and urban illusions away).

Sacred Animal fellow travelers
celebrate our return at Kumbh 2013

Watching 30 million folks flow silently through town toward a sacred swimming hole in search of redemption, peace and divinity tends to make you realize a) you're not in Kansas (or Kyoto or Kennebunkport) anymore, Toto; and b) from Occupy Wall Street & the Arab Spring to Brazil's boiling streets and the Kumbh's vast yearning, the worldwide hunger for transformation may be varied in form and costume, but it's an undeniably growing groundswell of discontent with chronic injustice and corrupt parasitic hierarchies.

Queuing for the great Kumbh cleansing

The Kumbh millions are no doubt the least overtly political, but they invest unimaginable effort in their quest for real change. As one naked Shaivite PhD told me, "our needs and pleas are simple - peace, health, justice and a liveable future for the young. When politics fail you on all those fronts, jump the chain of command and head upstream to the sources of life and consciousness from which real power flows." 

The Kumbh earned the title this year for "the largest peaceful gathering in human history"
but it's not just about quantity as these shots may show.

Less colorful and humungous, but still inspiring are the Indians Against Corruption (IAC) rallies that have mobilizedd millions and rocked India's corporate-corrupted status quo for the last two years. The ferment has birthed a new political force, the Aam Admi (Common Man's) Party, which will play David to the Congress/BJP Goliaths in elections this coming year.

We will introduce you to some leaders of this spreading insurrection as well as the other key players in India's new awakening: the radical socially engaged directors of Bollywood 2.0.

For openers check out Prakash Jha's riveting "Chakravyuh" - the largely true story of the state-abetted corporate war on central India's "Maoists", eg., the Chhattisgarh tribes & villagers who made the mistake of getting born on resource rich lands. Despite the nearly 200,000 paramilitary thugs the gov has loosed upon them, their grassroots rebellion continues to spread.

---

Suffice to say, astonishing things are happening here now, things that give the Tourist Department's "Incredible India" PR jingle a whole new ring. So please stay tuned and pass the word - Sacred Animals Party now in India and we invite you to join us for the wonder & the weirdness, and to understand why...

Open Letter to Jill and Cheri re the Necessary Miracle

All right, folks, the SAP campaign begins in earnest today, ironically by offering our best chops to Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala, the real world Green POTUS candidates. Have just sent the Open Letter below to their campaign and will keep ye posted on their response. Meantime, please review the ideas offered for yourself and imagine the possibilities they present. I sure as hell don't see any other way out of the corporate duopoly trap or our lethal global predicament.

Open Letter to Jill and Cheri re the Necessary Miracle

- Big magic & shadow cabinetry for a Green 2012 win and a post-corporate renaissance

"4 more years of tech-accelerated corporatist business as usual will irreparably cripple our democracy, eviscerate our freedoms and critically wound the biosphere."

Fierce ladies,

I approach you both with great respect and a wild sense of urgency to suggest some new memes that could help you prevail this year - not just in the noble quixotic sense, but as honest-to-god victors in ways that really count. Specifically, we propose a unifying Big viral message, America's first shadow cabinet, and an evolutionary death knell for all monstrous orgs on Earth.

Premises: Known knowns

Despite all thy genial hustings cheer, you are obviously in one agonizing dilemma. You're aware all your work thus far, and in the months to come, is neither likely to dislodge the corporate duopoly nor even usefully impact its lavish Punch & Judy show. Yet you are also fully conscious of tipping points, our velocity of decline, and the fact that megacorps are killing the world so fast we just don't have any more time. So failure not being an option, let us visualize a win.

Admittedly, your odds do seem pretty dim at the moment given the media blackout, the duopoly lockout and the exorbitant firepower the corporate parties wield. As things stand you, Gary Johnson and Roseanne Barr will collectively pick up less than 1% of national political funds, 0% of presidential debate time and 3~5% of the November vote.

This is both clearly realistic and totally unacceptable since 4 more years of tech-accelerated corporatist business as usual will irreparably cripple our democracy, eviscerate our freedoms and critically wound the biosphere.

Besides the Herculean opposition noted above, you face two more tough but soluble problems:

1)      the absence of a contagiously revolutionary insight/vision/message to crystallize the angst and outrage of the 99%; and

2)       the public’s inability to imagine an outsider surviving let alone governing in the duopoly shark pool of DC.

Holistic Message Massage: Targeting the Big cause
The insight/vision/message shortfall, I will argue, can be remedied quite deftly by appealing to our species’ instinctive fear and loathing of big orgs – huge corporations, bloated governments, oversize hierarchies of any kind. Generations of research and common sense show it is the inhuman scale and cancer-like growth of our "great" organizations – commercial, military, financial, etc. - that cause most eco-social ailments the world suffers from today.

Grasping the Engineered Futility of Rio+20, COP 10, etc.

We've exhumed the luminous 2002 article below to cast light on the expensively aborted hopes of Rio+20 and many other futile international attempts to protect the web of life - like COP 10, CITES, the IWC, etc.

We've written a bit about the corporate assault on the COP 10 Biodiversity Treaty in Big Bodies vs the Biosphere and at our NGO website COP10.org, but Lady Ainger has done a stellar job tracing the history of Big Biz's well funded and relentless attacks on the UN and the global public sphere. Please note how well they were abetted by both the Dems and GOP, and perhaps consider it a reason to stand up, walk out and help out SAP instead.

"Earth Summit for Sale: Katharine Ainger discovers how
the UN learned to stop worrying and love big business"

Katharine Ainger
New Internationalist.
July 1, 2002

WHITE ants -- Australian for termites - are pale grubs that chomp their way through wooden structures which still look intact from the outside. Until, that is, you lean on the framework and find yourself crashing through rotten, hollowed-out wood. In the run-up to the second 'Earth Summit' which will open on 26 August in Johannesburg, South Africa, 10 years after the Rio Conference which brought environmentalism centre stage, the world will look to United Nations frameworks to protect the planet and its people. But corporations with a record of undermining UN initiatives -- on climate change, toxic waste, tobacco, apartheid sanctions and more, are now 'valued partners' of the institution. Secretary General Kofi Annan says: 'The UN and private companies are joining forces.' Critics say corporations have successfully 'white anted' the UN.

As the economy has globalized, political and social institutions that mitigate the worst ravages of the market have become hopelessly outgunned. For some, the UN still holds out hope for a planetary social contract for the age of globalization. But for that optimistic hope to be realized, the UN would need to have enforceable powers over corporate polluters and human-rights abusers.

Big business is ahead of the game. As one international lobbyist put it: 'The first thing I tell an industry that's being threatened with regulation is to self-regulate, put in place voluntary codes of conduct.' There are now over a quarter of a million voluntary, non-binding corporate codes of conduct in place -- and not a single international binding agreement of corporate responsibility. As the UN is the likeliest venue for such an agreement, corporate partnerships and voluntary codes of behaviour are their best weapon of defence.

Read the full history here.

Opening Salvos

We hoped to have everything in SAP up and running by Bastille Day 2012, but given the Supreme Court decision yesterday striking down the Montana Supreme Court ban on corporate election funds, we shall try to hurry up a bit. Read the article below and weep, fellow creatures, weep.

Supreme Court Upholds Citizens United;
Tightens Corporate Stranglehold on Campaign Finance
Common Dreams
June 25, 2012

In a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court has struck down (pdf) Montana's 100 year old law that banned direct corporate political campaign spending in state and local elections. The court reversed a lower court ruling, but did so without allowing full briefing or argument in the case.

Previously, the Montana Supreme Court upheld the law due to the state’s dramatic history of corruption, but the Supreme Court's ruling today rejected that decision, arguing that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Critics, however, say all available evidence -- especially in the aftermath of the 2010 Citizens United decision -- suggests such arguments are absurd and say today's decision only strengthens the role of corporate money and independent wealth while weakening the ability of lawmakers and citizens who might try to temper the amount of corporate money that is now flooding into state-level campaigns...  Read full article here.